Escaping — even for the briefest period of time — is a highly metaphoric act for establishing one’s identity. This [psychological] need to escape finds a particularly pertinent expression in men’s apparel, as fashion has encased, constricted and codified man in sombre, stiff fabrics since the Great Masculine Renunciation, when he dispensed with the decorative costumes after the French Revolution. But an escape from this system of dressing cannot simply be one of dispensing with clothes. It requires a radical approach…

Tearing at the seams of established production processes, Poell’s escape routes do not simply lead away from fashion. Although they often direct us to a place situated outside the fashion industry, he insists, for creative as well as analytical reasons, on the potency of dress for man’s figure. Thus any possible flight must lead us deeper into the folds of the cloth itself.

The surface of clothes is probed and often penetrated with the expertise of the scientifically-qualified artisan. Poell’s childhood memories of smell from a tannery and of helping his stepfather, a tailor, to cut cloth direct his work below the sartorial surface into the very fabric of a design or object. Thread made from household rubber bands, pigskin trousers dyed in oxblood, shoes without seams, bodyplasts or cemented jersey shirts activate the surface through haptic, olfactory or audible traits. The wearer is made consciously and continually aware of the cloth and, through its unorthodox look or feel, offered an alternative physical state that allows for escape from immediate social or sartorial surroundings.

Giuseppe Penone

William E. Jones, Four Frames from “Spatial Disorientation”, (2010)

  Sequence of digital files, color, silent, 4 minutes and 45 seconds looped.