In the early pandemic, I shipped my friend Lauren a pile of hand-made, half-stitched, clothing. It made it from Brooklyn to Los Angeles, only to be stolen from Lauren’s front steps.

Who would steal this? Who else cared about the tag-less, logo-less, unhemmed skirt? Perhaps if it were just clothes, as I had called it to numb my anger, it would be obviously desirable to others. It would show up for resale on Depop, like a stolen bike on Craigslist. But in Lauren’s words, it also isn’t just clothes.

We can think about just clothes as belonging to Fashion with a capital F, the expansive network that manufactures trends, photographs, editorials, magazines, runways, designers, wealth, pollution and, of course, clothing. Stemming from Lacan’s recognition of self in the mirror, and extending to Barthes’ Fashion System text, we understand that clothing makes meaning in the public sphere by flattening the body and garment into signs read by a social network with a mutually understood vocabulary. And while wearing clothing can be wildly political, Fashion is often dismissed for its overtly capitalist agenda of consumption, which is rightly critiqued. But it is more than objects for sale, more than signs, more than just clothes. Fashion is also to fashion, to construct ourselves.

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In October of 2007 I draped a sequined swath of fabric on my new friend, Lauren. It was the first garment I made for and with her. By March of 2020 we had mailed each other myriad presents as we moved to opposite coasts and took up professional careers. I sent her clothing I had crafted; she sent me books she had written. The gifts were sporadic, but in the solitude of the early Covid-19 pandemic I found myself stitching and sending garments to Lauren with renewed frequency. The very first package was stolen in the mail.

While we were heartbroken over the lost package, Lauren and I survived to see approximately fifteen other garments arrive to her apartment in Los Angeles. I called the series of garments spacewhere, deliberately punning on the slippage between “where” and “wear,” referencing my own nickname of Spacey Stacey, and drawing attention to the voids, or spaces, I left in the garments. Gestures like fraying, raw edges offered formal invitations for Lauren to inhabit the clothing. It would be finished, temporarily, only when she filled it in with her body, energy, and spirit. The garment becomes “complete” in the space where she puts it on.

As I built spacewhere in my Brooklyn apartment, I worked from a set of Lauren’s measurements roughly sketched on a scrap of paper. I worked from my memory of Lauren’s form, having spent over ten years of friendship, sleepovers and hangovers together. When I adjusted the waistline on canvas shorts to hit her belly button, the absence of her physical form was filled with the ghost of her presence that lives in my hands. It was supplemented by her texted measurements that translated my memories into numerical data. I encoded Lauren’s body in the garment, while she was across the country. But spacewhere also holds me. Of course I am linked as the author, but it’s not just in title or intention that I exist in the shape of the shorts – my physical being is embedded in the clothing. Working through degrees of intimacy: we see my hand as the artist in the painted flowers creeping across Lauren’s torso; we measure the length of thread I unspooled to applique the patches to find that it is the length of my arm; pinpricks of my blood stain the interior of the canvas. Carried on Lauren’s shoulders and resting on her hips, spacewhere is as much my body as it is hers.

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The most recent batch of clothes arrived in LA over the course of a few months, spanning December 2020 through May of 2021. In this window of time: Lauren went through a break-up, I decided at the last possible minute to apply to grad school, we both got Covid vaccine shots, I turned 34, Lauren moved, I got into grad school, we both got vaccine booster shots, I designed costumes for an Amazon TV Pilot, Lauren negotiated a raise, I found a new therapist. There was political turmoil (ongoing) and emotional turmoil (I’m working on it). In addition to our constant phone calls and text messages, the clothing I was making and sending provided a thread to connect us across the country at a time that was uniquely physically and mentally isolating, globally. We couldn’t hug each other, but we could clothe each other. Each package was an excuse to FaceTime. As Lauren tried on the clothes, we would weave elaborate fantasies about how and when this garment would premiere, what specific people from our past/future would appear to witness it, and what resultant successes this encounter would engender. The clothing provided an immediate basis for our imagined futures. But over the course of those tumultuous few months, these fictions nudged us towards tangible next steps: I committed to going to grad school; Lauren committed to writing a book. spacewhere was also the space where we constructed new versions of ourselves.

Of course the clothing I mailed Lauren also isn’t just clothes. It’s a gift, a tie between two friends, a work of art. It’s an invitation to take apart and refashion ourselves, our lives, and each other.

Images, Screenshots/Facetime:
Stacey Berman, Lauren Ellis Matthews, Annie Morrison