Our POPFest Showcase on Tuesday 17th September was held in the River Rooms at Somerset House, central London. It was timed to coincide with London Design Week and we ran a series of events throughout the week. We had a Symposium the day before and on the weekend we were part of V&A’s annual Digital Design Weekend.
The evening Showcase event was designed to showcase 5 years of the POP project. We wanted to highlight the enormous body of work we have been doing in the patent archives and POP Studio as well as the multi-dimensional outputs we have produced and the talents of the many creative collaborators we have had the pleasure of working with.
POPFest featured talks, performances, short film showing, convertible costume catwalk and launch of the our new edited collection “Wearable Utopias” (MIT Press).
POPFest was a public event designed to showcase 5 years of the POP research project.
The Showcase started with a welcome and overview by the fantastic award-winning feminist cabaret artist Ada Campe, performed by Dr Naomi Paxton.
POP have been working with Naomi for a while as part of the “Pockets of Power” performance. In 2023, POP collaborated with Naomi along with feminist theatre company Scary Little Girls to produce a 20min show based on the histories of pocket patents which was performed at Glastonbury, Being Human Festival and Mayven Arts Festival.
In her role as Ada Campe, Naomi did a wonderful job hosting POPFest Showcase in her unique warm and humorous way.
What is POP and why does it matter?
Kat, in her role as lead research of POP, introduced the project – Politics of Patents: Reimagining citizenship via clothing inventions 1820-2020.
She talked about the framing of the project in STS (science & technology studies), gender studies and queer theory.
She introduced the relevance of studying past clothing patents in the social science – explaining how they hold really useful insights about how people have attempted to change the worlds around them stitch by stitch.
Some of the reasons why clothing patents make fascinating research data.
Research questions we ask in the POP project:
Kat talked about the practice-based methodology at the heart of the project.
We approach clothing inventions by researching, reconstructing and re-imagining the data
In addition to quantitative and qualitative methods, and interviews with living inventors we do something called speculative sewing – which involves stitching data, theory and fabric into objects described in patents and analysing them as 3D arguments.
- Don’t have to be exact replicas – we are not dress historians – We are interested in socio-political “problems” being “solved” in these wearable tech forms
- For us its about dwelling with, getting up close and into the past to think diff about the present and future.
- In the process we ask new and different questions of the data
At POP we often talk about “making things to make sense of things” – so we always ask what might we learn from making and wearing data that differs from just reading text?
Show, tell & try on
Kat then demonstrated an example of the research in the form of Edith Foltz’s 1937 convertible pilot suit.
Foltz was a renowned aviatrix from Oregon, US. She gained experience during WII and continued her career afterwards. She was an accomplished record breaker, cross country flyer, navigator and transport pilot from Oregon, US, took this even further in 1931 when she filed a patent for an innovative design.
Her ‘combination’ costume was targeted at women flyers but suited a range of out-door sports, including horse-back riding, hiking, and similar. It consisted of tailored trousers, that look like jodhpurs in the patent illustration, a narrow-fitted skirt and loose blouse.
The convertibility comes from unzipping the sides of the skirt and lifting the lower edge up to the shoulders, where it is re-fastened at the neck to form a blouse. This action reveals the trousers underneath.
Despite it being 1930s, trouser-women were not widely accepted, even on the airfield, which inspired Foltz to design a garment that worked well in multiple places.
Kat was wearing POP’s version of this invention and demonstrated it to the audience.
Short film showing
After this intro and demonstration it was time to move onto the short film showing (it was a specially made 9min trailer).
Some of you may have seen POP’s short film – Women On The Move.
It was made in collaboration with The Adventure Syndicate and Mòr Diversity in Scotland. Alice Lemkes directs it. And Kat stars in it too. It is based on POP research into the socio-politics of women’s inventive sportswearand features a collection of reconstructed costumes from 1890-1940s patents.
It’s been on tour, travelling the world at international film festivals, translated into different languages and shown at prestigious sites such as United Nations Commission on the status of Women annual conference in NY.
See the 3min trailer here.
Book launch
POP’s new edited book Wearable Utopias was launched with a panel of special guest speakers:
Ben Barry – Dean and Associate Professor of Equity and Inclusion in the School of Fashion at Parsons
Laura Forlano – Professor, Art + Design and Communication Studies at Northeastern University
Abiola Onabulé – Innovative London based womenswear designer
We greatly appreciate comments by Ben and Laura on the back of the book and Abiola’s inspiring creative practice is in the book. See more here.
Each spoke about the book in the context of their work and interests in clothing design, teaching and research. It was terrific to hear about how they felt it could play an important role in highlighting brave new ways cutting-edge designers were using their craft and skills to carve out alternative ways of being in and understanding the world.
The book is available to buy – with all royalties being donated to not-for-profit organisations agreed on by everyone in the book.
A digital version of is available FREE OPEN ACCESS here.
