Sanya Kantarovsky, 2013, 2 watercolors on paper, each 37.5 x 32.5 cm

The first quarter of the 20th century — particularly the years on either side of WWI. Artists turn to clothing design. This was not, of course, the first time. But unlike, say, the smocked waists and other medieval archaisms of the Pre-Raphaelites’ “artistic dress” the figures under consideration here all designed, and sometimes sewed their own garments; only some produced, or hoped to produce, clothes for wider consumption. Acts of self-fashioning inspired by that old Romantic ideal — a seamless cloth sewn of art and life.

–“Robes and Geometers,” Eli Diner & Sanya Kantarovsky, Bulletins of The Serving Library #6, 2013