ABOUT
"Politics of Patents: Re-imagining citizenship via clothing inventions 1820-2020" is a five year research project funded by an ERC Consolidator grant [2019-2024].
POP is an ambitious global investigation of 200 years of patented clothing inventions
Q
– How have clothing inventors attempted to change the world stitch by stitch?
– What kinds of citizens are made possible or re-imagined through clothing inventions?
– Can clothing inventions be read as acts of political resistance, contestation or subversion?
– What might a study of clothing inventions reveal about citizenship in the past, today & the future?
TEAM
The POP project is led by Prof. Kat Jungnickel and has benefited from the skills, expertise, collaboration and care of a wide range of people over the years.
Core team – Clau Di Francesco, Dr Silvia Bombardini, Britt Hatzius, Ellen Fowles, George Kalivis, Dr Katja May, and Nikki Pugh. Collaborators – The Adventure Syndicate (Dr Alice Lemkes, Lee Craigie & Phillipa Battye), Mór Diversity (Aneela McKenna), Oxford Atelier films (Maciek Tomiczek), Julien McHardy, Nahuel Cano, Dr Roselind Sinclair, Jamie Shilvock, Scary Little Girls (Becca Morden) and Dr Namoi Paxton. Expert sewers and pattern makers – Alice Angus, Julia Santili, Anna Baumgart. Many thanks also go to Chloe Nast, Prof. Evelyn Rupert, Will Cenci, Dr Paul Stoneman, Dr Katalin Halász, Dr Adele Mason-Bertrand, all the performers in our theatre piece and the fantastic models in our photos and on the catwalk, all our interviewees plus everyone who has invited us to present, write, show films and share stories about amazing inventors and their inventions.
Why Clothing?
Clothing is a fascinating barometer of socio-political change. It is easy to trivialize or overlook the value of clothing, but it is a critical socio-technology that touches every single person.
Why Citizenship?
Citizenship is a critically important topic today. It is not just solely linked to legal status, where you live or your relationship to the nation-state. It is also practiced, negotiated, claimed and struggled for on a daily basis.
Why inventors?
Inventors operate on the cutting edge of social and political change. They build on the past to make claims on the present and imagine different futures.
What can clothing inventions tell us about citizenship?
From swimsuits to spacesuits, clothing directly connects the body to social life and the political world and can be seen as ‘sites of political struggle’ (Parkins 2002).
Clothing is central to ideas around identity, participation, inclusion and exclusion. It reflects, and shapes, how we see ourselves now and imagine different futures.
Far less investigated is the fact that many socio-politically charged artefacts of clothing are patented inventions.
Patenting is a key way of studying inventions over time. Inventors describe specific problems they seek to resolve and their solutions in visual and textual detail and in doing so provide fascinating insights into radical transformations and everyday happenings.
We are have also interviewed contemporary inventors engaged in designing, making, adapting and hacking clothes to fit different kinds of bodies, activities, and social, political and cultural beliefs.
REINFORCE RESIST DISRUPT SUBVERT
POP explores how inventors create new forms of clothing that resist, subvert and disrupt social and political norms and beliefs, and in the process, bring new expressions of citizenship into being.
Our critical practice research is located in the Politics of Patents (POP) clothing invention reconstruction lab
Inventive clothing
offers another way
of getting at citizenship stories.
Patent illustrations from Espacenet, used with permission of the European Patent Office.