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Welcome to the VERANDA Sip & Read Book Club! Each month, we dive in to a book and offer exclusive conversations with the authors behind each tale over on Instagram, along with a perfectly matched cocktail. This month's pick is Alison Hawthorne Deming's A Woven World, an interconnected story of fashion, fishermen, and preservation. Get caught up on our past book club selections here.
The herring that once proliferated in Canada’s Bay of Fundy where Alison Hawthorne Deming grew up are draped in the colors of the sea. They remind her, as does so much of her childhood home, of fashion and abundance, two threads Deming knits together in A Woven World, her part-memoir, part-cultural exploration that ties together a host of seemingly disparate topics with gorgeous language and thoughtful care.
A Woven World: On Fashion, Fishermen, and the Sardine Dress
A Woven World: On Fashion, Fishermen, and the Sardine Dress
Fashion, Deming tells us, is constantly changing. Devoted to it, in fact. This is but one element that it has in common with history and the environment. And Deming would know. Her family’s history has a fascinating link to French aristocracy: Her great-grandmother, Louisa de St. Isle Bregny, was a master seamstress to French Empress Eugénie. But in the 1860s, Louisa immigrated to New York City from Paris and established an haute couture clothing company that catered to the city’s Gilded Age elite. Deming traces her family’s story around the world, to Paris and Iceland, New York and Grand Manan Island, Canada, as she attempts to understand the multitude of artisans, both familial and not, who have shaped her life.
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The search for answers is initially inspired by Yvez St. Laurent’s 1983 Sardine dress, on display at the Metropolitan Museum of Art Costume Institute's "Manus x Machina: Fashion in the Age of Technology" exhibit in 2016, which grabs Deming’s imagination and escorts her directly back to childhoods spent on Grand Manan Island, watching the fishermen catch slippery, silvery herring. Deming is drawn to the connections between them all—fashion, history, the artistry of the handmade clothing her great-grandmother made and the nets the fishermen cast into sparkling waters for a living—and she threads each into the narrative.
The dress catches the light with such intensity that the delicate paillettes perfect the illusion: the dress is made of metal, a gorgeous feminine armor. Metal dress on the wheeled metal shaft of the manikin stand, though of course the dress is not metal at all, merely the illusion of metal, ideal for the woman who shines with the patina of strength. The hem and sleeves are trimmed with a different pattern of sequins. Long ripples rise and fall, rise and fall, like a disturbance on a calm bay, moon-work at play in a field of light. The manikin is standing in an arched alcove that mirrors water’s restlessness in shimmering light, though there is no water in the exhibit hall.
There’s much ground to explore here, and Deming’s skill as a poet and essayist are on full display, allowing her to frame and navigate seemingly unrelated elements with beauty and interest. Her exploration of the legacy of artisan craftspeople—and what we’re losing and risking due to climate change and other cultural and economic forces, illuminates her passion for the artistic and the handmade, whether it be in the form of fishing nets, words, or the clothes we don as armor and statement.
Alternating chapters between the importance of herring to the Grand Manan Islanders, the commingling personal and professional history of her family, the fashion and political prowess of Empress Eugénie, and the craftsmanship of the Sardine dress, Deming asks us to consider what we, as an intricately linked, interwoven world, stand to lose if we sacrifice the artistry of our craftspeople, illuminating in the process everything we have to celebrate—and gain.
VERANDA SIP & READ BOOK CLUB FOR SEPTEMBER 2021
Selection: A Woven World by Alison Hawthorne Deming (available via local booksellers, Amazon, or Bookshop)
Start reading with us September 1.
Send Deming your questions via VERANDA's Instagram Stories.
Tune in to Instagram as Deming answers your questions and chats live about A Woven World on Sept. 28 at 12 noon EST.
