Take a moment and think back to the flavours, tastes and smells of your childhood. Particularly, think about those elusive flavours which are now - because of time, distance or your own evolving palette - hard to comeby. What comes to mind? What elusive fragment of your past is on the tip of your tongue or tickling your sinuses?
I’m transported back to late April in South China, there are grassy-smells and grasshoppers, and my grand-mother’s aicao (艾草) mochi. In Chinese, this Hakka snack is called ai ci (艾糍), in Japanese; kusa mochi (草餅). The sweet, sticky balls of my childhood have a vivid green colour to them and... a whiff of summer. The scent of fields and hedges. The crispness of the scent belies the soft texture of the mochi.
seventyfive’s new collection, Fragments, makes use of the memories of the childhood home through the natural dyes used across the collection. Through these memories, new creations come into being. Fragments are not isolated chunks of the past, they are the potential for a newness that builds on the past. In this collection, natural dye is used to join the fragments of my past - such as aicao mochi - with clothes that are interpretations of the past. These Fragments are close to my heart and reminders of my past; they are what I have built my new home around. For this reason, the images of Fragments you see were shot at my home, in North London.
Fragments makes use of the flavours and colours of my childhood, particularly aicao, which is one of the natural dyes used in the collection. As a child, in late Spring and early Summer my grandmother and I would gather aicao together, led by our noses. Aicao is known for its medicinal properties, and commonly used in traditional Chinese medicine. Thinking back, it sounds too good to be true; eating sweet mochi for the health benefits. The quirks of language mean that - to my ears at least - aicao sounds much less appealing in English; mugwort. The mug refers to marshes, and the wort means root. In English, -wort flowers are known to have medicinal properties, and, luckily for seventyfive, they also make excellent natural dyes.
Fragments builds on the previous collection, Tacet, which was concerned with family memory. Thematically and geographically, Fragments follows in the same footsteps, but the collection is far more intimate. Whilst Tacet was a broader brush stroke through China’s aesthetic traditions, Fragments takes those aesthetics and brings them closer to my own childhood. This childhood intimacy is conveyed through the natural dyeing processes I have developed for Fragments, with the collection dyed using different combinations of aicao, tea leaves and iron.
Fragments uses aicao for the colours and flavours of childhood, including the mochi. Tea leaves are involved in the first natural dyeing process many of us ever do, and the bitter tastes of fresh tea leaves are something once feared but now coveted. Finally, I use iron to recall my maternal home in China’s rust belt; the North East (東北). Aicao was an unmistakably Southern experience for me, a part of my paternal home which was seeped in Hakka traditions. Fragments blends aicao and iron to represent my own fragmented past; two families more than 2,000 miles apart. The iron cuts through the aicao, and the two interact in unexpected ways, resulting in a haunting quality unique to each garment.
I hope you enjoy these Fragments.
