Stripes in practice: i love stripes, 2025

Stripes in Practice: i love stripes is a series of works that explore how striped patterns transform in response to the wearer’s movements and the conditions that emerge during the making process. Historically, stripes have functioned as symbols of social order, hierarchy, or resistance*. This project takes a practical approach to these ideas using knitwear as a flexible medium.

Knitting, with its repetitive production method and structural elasticity, accommodates both the regularity and transformability of stripes. This allows the pattern to extend beyond mere surface decoration, engaging with materiality and the experience of wearing—concepts discussed by fashion theorist Joanne Entwistle. Entwistle argues that clothing is not merely an outer shell but an interactive element whose form and meaning shift depending on how it is worn and how the body moves**. In this project, striped patterns stretch, twist, and distort in response to the body, functioning not as static designs but as ‘moving patterns’ that evolve with the wearer.

Furthermore, the project aligns with critical fashion research strategies that challenge the normative structures of the fashion system. Kate Fletcher and Mathilda Tham argue in Earth Logic*** that the fashion industry must go beyond superficial sustainability claims and break away from its growth-driven framework. They emphasise that moving beyond standardised design and mass production is not enough; instead, fashion must be restructured to operate more deeply within environmental and social relationships. This perspective goes beyond experimental design alone and calls for a reconsideration of the fundamental structures and relationships that shape fashion, encompassing both the making process and the experience of wearing.

Accordingly, Stripes in Practice does not view the ‘regularity’ of stripes as an absolute aesthetic principle but instead embraces irregularities and mistakes as integral to the making process. These irregularities are not errors but rather a strategic practice that subverts the conventions of pattern production and visual order. Instead of treating stripes as mere decorative elements, the project explores them as a fluid process that continuously shifts through their relationship with the wearer’s body. This approach challenges the conventional notion of fashion as a repetitive system of fixed forms and instead proposes a perspective that sees fashion as a relational practice emerging through the processes of making and wearing.

In a world of strict order, even the smallest mistake becomes more noticeable. This project experiments with that principle within striped patterns. While evenly spaced stripes symbolise regularity, unexpected errors or misalignments in the making process actually serve to highlight the pattern further. Rather than correcting mistakes, the project embraces them as part of the design, allowing them to be naturally—or even unnaturally—integrated into the knitting process.

Ultimately, this project is about translating patterns into a material practice. By following a set of rules while simultaneously allowing for variation and randomness, it shifts clothing from being something merely ‘to wear’ into something ‘to experience.’ Instead of hiding mistakes, it highlights them and finds small moments of joy within them—this is the story this handmade project seeks to tell through striped patterns.

The garments created in this project will continue to evolve in new forms, and before long, they will be encountered somewhere.

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

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

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