Bespoke.

When I first heard the word, I thought it meant some kind of talking, as in, “He bespoke of the movie,” or, “I bespoke the truth.”

Needless to say, that’s not what it meant. At least not fully.

After some relentless online digging, I found the real meaning of the word, along with some interesting history.

Did you know?
The word “bespoke” actually means custom-made, in reference to things of any kind, specialized to the buyer’s preference. It is the opposite of ready-made. When applied to fashion, however, the term bespoke is only used for men’s suits and clothing, making it a parallel to the women’s haute couture label of individually cut and designed garments.

Why should I care?
Unlike haute couture, bespoke is not a protected label. This upset a lot of men in fashion, especially tailors, so the Savile Row Bespoke Association was set up in 2004 to protect the integrity of the art of tailoring in London’s West End. In 2006, the Savile Row Bespoke became a label, established for simple identification of suits and garments made specifically on Savile Row (and surrounding streets). So while bespoke is not a protected label, the Savile Row Bespoke Association has made itself a trademarked brand, and is working towards making bespoke clothing protected, so that it can be the male fashion equivalent to women’s haute couture. However, they haven’t been successful in achieving that goal yet, which is probably why not that many people today know what it means, or even that it exists.

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From a young age, the line “Being plastic is fantastic!,” always associated with Barbie, was ingrained in my head. I never thought too critically about it—it was a catchy little rhyme—but as I grew older, I began to see just how warped the message being sold to my Barbie-obsessed friends and me was. To this day, I maintain a love-hate relationship with Barbie: the girl’s got style, and I can’t help but admire her determination to experiment with every career from veterinarian to pizza maker; however, her body type has been proven multiple times to be beyond realistic, a narrowly idealized figure being sold to young girls as the pinnacle of beauty. It’s not just that Barbie and friends lack diversity in their shape: her form is downright impossible to achieve.

You can imagine how excited I was to stumble upon Margaux Lange, a New York-based jewelry designer who seems to share my sentiments. She created The Plastic Body Series: a handmade accessories line which pays homage to pop culture’s fascination with Barbie by salvaging old doll parts and transforming them into wearable art. As sweetly nostalgic as they are creepily Lynchian, the accessories themselves are a psychedelic gaggle of doll heads dangling from necklaces and disembodied eyes peaking out of rings. While one typically wouldn’t think of “dismembered female body parts” as empowering, it somehow works when the body in question was totally artificial to begin with. By reworking different Barbie parts into pieces, including a necklace that is a mash-up of different plastic chests, the result feels like a wearable statement forcing society to critically examine those plastic body parts constantly deemed beautiful. Plus, Lange’s work has given me the ultimate D.I.Y. inspiration for how to transform the Barbies that I was never able to purge and alter them to fit my teenage self. Perhaps next up will be decapitating Furbies for a new accessories line.

text by Emma from The Emma Edition

At first glance, we seem bombarded with clothing options. Never before in history have there been so many stores and styles to chose from. Don’t like the ‘fast fashion’ of the malls? There are vintage shops a-plenty. Having trouble finding a specific item you see in your mind? Go online and you’ll probably uncover something similar.

As clothing has become more and more central to our identities, styles have multiplied exponentially, like molecules in a petri dish.

But not everyone is represented in the innumerable items on the rack. As Jeanne Beker recently wrote about a friend of hers who uses a wheelchair, many people still get left out of the fashion industry despite declarations of democracy.

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Pinking shears no more! A serger (or an overlock machine, if you are fancy like that) will cut the fabric and finish the edge all in one fell swoop of the presser foot. For January mending night we will have a serger on site to help you recycle old knits into cozy scarves, hats, and mittens.

Of course we will still have tools on hand for any mending projects, but if you’ve never used a serger before, I implore you to sew a seam or two.

WORN’s Thursday Night, Your Stockings Needed Mending
January 12 (and the first Thursday of every month), 7 to 10 p.m.
Freedom Clothing Collective, 939 Bloor Street West
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