As a step further, in autumn 2007 I remade some of the manuals and kits I had
produced earlier into a more delicate DIY kit in a book-format I called “Abstract
Accessories”. With the intention of trying to “productify” the manuals and kits,
which had previously only existed in prototype editions or on the web, the idea was
to make something that could be sold in progressive fashion stores and to be dis-
seminated along with fashion items. With these kits fashion engagement could
bridge the gap between fashion and theory and also form practical lines of practice
for users to actively engage in fashion. A tricky balance between on the one hand
providing ready-made tools, but on the other avoiding the kits being too prede-
fined and of limited use.
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One of these “Abstract Accessories” was an embroidery kit called “Textile Punc-
tum”. In a small essay I reinterpreted Roland Barthes book Camera Lucida (1981)
and his concept of “punctum” in relation to fashion. In this book Barthes decodes
the communication of photography into two categories, that of “studium”, the
readable intention of a photo, and that of punctum, the unintentional meta-mean-
ing of details working on a personal level. Barthes finds details in old photos that
affects him in ways the camera operator could not have intended, triggering child-
hood memories, noting the passing of time and finally death.
In my essay I construed his concept of punctum as a tool for engaging in marking
memories on to clothes. Embroidering stains and manifesting these “wounds” on
the clothes highlights their own lives, that they have an own lived history, and not
only exist within the fashion system, as expectations or promises of social or func-