Word: cloth
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Half the women were draped in body-length black cloth, the other half in white. Some of them carried hand-made crosses, others beat drums and pounded 10-ft.-tall bamboo poles in time with their slow march. The 150 women, who had walked more than 200 miles from Dortmund, West Germany, led a 1,000-strong parade near NATO's Brussels headquarters last Saturday to mark the 38th anniversary of the bombing of Hiroshima. But many of their banners also bore slogans that reflected a more immediate concern: FOR A EUROPE FREE OF NUCLEAR WEAPONS. NO PERSHING...
What occurred between the noontime rally and the "loss" of the banner is a classic example of the abuse of bureaucratic power and systematic harassment of revolutionaries. The fact that the banner was hand-painted on a delicate cloth and worth $500 is not as important as the implicit message delivered by the Harvard Administration to leftist activists...
...names on the labels in a boutique, there is a growing perception of the changes these designers are trying to make. Fabric sewed and folded into shapes that shift on the body like shadows. Colors that seem to come from the shaded, sun-dried underside of the spectrum. Clothes that reshape the body with the undulations of their fabric. Garments in which the space between the body and the cloth sets up a sliding, changing movement that is like an ever mutable silhouette. Fashion is meant to be a frivolous business, but consider: in no other area of culture...
This may seem like heavy freight for mere fashion to bear, but Japanese designers do not usually make the fussy Western distinction between craft and art. Issey Miyake talks about the "energy" of fabric and works with a bolt of cloth like a sculptor with clay, not molding it into a presketched design but draping the whole length over a body, drawing the shape of the final garment from the fabric itself as it works in easy collaboration with the body. Rei Kawakubo, the most austere and cerebral of these new designers, speaks intensely about "getting down to the essence...
...denim," he says. In those early years, the shapes had their traditional roots as well. Miyake made a housecoat, called a tanzen, into a hooded wool coat and turned striped cloth used to lead horses on ceremonial occasions into a jersey. He made tucked cotton jumpsuits so intricate that he evoked origami, the ancient art of paper folding, and he turned a farmer's backpack into a knit jacket. Says he: "I was trying to peel away to the limit of fashion...