Worn: footwear, attachment and affects of wear
Sampson, Ellen (2020) Worn: footwear, attachment and affects of wear. Bloomsbury Academic, London. ISBN 9781350087187
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In a culture preoccupied with newness and a fashion system largely predicated upon it, what is the significance of the worn and used garment? What is our attachment to clothes which are marked through use and why do they have the power to affect us so deeply? How are our relationships to clothing produced and maintained through the embodied and bodily practices of wearing, maintenance and repair? Through a focus upon a single garment, the shoe, this book seeks to explore broader questions about the embodied experience of wearing and the affect of the worn. Using anthropological and psychoanalytic theories of attachment, value and exchange, this book investigates wearing as a reciprocal relationship between two agents - the wearer and the worn. It presents an exploration of how, through use, the mass-produced is made unique, and powerful; of the power of the marks of use and wear.
Originating in a practice-based methodology which placed wearing at its centre, this book seeks to explore the outcomes and experiences of wear. Through the process of making, wearing, and photographing shoes Sampson sought to uncover the materiality of our relationships with the things we wear. She presents the act of wearing, the embodied experience of clothing and the body together, as a tool for developing knowledge, of ‘being in’ or ‘being with’ rather than observing from outside. Accompanied by Sampson’s evocative close-up images of worn shoes, this book presents a poetic exploration of the experience of wearing and a call to reconsider the value of the marks of use and wear.
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