Dressing the Body

A glove

Autumn 2018 Welmoed Bosch bought a vintage pair of leather gloves at the Rotterdam flea market. Something about the way they were made struck her; they were constructed of many different panels which were made to fold around and into the different slopes and creases of the wearers hand. As a result of this construction the glove rather realistically mimicked a human hand. She decided to take the glove apart and while she ripped open one seam after the other she saw before her the unfolding of this human shape. She could not sleep that night.

Pattern as abstracted body

The glove sparked a fascination with the way the human body is reflected in clothing. Most contemporary clothing is based on metric patterns: two dimensional abstractions of the living, breathing body. There is something eerie about this: the clothing we wear is not based on our actual bodies but on the abstraction of our bodies that is the pattern. In ‘Dressing the Body’ Welmoed Bosch develops a method of patternmaking which takes the concrete physical body as its foundation, rather than its mathematical abstraction in pattern. This resulted in a series of garments directly based on real people.