Understanding something by disassembling it

Sometimes, when you take something apart with attention and care, the makers´ ability and eloquence reveals itself to you.

I found a pair of pants in the trash yesterday. Not just any usual pair of pants. The pants I found were made from an artfully woven woollen fabric, with a thin, delicate cotton lining on the inside, necessary to prevent your legs from being itchy within the thick, stuffy woollen layer. I got very excited at first, but my excitement quickly gave way to a wave of disappointment once I had taken a closer look at the size they came in. „I’ll never fit my butt into these“ I thought to myself.
I took the pants anyhow and back in my room, I bravely tried them on, prepared for the final disillusionment that these pants were too small for me.
To my own surprise I managed to pull them on all the way. I was delighted!
I closed the zipper on the side, and when I tucked in my belly, I was even able to button up the waistband.
What I felt next wasn’t pure joy though. It felt rather like a compromise. A no sitting,
no kneeling, no bending over kinda compromise. I don’t like compromising when it comes to clothing! Over the many years of picking my clothes I developed quite a clear set of requirements when it comes to my garments. They need to be pretty but practical, have the right size to give me space to move around but also bring out my features. They need to be made from good materials, need to be made to last, so that even if they break, I will be motivated to invest the necessary time and resources to fix them. These pants fulfilled most of these requirements, with the exception that they were just two centimeteres too narrow. I took a closer look. I was intrigued by the choice of material. All natural while being functional, that’s hard to come across these days. On the inside, I found a small, faded label that read “International Ladies’ Garment Workers’ Union”. That label made me even more curious. I looked up the name and learned that the “International Ladies’ Garment Workers Union” once was one of the largest labor unions in the United States, one of the first U.S. unions to have a primarily female membership and a key player in the labor history of the 20s and 30s.

How exciting! The pants I just found were made by a workers union that stood for the empowerment of women, owning up the previously unpaid labor of textile work!
This fact just made me want to work on these pants even more. I decided to resize them so that I could wear them comfortably. My plan was to unravel the seams on the sides of the pants to insert an extra strip of a woollen fabric which I already had at home to broaden the pants by 2 to 3 centimeters. While I was examining all the seems and stitches, I realized that it would take more than “just opening up the sides”. This piece of clothing was an intricate work of art. The assembly was done with a clear concept, a step-by-step plan, and each of the steps was building on the previous one. There was an order in which these pants had been assembled, meaning that they would have to be disassembled in reverse. Later I would figure that “just opening up the sides” would be one of the last steps in the process. While I was sitting there on the floor of my bedroom with my reading light pointed towards my busy hands, I was mesmerized by the attention to detail that went into the making of this piece of clothing. I felt I was discovering a whole new way of thinking, a new kind of logic (to me). The logic of sewing clothing neatly, of folding and stitching and hiding and smoothing out the bulgy overlaps of fabric. The joy that a well hemmed zipper can bring is immense when you find yourself thinking about the person that a long time ago had stitched it up, attaching it in this very elegant way. I was unravelling seam after seam, advancing deeper and deeper into a skill that I didn’t possess yet. Analyzing the work that someone else had done decades ago. I took notes on each step of my undoing, with little drawings to visualize things, to make them clearer, in the hope I could reassemble the pieces just like that, once I had added in my extra fabric. The pants are not done yet. After I had disassembled them into four pieces (the woollen outer layer, the cotton lining, the zipper and the waistband with the buttons) I put them into the sewing basked and decided that this was enough detail-focused work for today. I hope I’ll find the time to piece them back together with my adjustments made on the weekend. Until then I’ll be thinking about the idea of understanding something by disassembling it with attention and care. The idea of learning from an object by taking it apart, by zooming into the thought process of its creation. The notion of decoding a step-by-step plan that allows you to appreciate the complexity of the seemingly mundane. It really is through disassembling that we can sometimes recognize the beauty of the whole.