Plaid Persona
3 years ago, staring at myself in an elevator wearing a plaid fast fashion shirt, I asked a friend next to me if I looked nice. The whole premise of that question was to confirm what I already knew. Plaid was a safety net for me. It was what I would buy because it was what I thought I should buy. A good old checkered shirt. Since then I did clear my wardrobe (for the lack of a better word) of anything with boxes, big or small, colorful or not quite.
On a technical standpoint (and you can skip this paragraph if you don’t care about how I make my shirts), plaid is the opposite of safe. It is the next step for me. To run across a line with my needle going through my own work requires a confidence that I have mustered after hours and hours of doing this. Takes alot of planning too: do my horizontal lines run over the vertical ones, do I embroider all the vertical lines together, will the lines have the level of randomness to be called strings? Is this too boring? Is plaid still boring? Is this still plaid?
Naturally I chose a mid weight khaddar for these. I also tip-toed on a line that I drew for myself when I started this: the fabric should not be more interesting than what I do to it. And the fabric is intriguing to say the least. You can see the organicity on the weave. Literally. There’s a certain grain to it that isn’t uniform but also blends in. I do hope pictures do justice to it.
