The Autoptic Eye: A Methodology for Drawing Worn Clothes and Narrating the Past in Collections of Textiles and Dress

This research uses drawing to explore the different ways in which worn clothing in collections of historical textiles and dress can reveal information, such as how clothing was made, worn, altered, and cared for. It has a particular focus on signs of wear, such as stains, mends and tears and how these subtle marks left by the bodies that wore the clothes, or cared for them, might be drawn as a way to elicit additional narratives of the past.

Drawing has historically been valued as a way to think, document, communicate and produce new knowledge (Kantrowitz, 2012a; 2022). However, drawing has yet to be tested as part of a framework for the interpretation of dress. This research contributes a methodology which synthesises different methods of drawing from the fields of anatomy and pathology and examines how these approaches might be applied to the study of worn clothes to help make narratives of the body’s intimate relationship with clothing more visible.

I argue that clothing, when worn against the body, can be conceived of as skin-like, and therefore can be ‘read’ in the same way as the skin, based on Didier Anzieu’s concept of the ‘Skin-ego’ (2016 [1985]). I use Julia Kristeva’s (1982) theory of the ‘abject’ to enable a reading of how stains left from the body on cloth form cloth’s ‘complexion’ and transform worn clothes into ‘abject cadavers’, once shed. The originality of this research lies in the synthesis of these theoretical approaches and the development of a new specialised practice-based framework for the analysis and interpretation of worn clothing which I refer to as ‘the autoptic eye’.

The research examines a baby’s dress with little known provenance held in the Museum of English Rural Life (MERL), University of Reading, Berkshire, UK. This dress is used as a case study to explore how drawing with an ‘autoptic eye’ can elicit new interpretations of worn clothing. Insights gleaned from drawing the dress are compared to those generated from more established models of object analysis used in the study of dress history, such as McClung Fleming (1974), Prown (1982) and Mida and Kim (2015). Results suggest that drawing with an ‘autoptic eye’ enables more confident assertions to be made about methods of construction when examining worn clothes in collections of historical textiles and dress. The approach has the capacity to enhance one’s experience of an object, generate embodied knowledge through re-tracing the traces left by the body on clothes, and foremost, provides a way to bring the narratives of the absent bodies who made, cared for and wore clothes back into focus.