Annette Kniep
Our twenty-fourth member of the month is Annette Kniep
UCRF is running a ‘Member of the Month’ feature on this blog, where a member, selected at random from the membership database, is sent five questions to give us all an overview of our members. Our twenty-fourth participant, Annette Kniep, is an art historian and museum curator specialising in textile arts, whose work bridges historical textile techniques and fashion’s social dimensions to reveal the hidden resources, labour, and sustainability lessons behind garments.
—1 How would you sum up your research/practice?
I am an art historian with special qualification in the history of textile arts. I work in a museum as a collections curator for paintings and applied arts, which also includes a textiles and clothing collection. One of my main research interests regarding fashion is its social aspects: the wish to demonstrate status and wealth through over-consumption of clothing and textile resources on the one hand and the social sanctioning of the inability to do so on the other. Besides this, I focus on textile techniques and try to understand how textile and clothing production as a craft worked and still works. This helps to develop an understanding of the quality of historical and also modern garments, but also shifts the focus from, for example, a luscious silk dress and its wearer in a portrait to the resources and work behind it and its often unknown producer.
— 2 How do you address fashion and sustainability in your work?
In our daily life as consumers, fashion and its downsides are more and more discussed, while in museums, in dress and art history, we still tend to focus on the development of styles and beautiful, high-society dress. In my work – for example, when I give guided tours in an exhibition or write texts about textile topics or museum objects – I also address what resources, craftsmanship and often even suffering hide in preserved garments or their depictions and the impossibility of dressing fashionably for huge parts of society before industrialisation. We might imagine that fashion was slower «back then» or that people wore their clothing longer than we do today, but do we really know what that means? There are a few daily goods whose status and price changed as profoundly as clothing and textiles with industrialisation. Understanding what textile production in earlier centuries meant and what a luxury fashion actually was might help us rethink our own relationship to our garments. I am aware that this is only a side issue compared to the huge problems of the fashion industry today. But museums help us understand our culture and heritage; they are sustainable by definition. So I believe that museum research, art history and other historical sciences can also contribute to growing an awareness of what has to change in the way we consume fashion today.
— 3 What are the conflicts you have encountered around fashion and sustainability in your work?
First of all, it is only a small aspect of my daily work. I am happy to be able to bring it up every now and then when an opportunity arises. Above all, you need matching objects on display, the possibility to lecture about them, time to do research and platforms to publish. The direction I address these topics from might be a bit unusual, so it kind of falls between the cracks of modern consumption critique and historical research. I can’t say I encounter conflicts, but in most academic projects about historical textiles, concerns about today’s fashion are simply in the wrong place, so it is not easy to find a platform to share my kind of research with a wider audience.
— 4 What do you consider the key sources and cases when it comes to fashion and sustainability?
I think what we as a modern consuming society lack most when it comes to fashion and sustainability is an awareness of the resources (of work, of energy, of knowledge and of material) that go into our garments and, in consequence, an appreciation of them. I am not sure if it is a problem of sources; if you want to know, you can find information about it in abundance. What bothers me more is the indifference to the problem of those who contribute to it the most.
— 5 Could you recommend some less-known sources or cases you think should be more widely shared?
Euroweb, an interdisciplinary network that wants to formulate a new vision of European history through textiles and that combines historical and technical questions as well as social and ecological ones.
Not purely fashion, but Working Class History is a website that focuses on historical events led by workers and «ordinary» people. If you search for the tag «textiles», you find many entries about garment workers’ fights for better working conditions, demonstrating that the problem goes back far beyond the Rana Plaza collapse.
https://workingclasshistory.com/
Thank you, Annette, for sharing your work!
