Blithe Spirits: Absent British Women Couturiers – The Rahvis Sisters (1928 – 1981)

This practice-led research project explores the Rahvis Sisters as ‘Absent British Women Couturiers’ in the established canon. As my title states, here they become ‘Blithe Spirits’ located in the virtual world.

My project is multifarious: it repeats, returns and is polymorphic, in approach, methodology and outputs. I start with the Rahvis Sisters virtually, as conduits for a practice grounded in an online photograph of Carla Lehmann wearing a Rahvis jacket evocative of military uniform. I then purchase and unpick a military jacket and make a pattern and toile from its parts to philosophically explore dismantling, disseminating and reworking a hegemonic system, microcosmically and metaphorically. I then work with an online maker to reenact a production process with inherent power imbalance. Returning to the online photograph when remaking the sample jacket, I navigate the image’s ‘missing’ back and lining as an exploration of acts of resistance when living within patriarchy.

The toile and sample jacket are supported by a photographic record of the processes undertaken, together with a somatic and transgressive text which serves as a form of documentation of my dialogue with the military jacket, the image of the Rhavis jacket and the range of material processes engaged in throughout the creation of the toile. This forms a linguistic counter to the more academic form as practice and reiterates the challenge to orthodoxy. Thus, reminding and engaging the reader of and the viewer in, the material activities of designing, making and the performative, as with bodily acts of garment makers and wearers.

The project is framed by a feminist rationale and supports a new methodological framework that invites the Rhavis into the research process. I call this a metis-methodology, a developing experimental approach manifesting itself in a variety of registers, haptic, linguistic and visual, that challenge traditional and revisionist histories when a practice-led project.

This project offers a methodological and material-virtual-linguistic means by which to explore ‘absented’ and ‘silenced’ marginalised women creatives, such as the Rahvis Sisters, proposing an object-based materially-centered resistance to regulatory systems and constructs, so that a new antagonistic space I call ‘In Yearning’ for thinking with and through these women is built and held.