Stripes in practice: i love stripes, 2025, Tokyo, JPN

Stripes in practice: i love stripes, 2025

Stripes in Practice: i Love Stripes is a series of works exploring how stripe patterns transform through the movement of the wearer and the process of making.

Historically, stripes have functioned as symbols of social discipline, hierarchy, or resistance¹. This project takes that symbolism and works through it practically, using knitwear as a flexible medium. Knit is a material that carries both a repetitive method of construction and a structural elasticity — one that holds the regularity of a stripe pattern while showing, through the body itself, that such regularity can always be undone.

Fashion theorist Joanne Entwistle² describes clothing not as a passive covering but as an interactive element whose form and meaning shift with the body's movement and the way it is worn. In this project, stripes are never fixed. On knit, they stretch and skew with the body, becoming a pattern that moves with its wearer rather than sitting still.

In Earth Logic³, Kate Fletcher and Mathilda Tham argue that fashion must do more than claim sustainability — it must step outside the growth-driven structures that define the industry. This project takes that argument into practice. Rather than standardised production, it chooses the slow process of making by hand, and rather than correcting the irregularities and mistakes that arise along the way, it accepts them as part of the design.

In a system of perfect order, small deviations become more visible. This project pays close attention to exactly that. A stripe, evenly spaced and neatly aligned, stands for regularity — but an unexpected error made during knitting does not disrupt the pattern so much as it sharpens it. Mistakes are not flaws to be hidden. They are traces of making, and a sensory part of what the work is.

Ultimately, what this project is trying to do is shift clothing from something worn to something experienced. To follow a set of rules while moving freely within them, and to find small moments of pleasure in chance and error. That is the story this handmade project hopes to tell through stripes.

The garments made here will continue to take new forms. They will find their way to you, somewhere, in time.

¹ Michel Pastoureau, The Devil’s Cloth: A History of Stripes and Striped Fabric, trans. Jody Gladding (New York: Columbia University Press, 2001), 15.

² oanne Entwistle, The Fashioned Body: Fashion, Dress and Modern Social Theory (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2000), 34–37.

³ Kate Fletcher and Mathilda Tham, Earth Logic: Fashion Action Research Plan (London: The J J Charitable Trust, 2019), 12–15.

Thanks to Sei