The Art of Craftsmanship
My mother has a table that's been passed down in her family for generations, and someday it will come to me. It was already a century old before it reached my great-grandmother, something that outlived the hands that made it, carrying the wear of every generation who's sat in its presence. That's craftsmanship. But what if it's art too?
Art and craftsmanship are often judged in opposite ways, art by what it expresses, craftsmanship by mastery and precision. I used to think those were different tests. Now I wonder how different they really are.
Art is the work of skilled hands choosing every detail meticulously enough to create something beautiful, something that tells a story or shares an emotion. Take my grandfather's stained glass. It's the hands that spent hours mastering how to cut and fit the glass, but it's the imagination that chose its shapes and colors, telling me more about who he is and how he sees the world. It evokes emotion. And isn't that what art is?
There's an artistry to fashion that often gets lost in the noise of consuming it. Thanks to Charles Frederick Worth, couture became appreciated as the art it always was; the practice of sewing labels into garments stems from his desire to sign his work the way an artist would. What we forget is that our everyday clothes are crafted through the same imaginative minds.
In this medium, the fabric is the canvas and the designer the artist. A seam finished by hand says, I'm made to last. A dart added to the bust declares how the body is meant to be seen, not just fit. Fashion is only art when it works with craftsmanship, because if art is going to be timeless, it has to endure, and every decision a designer makes is what allows it to.
It's easy to think a designer only sketches an idea and hands it off to be made. But the hands that bring it to life are craftsmen in their own right. Think of a Birkin bag: the artistry isn't in chasing an original idea, that design has existed for decades, it's in the single trained artisan who cuts, stitches, and signs their name to one bag start to finish. And the reverse is true, too: the designer who first imagined that bag held a vision so specific nothing else would satisfy it, an idea that's held up for more than forty years. That's the standard I hold myself to in every piece I design.
Take my Anne Maxi Skirt for example.
I spent nine months getting it right. The fit itself only took two tries, an a-line skirt that fell to the ankles. But I sat with it for months before I was ready to cut and sew it, and something didn't feel right.
Want to know what it took to fix it, and what I think that means for whether a craftsman is really an artist? The full essay is in Studio Notes.
xx,
Brittany Anne