Hot Off the Shelf: A Woven World: On Fashion, Fishermen, and the Sardine Dress by Alison Hawthorne Deming

[Disclaimer: I received a free copy of this book in exchange for an honest review. If you’d like to buy a copy, this post contains an affiliate link.]

A funny story: When I first started this blog, it seemed that everyone I knew had a blog about food, fashion, and fitness. When I told Mr. Off the Beaten Shelf this, he said, “Why doesn’t anyone have a blog about food, fatness, and fishing?” So when I saw that there was a book about fashion and fishing, I had to have it.

When I was offered a copy of A Woven World: On Fashion, Fishermen, and the Sardine Dress by Alison Hawthorne Deming to review, I knew it was for me. It ticked so many of my boxes: blended genre memoir, weird history/environmental bent, material culture with handmade craftsmanship element… I was all about it. Plus, I’d read books from the publisher, Counterpoint, and enjoyed them. Their hallmark style (at least based on what I’ve read of their catalog) are blended genre memoirs that offer interesting environmental perspectives. Right up my alley!

First, the synopsis:

Synopsis:

Part memoir, part elegy, part cultural history, A Woven World reflects upon and celebrates the fading crafts, cottage industries, and artisans that have defined communities for generations.

The desire to create is the cornerstone of civilization. But as we move into a world where machine manufacturing has nearly usurped craft, Alison Hawthorne Deming resists the erasure of our shared history of handiwork with this appeal for embracing continuity and belonging in a time of destabilizing change.

Sensing a need to preserve the crafts and stories of our founding communities, and inspired by an exhibit at the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s Costume Institute featuring Yves St. Laurent’s “sardine” dress, Deming turned to the industries of her ancestors, both the dressmakers and designers in Manhattan in the nineteenth century and the fishermen on Grand Manan Island, a community of 2,500 residents, where the dignity of work and the bounty of the sea ruled for hundreds of years. Reweaving the fabric of those lives, A Woven World gives presence on the page to the people, places, and practices, uncovering and preserving a record of the ingenuity and dignity that comes with such work. In this way the lament becomes a song of praise and a testament to the beauty and fragility of human making.

The book opens with a meditation on the Yves Saint Laurent sardine dress, which is what inspired the book. From there, the chapters alternate between Deming searching for more information on her grandmother and great-grandmother, both of whom were dressmakers, and searching for antique fishing weirs off the eastern seaboard of Canada where her family owns a cabin.

I kept thinking the blend of fashion and fishing would come together again as it did in the first chapter, though besides a page or two on fishnet stockings the subjects were mostly separate. At times I felt like I was reading two different books––both interesting but each unfinished––that had been put together.

I thought more about the title, A Woven World, and realized that perhaps that’s the point? That the creative challenge of this memoir was to weave two seemingly disparate stories together from each half of Deming’s family so we understand how she came to be. That structure should follow form.

I understand the impulse to research family history and want to know more about our origins––I think it’s a deeply human instinctual need. I also know that rarely do other people find our family histories as fascinating as we do. My father-in-law, who I love dearly, can talk for hours on end about his research on Ancestry.com and my eyes glaze over after a few minutes. Other than names and dates and a profession here and there, these people are 2D to me; they don’t seem tangible. After years of listening to him talk about his research, I realized why: He’s chiefly concerned with names and dates and figuring out where each person was buried and what wars they fought in. He doesn’t particularly care for the personal stories that made them unique, if such stories have even survived. He also doesn’t care to unpack how his ancestors’ lives coalesced to lead to him. He has no interest in the question of why he is the way he is, how he got here, and how his ancestors contributed to making him the person he is.

And that’s fine––he’s not writing a book. He does his genealogical research purely for his own enjoyment. I think what I so badly wanted to see in A Woven World was investigating genealogy as a means of figuring out if this is why Deming has a particular interest in fashion or why she loves going fishing. But unless I read it wrong, I got the sense that she only became interested in these things after finding out her ancestors chose these industries as their professions. And even then the interest seemed to manifest mostly in research, not trying them in practicality. I wanted to see her trying to piece together a couture dress in the way her grandmothers did, not just trying to find the many places their studios were all over New York City. I wanted to see her trying to fish in the traditional way, not just flying in a helicopter over weirs to see where they once were. I wanted to see her get hands-on with the information, not just presenting research or the process of finding.

This is not to say I didn’t enjoy the book. I think A Woven World would be of particular interest for people who want to know a little bit about everything. My curiosity is generally insatiable, perhaps with the exception of my father-in-law talking about genealogy, so I did appreciate learning so much about so many disparate topics, including Empress Eugenie, the Babbage calculator, herring recipes, terrorism, women entrepreneurs in the 1800s, crinoline and more. Deming is clearly intelligent and her own insatiable curiosity leaps off the page.

I think if this were billed as a collection of essays, I wouldn’t have expected so much cohesion. Each chapter is enjoyable in its own right, though I wouldn’t necessarily call this a memoir, even though there are memoir-ish elements. I think a memoir requires more emotional vulnerability and more introspection. That said, Deming is a gifted writer. I could tell she was a poet even before reading her bio because the language is so gorgeously rendered.

I saw all this not to discourage you from reading the book, but to let you have a different perspective going into it. I think I would’ve enjoyed the book more if it’d been communicated differently to me. If you’d like to buy a copy, please use my Bookshop link. It’s an Amazon alternative that supports indie bookstores, so win-win!