Magic Nightie
Natural materials generally feel best. We are told they breathe. I imagine my cotton t-shirt taking a deep breath, letting the air fill the space between each thread. In response to my inhalation, the shirt I am wearing expands to accommodate the expansion of my lungs. If I were wearing a tighter, stiffer shirt, my breathing might adjust to become shallower, more restricted. The thought of a living and breathing shirt may be absurd; however, it demonstrates quite well how the environment can act upon our minds and bodies. In one scenario, my shirt expands to accommodate me; in the other, I adapt my body to the shirt. People shift and adapt to their work and home environments all the time; however, these modifications are often unconscious or considered unimportant—little more than a nuisance or whimsy.
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Years ago, my mother made my daughter the softest white, cotton nightie. I got one too. Perhaps due to the romantic or nostalgic memories of times past, or the love sewn into every stich by my mother, but wearing the nighties made everything feel more magical. Their long, flowy shapes moved and transformed into different combinations of foldings, over-layerings of material that occasionally caught the breeze to dance with our bodies. Wearing the nightie shifted how my body moved, its cotton rhythms influencing how I walked and moved through the house. My daughter’s nightie seemed to transform her way of being and moving in the space too. Through the nightie, she became an extenson of its threads.
In an exploration on boundaries, Nijs and Daems draw our attention to William James’s suggestion “that in ‘pure experience’, it is not clear yet what is body and what is world”.[1] Asking how a nightie or environment can shift the way we relate to ourselves—our perception of reality—draws the material world into an active construction of the day-to-day. In these examples, both cloth and walls dress our thoughts, actions and emotions as we work and move through them. Henri Lefebvre[2] says that from the moment we wake up our body exists within the context of our bed, bedroom, house, city etc. and therefore its day-to-day habits, emotions and sense of self are consciously and unconsciously co-determined by these spatial relationships. What happens if we see space as a sculptor rather than a container?
[1] William James quoted in Greg Nijs and Amélie Daems “And What if the Tangible Were Not, and Vice Versa? On Boundary Works in Everyday Mobility Experience of People Moving into Old Age: For Daisy (1909–2011),” Space and Culture 15, no. 3 (2012): 187.
[2] Henri Lefebvre, The Production of Space, trans. D. Nicholson-Smith (Blackwell Publishing, 1991).
