Cloth and clothing follows us through life and especially marks the rituals per-
formed at transitions between roles, entitlements, and life stages. Even the dead are
wrapped or clothed as this is believed to ensure their continuance as social beings,
resisting our blunt biological doom.
Schneider claims two crucial aspects for understanding self-enhancement in rela-
tion to clothes: their aesthetic characteristics and their spirituality. Most often these
aspects are combined into, for example, patterns and symbolically coded colours.
The spiritual aspect can involve very distinct signs and symbolic functions, such as
prints and applications protecting against the evil eye or black magic, but they can
also connect the living with the world of spirits and divinities in more direct ways.
In examples of spirit possession the restless spirit is not only believed to need a hu-
man body, “but human apparel, and to reveal its identity through demands for
specific items of cloth and clothing.” (Schneider 2006: 204)
Spiritual rituals are not only performed by wearers of clothes but also by the arti-
sans and craftsmen making them. There are many ethnographic descriptions ofartisans performing rituals and observing particular taboos in the course of spinning,
weaving, embroidering, brocading, dyeing and finishing their product. (Schneider
2006: 205)This especially involves dyeing, which before the advent of chemical dyes was a
very secretive and expensive practice. It made dyers often closely connected to roy-
al monopolies with “exotic substances, training, talent, and closely guarded secrets”The House of Diehl is a New York
based design group organizing “Style Wars”,
a merger of MC battling & Haute Couture.
These are live styling and design events, often
hosted at nightclubs, where the participants
creates new garments and work against the
clock on live models, live on stage, only using
recycled garments and ordinary objects as raw
materials and with a time limit of 5 minutes.
House of Diehl define their work as “Au-
thentic involvement and collaboration. Rather
than shallow infiltration and shameless
imitation. Think fashion from the mosh pit.
Fashion as Olympic sport. Fashion as sex.
Fashion as Hendrix.” Their work “seeks not
only to express a community, but to generate
one. [...] To make the ‘spectator’ the star.”
(House of Diehl n.d)