Journal articles on the topic 'Pressing of garments'

In garment manufacturing, pressing is one of the latest stages of production. The purpose of the pressing is to achieve a smooth appearance of the shell fabric and flat and smooth seams. A group of woven fabrics with of fiber composition 100% cotton, cotton/Lycra, 100% wool and blended wool/PES for production of men's shirt and tailored garments were tested for seam pressing performance on a FAST 4 press test. The relationship of the seam crease angle after pressing with the fabric fiber composition and fabric weight and end use. The substantial difference between fabric end use and seam pressing performance was analyzed. The fabrics of Wool/PES fabric composition have shown best seam crease performance out of all fabrics for tailored garments. Cotton/Lycra fabrics have shown superior seam pressing performance compared to 100% cotton fabric for men's shirt.

Purpose The purpose of this paper is to present an efficient algorithm for multi-layer garment fitting simulation based on the geometric method to solve the low time cost problem during penetration detection and processing. This is more practical to design a CAD system to preview the multi-layer garment fitting effect in daily life. Design/methodology/approach The construction of a multi-layer garment based on existing 3D garments is a suitable method because this method is similar to the daily method of multi-layer dressing. The major problem is the penetration phenomenon between different garments because these 3D garment’s geometric shapes are constructed in different situations. In this paper, an efficient algorithm of multi-layer garment simulation is reported. A face-face intersection detection algorithm is designed to detect the penetration region between multi-layer garments fast and a geometric penetration processing algorithm is presented to solve the penetration phenomenon during multi-layer garment simulation. Findings This method can quickly detect the penetration between faces, and then deal with the penetration for multi-layer garment construction. Experimental results show that this method can not only remove the penetration but basically maintain the trend of wrinkles efficiently. At the same time, the garments used in the experiment have almost more than 5,800 faces, but the resolving time is under five seconds. Originality/value The main originalities of the multi-layer garment virtual fitting algorithm based on the geometric method are highly efficient both in terms of time cost and fitting effect. Based on this method, the technology of multi-layer garment virtual fitting can be used to design a novel CAD system to preview the multi-layer garment fitting effect in real time. This is a pressing requirement of virtual garment applications.

Globally, one of the twentieth-century developments is the increased participation of women workers in factories. Indeed, women workers continue to play an essential role in the global economy. But the participation of women in wage labour is regarded as a form of violence in South Asian countries, particularly Bangladesh and Sri Lanka. However, this study documenting the experiences of violence against women in garments factory contributes to the idea of ‘violence against women as part of Globalization. This study recognizes the relationship between the different sufferings of women workers in garment factories through a gender relations lens and the key issues involving gender inequality, education, coercion and sexual harassment and how they represent global inequality and local identity. This article also offers to understand the trends and challenges of the women workers choosing a career in the garment factory. This study was conducted among the different ages of garment women workers in the garments of Bangladesh and Sri Lanka using ethnographic study under qualitative research method involving in-depth interviews, survey and participant observation was used to collect data about their experiences and suffering of violence against women. The preliminary results of the research show that 98% of women from marginalized backgrounds have faced social, cultural, economic and health issues. In addition, 45% of women reported being sexually harassed by male garment employees. This study extends the position of women, which is the most pressing challenge for women’s empowerment. Following an ethnographic analysis of research findings, it can be said that only equal rights, respect, and gender equality pave a new path for women and eliminate all forms of violence globally.

Abstract Nowadays, the virtual technology is being widely applied in the area of clothing design and try-on. However, the possibilities of these technologies cover only the contemporary marketable clothes, while the insight in the aspect of historical costume is very limited. In this research, we developed the method that allows to reconstruct and do the virtual try-on of historical men’s suit consisting from four different garments—trousers, shirts, vest, and coat. The method includes, on one hand, the analysis of pattern drafting systems, patterns construction, special means of bespoke tailoring that were popular in the history and, on the other hand, the way of its adapting and preparing to contemporary technologies of 2D and 3D design. The exploration was done with men’s suit and the patterns from the nineteenth century. We studied how the tailors took all measurements, the content of size charts including divisional, direct measurements, and its combination. To parameterize the historical patterns of men’s clothes, we created the schedule of special indexes. We developed the method how to identify the means of garment shaping by steam pressing, which are hiding in the patterns, and how to perform ones by darts. The preparation of historical patterns to virtual try-on was done by CAD. As example, the reconstruction of full-dress suite painted on the Prince Albert of Saxe-Coburg and Gotha’ portrait (1840) was done, and high adequacy between the historical prototype and the virtual suit has been proved.

The main objective of the paper is optimization of the process of thermal transfer in order to obtain - with minimum number of tests and maximum precision - a high adhesion degree of stencils applied to the garments. The major factors affecting the thermal transfer processes are: temperature, pressure, time, and the characteristics of the textile (fiber composition, finishing, structure of the face surface, etc.). The problem is current for most companies that produce clothing for sports and outdoor activities. This category of products is quite complex due to processing technology, combinations of various textile components, cutout components and most importantly the informative and decorative elements applied through thermal transfer process. To optimize the thermal transfer process, a series of experiments with a central rotating compound were applied. Analysis and Interpretation of the results showed that the pressing time is the most important factor of the adhesion of the thermal transfer to the textile material and its ulterior resistance to washing.

Cutting processes using blades have found applications in many industries; for example, in garments, fiber–polymer composites, and high-performance fabric forming. In recent decades, the process of cutting the material using a robotic-controlled blade has raised concern about the value of the pressure and the cut force required for a certain type of woven fabric and the estimation of its value before the pressing and cutting process. A simple theoretical relation was established based on the fabric structure and yarn shear stress. The model formulation and experimental results to describe the basic theory of blade cutting fracture for woven fabric of different designs was derived. In this work, the experimental investigation of the effect of the fabric specifications, normal load, and the cutting speed on the cutting force was carried out, which indicates that the value of the specific cutting resistance of the fabric was found to be highly correlated with the fabric structure, warp and weft yarn count, Young’s modulus of the fabric, and fractional cover factors ratio ζ.

Flexible and stretchable electronic yarn containing electronic components (i.e., hybrid electronic yarn) are essential for manufacturing smart textile garments or fabrics. Due to their low stretchability and easy interconnection fracture, previously reported hybrid electronic sensing yarns have poor mechanical durability and washability. In order to address this issue, a stretchable hybrid electronic yarn for body temperature monitoring was designed and prepared using a spandex filament as the core yarn and a thin enameled copper wire connected with a thermal resistor as the wrapping fiber. The temperature sensing performance of different hybrid electronic yarn samples was evaluated using the following three types of interconnection methods: conductive adhesive bonding, melt soldering, and hot pressure bonding. The optimal interconnection method with good sensing performance was determined. Furthermore, in order to improve the mechanical durability of the hybrid electronic yarn made using the optimal interconnection method, the interconnection area was encapsulated with polymers, and the effect of polymer materials and structures on the temperature-sensing properties was evaluated. The results show that traditional wrapping combined with hot pressing interconnection followed by tube encapsulating technology is beneficial for achieving high stretchability and good temperature-sensing performance of hybrid electronic yarn.

Abstract: The pressing process is a process of applying heat and pressure at a predetermined time. Temperature, time and pressure in the pressing process in the finishing department play an important role in the quality of the results of pressing garment products at PT X. Various types of main materials used in the garment production process at PT X require different conditions of temperature, time and pressing pressure, so it is necessary to know the appropriate pressing conditions for each type of material. If these three elements are not appropriate, it can give rise to several categories of defects, one of which is often experienced by PT X, namely glossing/shiny defects. The method that used in this research was carried out by experimenting with variations in pressing temperature where the time and pressure variables used were fixed. The temperature variations used in this research include 600C, 700C, 800C, 900C and 1000C.. This research aims to determine the optimum temperature that used in the pressing process in making Bigborn 2-Tuck Pants Style 3651 trousers with the main material composition being 65% Polyester and 35% Katun. The pressing results are then tested for the tensile strength of the fabric towards the warp and towards the weft of the fabric. Based on the experiments carried out, it shows that for temperature variations of 600C and 700C there are poor press defects. At varying temperatures of 800C and 900C, there are no glossing defects. At 1000C it has glossing/shiny defect. Next, to obtain the most optimum temperature conditions, the experiment continued with testing the tensile strength of the fabric. Based on the fabric tensile strength test data, an optimum temperature condition was obtained in the process of pressing Bigborn 2-Tuck Pants Style 3651 trousers, namely at a temperature of 800C. The tensile strength results obtained at a temperature of 800C were 55 kg for the tensile strength of the fabric in the warp direction and the tensile strength of the fabric in the weft direction was 45.5 kg. Keywords: temperature, pressing, glossing

The article considers the problem of processing textile waste from garment production. The main directions of their use in the production of nonwoven fabric and composite materials are briefly described. The use of waste padding materials based on thermoplastic fibers in the manufacture of nonwovens by hot pressing is considered. Samples of nonwovens were obtained and mechanical properties were tested. The coefficient of variation in the thickness of the obtained materials is about 10%. The composition of the waste used and the pressing temperature affect the rigidity of the samples during bending. The addition of waste from thermoplastic fibres leads to an increase in the rigidity of the composite and contributes to better par- ticle bonding and a decrease in thickness. The obtained materials can be used as pads in the manufacture of a wide range of consumer goods.

The fashion industry is a significant contributor to global carbon emissions and contributes significantly to the climate and ecology crisis, say authors. they say the fashion industry's production of textiles is a major contributor to pollution and climate change. they argue that fashion industry needs to adopt sustainable practices to mitigate its environmental impact. The social impact of the fashion industry on garment workers is a pressing concern that demands urgent attention. Addressing these issues requires concerted efforts from industry stakeholders, policymakers, and consumers to ensure fair labour practices, safe working conditions, and equitable treatment for the individuals who contribute to the global fashion supply chain. the fashion industry's remarkable growth and consumption patterns have led to significant environmental and social impacts. The industry contributes to carbon emissions, water scarcity, pollution, and biodiversity loss through its production processes and supply chains. Additionally, the surge in consumption and the production of disposable fashion have resulted in increased waste and exploitation of garment workers. To address these challenges, a shift towards sustainable practices, circular economies, and conscious consumerism is necessary.

Sewing thread cutting processes are widely used in semi-automatic machines of the garment industry, and is an urgent problem. There is no scientifically based methodology for designing thread trimming mechanisms for semi-automatic sewing machines. Cutting threads by the method of scissors does not provide complete cutting of all components of the thread in case of insufficient pressing of the knife planes to each other. To ensure complete trimming, a design cutting scheme has been developed and calculation formulas have been obtained for determining the force exerted by the thread on the movable knife, taking into account the mechanical characteristics of the cut sewing thread.

Intelligent textile that endow traditional fabric with functionalities have attracted increasing attention. In this research work, we fabricated a flexible and wearable pressure sensor with conductive nylon fabric as the electrodes and elastomer Ecoflex as the dielectric layer. The conductive nylon fabric in the twill structure, which showed a high conductivity of 0.268 Ω·cm (specific resistance), was prepared by magnetron sputtering with silver films. The flexible pressure sensor shows a high sensitivity of 0.035 kPa−1, a good linear response under pressure from 0 to 16 kPa, and a quick response time of 0.801 s. The fabricated pressure sensor was found to be highly reproducible and repeatable against repeated mechanical loads for 9500 times, with a small capacitance loss rate of 0.0534. The fabric-based flexible and wearable sensor with good properties can be incorporated into a fabric garment by the hot-pressing method without sacrificing comfort, which can then be used for human motion detecting or touch sensing. The smart glove with finger touch function was proved to be efficient in Morse code editing, which has potential for information transfer in the military field.

Ready to wear end-products may be obtained by different assembling methods such as sewing, bonding, seam taping, welding and pressing fabrics. Currently, sewing is the most common method, but other techniques are improving day by day in accordance with the new application areas and new requirements from seamlines. Seam taping is an innovative alternative method that can improve the properties of seams. In this study, some essential properties such as the strength, elongation, thickness and air permeability of sealed samples with different constructions were compared. As taping constructions, ultrasonic bonding plus taping, sewing plus taping, and only taping methods were used. These methods were varied according to the taping temperature and speed. Also, only sewn and ultrasonically bonded samples were prepared as reference samples. In total, 20 different kinds of seam sealed samples were obtained as test materials. According to the results, taped samples were advantageous in terms of seam thickness and seam strength properties when compared to only sewn and ultrasonically bonded references. Especially, “only taped” samples were one step ahead among the all constructions. The air permeability of the taped seams decreased by a certain amount, but it is thought to be tolerable in a full garment.

The purpose of this research was to shed light on the widespread issue of contractual workers' rights violations within garment factories across Pakistan, particularly focusing on monetary and non-monetary benefits, minimum wage adherence, and instances of "working off the clock." Employing a secondary data approach, the study analyses unpublished and confidential audit reports from various textile factories in Karachi, Lahore, and Faisalabad. These audits, conducted in 2017 by third-party entities, provide a quantitative basis for examining the relationship between contract employment and labour rights violations. A sample of 191 textile factories was selected using convenience sampling, with statistical analysis performed using IBM SPSS Statistics 20 software. The results underscore a significant relationship between the hiring of contract workers and the failure to provide monetary and non-monetary benefits, as well as a pronounced link with the practice of working off the clock. However, the study did not find a significant association between contract employment and the failure to pay minimum wages. These findings indicate a pressing need for stringent regulatory oversight and the implementation of comprehensive policies to curb labour rights violations in Pakistan's textile industry, emphasizing the importance of safeguarding worker rights in the face of contractual employment practices.

Abstract Competition among competitors in the increasingly tight business world today encourages companies to develop more effective and efficient way in achieving the goals and objectives that have been set. With the current information and technology consumers become more sensitive about quality and price of a product. Therefore, companies are required to improve the quality of products produced and continuously improve and improve. PT Bintan Bersatu Apparel Batam is one of the manufacturing companies engaged in the production of sportswear. PT Bintan Bersatu Apparel also strives to continuously improve the quality by pressing the product number in the product process in this company. Six sigma as an alternative to the principles of quality control, enabling companies to improve with the actual breakthrough. Six sigma is an important tool for production management to maintain, maintain product quality and improve quality towards zero defect. So six sigma is a method or technique. Which is a new breakthrough in the field of quality management. By using six sigma method can be known quality sportswear produced PT Bintan Bersatu Apparel in 3.55 sigma with damage level of 20,290 for one million production (DPMO). Six sigma quality improvement in this research can be concluded there are three causes of the product: workmanship or constructionas much as 82.04%, fabric as much as 13.82% and accessories as much as 4.14%.In this research data analysis used Six Sigma (DMAIC) method which through five stages that is define, measure, analyze, improve and control.

This study investigates the potential application of artificial intelligence (AI) in the field of sustainable fashion by streamlining the production of clothing and incorporating trend analysis. By researching current fashion trends and consumer preferences to identify the most well-liked apparel patterns and designs, the article seeks to optimise supply and demand while reducing surplus production. Fashion garment production can be optimised to fulfil customer demand while minimising waste and lowering costs by incorporating trend research into the manufacturing process. Companies may now invest in clothing concepts that will sell thanks to AI trend forecasting, which reduces some of the uncertainty and human error that now hinder trend forecasting. The fashion industry is infamous for its detrimental effects on society and the environment, including creation of waste and pollution. While the fashion industry has started to adopt more sustainable practises, AI has the ability to quicken the process by offering creative answers to some of the sector's most pressing problems. The study looks at a number of AI-related case studies in the fashion sector, including the use of predictive analytics to cut waste and streamline supply chains, computer vision to enhance textile recycling, and natural language processing to encourage openness and moral work practises. The paper also examines how AI could revolutionise the fashion business and hasten the shift to a more ethical and sustainable future. The report also highlights the necessity for careful evaluation of these concerns as the fashion industry develops by posing significant ethical and social implications for AI.

Recent conservation and restoration work on the icon of the Virgin and Child which stood on the altar in the Church of St. Nicholas at Prijeko in Dubrovnik has enabled a new interpretation of this paining. The icon, painted on a panel made of poplar wood, features a centrally-placed Virgin holding the Child in her arms painted on a gold background between the two smaller figures of St. Peter and St. John the Baptist. The figures are painted in the manner of the fifteenth- and sixteenth-century Dubrovnik style, and represent a later intervention which significantly changed the original appearance and composition of the older icon by adding the two saints and touching up the Virgin’s clothes with Renaissance ornaments, all of which was performed by the well-known Dubrovnik painter Nikola Božidarević. It can be assumed that the icon originally featured a standing or seated Virgin and Child. The Virgin is depicted with her head slightly lowered and pointing to the Christ Child whom she is holding on her right side. The chubby boy is not seated on his mother’s lap but is reclining on his right side and leaningforward while his face is turned towards the spectator. He is dressed in a red sleeveless tunic with a simple neck-line which is embroidered with gold thread. The Child is leaning himself on the Virgin’s right hand which is holding him. He is firmly grasping her thumb with one hand and her index finger with the other in a very intimate nursing gesture while she, true to the Hodegitria scheme, is pointing at him with her left hand, which is raised to the level of her breasts. Such an almost-realistic depiction of Christ as a small child with tiny eyes, mouth and nose, drastically departs from the model which portrays him with the mature face of an adult, as was customary in icon painting. The Virgin is wearing a luxurious gold cloak which was repainted with large Renaissance-style flowers. Her head is covered with a traditional maphorion which forms a wide ring around it and is encircled by a nimbus which was bored into thegold background. Her skin tone is pink and lit diffusely, and was painted with almost no green shadows, which is typical of Byzantine painting. The Virgin’s face is striking and markedly oval. It is characterized by a silhouetted, long, thin nose which is connected to the eyebrows. The ridge of the nose is emphasized with a double edge and gently lit whilethe almond-shaped eyes with dark circles are set below the inky arches of the eyebrows. The Virgin’s cheeks are smooth and rosy while her lips are red. The plasticity of her round chin is emphasized by a crease below the lower lip and its shadow. The Virgin’s eyes, nose and mouth are outlined with a thick red line. Her hands are light pink in colour and haveelongated fingers and pronounced, round muscles on the wrists. The fingers are separated and the nails are outlined with precision. The deep, resounding hues of the colour red and the gilding, together with the pale pink skin tone of her face, create an impression of monumentality. The type of the reclining Christ Child has been identified in Byzantine iconography as the Anapeson. Its theological background lies in the emphasis of Christ’s dual nature: although the Christ Child is asleep, the Christ as God is always keeping watch over humans. The image was inspired by a phrase from Genesis 49: 9 about a sleeping lion to whom Christ is compared: the lion sleeps with his eyes open. The Anapeson is drowsy and awake at the same time, and therefore his eyes are not completely shut. Such a paradox is a theological anticipation of his “sleep” in the tomb and represents an allegory of his death and Resurrection. The position, gesture and clothes of the Anapeson in Byzantine art are not always the same. Most frequently, the ChristChild is not depicted lying in his mother’s arms but on an oval bed or pillow, resting his head on his hand, while the Virgin is kneeling by his side. Therefore, the Anapeson from Dubrovnik is unique thanks to the conspicuously humanized relationship between the figures which is particularly evident in Christ’s explicitly intimate gesture of grasping the fingers of his mother’s hand: his right hand is literally “inserting” itself in the space between the Virgin’s thumb and index finger. At the same time, the baring of his arms provided the painter with an opportunity to depict the pale tones of a child’s tender skin. The problem of the iconography of the Anapeson in the medieval painting at Dubrovnik is further complicated by a painting which was greatly venerated in Župa Dubrovačka as Santa Maria del Breno. It has not been preserved but an illustration of it was published in Gumppenberg’sfamous Atlas Marianus which shows the Virgin seated on a high-backed throne and holding the sleeping and reclining Child. The position of this Anapeson Christ does not correspond fully to the icon from the Church of St. Nicholas because the Child is lying on its back and his naked body is covered with the swaddling fabric. The icon of the Virgin and Child from Prijeko claims a special place in the corpus of Romanesque icons on the Adriatic through its monumentality and intimate character. The details of the striking and lively Virgin’s face, dominated by the pronounced and gently curved Cimabuesque nose joined to the shallow arches of her eyebrows, link her with the Benedictine Virgin at Zadar. Furthermore, based on the manner of painting characterized by the use of intense red for the shadows in the nose and eye area, together with the characteristic shape of the elongated, narrow eyes, this Virgin and Child should be brought into connection with the painter who is known as the Master of the Benedictine Virgin. The so-called Benedictine Virgin is an icon, now at the Benedictine Convent at Zadar, which depicts the Virgin seated on a throne with a red, ceremonial, imperial cushion, in a solemn scheme of the Kyriotissa, the heavenly queen holding the Christ Child on her lap. The throne is wooden and has a round back topped with wooden finials which can also be seen in the Byzantine Kahn Virgin and the Mellon Madonna, as well as in later Veneto-Cretan painting. The throne is set under a shallow ciborium arch which is rendered in relief and supportedby twisted colonettes and so the painting itself is sunk into the surface of the panel. A very similar scheme with a triumphal arch can be seen on Byzantine ivory diptychs with shallow ciborium arches and twisted colonettes. In its composition, the icon from Prijeko is a combination ofthe Kyr i ot i ss a and the Hodegitria, because the Virgin as the heavenly queen does not hold the Christ Child frontally before her but on her right-hand side while pointing at him as the road to salvation. He is seated on his mother’s arm and is supporting himself by pressing his crossed legsagainst her thigh which symbolizes his future Passion. He is wearing a formal classical costume with a red cloak over his shoulder. He is depicted in half profile which opens up the frontal view of the red clavus on his navy blue chiton.He is blessing with the two fingers of his right hand and at the same time reaching for the unusual flower rendered in pastiglia which the Virgin is raising in her left hand and offering to him. At the same time, she is holding the lower part of Christ’s body tightly with her right hand.Various scholars have dated the icon of the Benedictine Virgin to the early fourteenth century. While Gothic features are particularly evident in the costumes of the donors, the elements such as the modelling of the throne and the presence of the ceremonial cushion belong to the Byzantine style of the thirteenth century. The back of the icon of the Benedictine Virgin features the figure of St. Peter set within a border consisting of a lively and colourful vegetal scroll which could be understood as either Romanesque or Byzantine. However, St. Peter’s identifying titulus is written in Latin while that of the Virgin is in Greek. The figure of St. Peter was painted according to the Byzantine tradition: his striking and severe face is rendered linearly in a rigid composition, which is complemented by his classical contrapposto against a green-gray parapet wall, while the background is of dark green-blue colour. Equally Byzantine is themanner of depicting the drapery with flat, shallow folds filled with white lines at the bottom of the garment while, at the same time, the curved undulating hem of the cloak which falls down St. Peter’s right side is Gothic. The overall appearance of St. Peter is perhaps even more Byzantine than that of the Virgin. Such elements, together with the typically Byzantine costumes, speak clearly of a skilful artist who uses hybrid visual language consisting of Byzantine painting and elements of the Romanesque and Gothic. Of particular interest are the wide nimbuses surrounding the heads of the Virgin and Child (St. Peter has a flat one) which are rendered in relief and filled with a neat sequence of shallow blind archesexecuted in the pastiglia technique which, according to M. Frinta, originated in Cyprus. The Venetian and Byzantine elements of the Benedictine Virgin have already been pointed out in the scholarship. Apart from importing art works and artists such as painters and mosaic makers directly from Byzantium into Venice, what was the extent and nature of the Byzantineinfluence on Venetian artistic achievements in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries? We know that the art of Venice and the West alike were affected by the Fourth Crusade and the sack of Constantinople in 1204, and by the newly founded Latin Empire which lasted until 1261.The Venetians played a particularly significant political and administrative role in this Empire and the contemporary hybrid artistic style of the eastern Mediterranean, called Crusader Art and marked by the strong involvement of the Knights Templar, must have been disseminated through the established routes. In addition to Cyprus, Apulia and Sicily which served as stops for the artists and art works en route to Venice and Tuscany, another station must have been Dalmatia where eastern and western influences intermingled and complemented each other.However, it is interesting that the icon of the Benedictine Virgin, apart from negligible variations, imitates almost completely the iconographic scheme of the Madonna di Ripalta at Cerignola on the Italian side of the Adriatic, which has been dated to the early thirteenth century and whose provenance has been sought in the area between southern Italy (Campania) and Cyprus. Far more Byzantine is another Apulian icon, that of a fourteenth-century enthroned Virgin from the basilica of St. Nicholas at Bari with which the Benedictine Virgin from Zadar shares certain features such as the composition and posture of the figures, the depictionof donors and Christ’s costume. A similar scheme, which indicates a common source, can be seen on a series of icons of the enthroned Virgin from Tuscany. The icon of the Virgin and Child from Prijeko is very important for local Romanesque painting of the late thirteenth and early fourteenth century because it expands the oeuvre of the Master of the Benedictine Virgin. Anicon which is now at Toronto, in the University of Toronto Art Centre Malcove Collection, has also been attributed to this master. This small two-sided icon which might have been a diptych panel, as can be judged from its typology, depicts the Virgin with the Anapeson in the upper register while below is the scene from the martyrdom of St. Lawrence. The Virgin is flanked by the figures of saints: to the left is the figure of St. Francis while the saint on the right-hand side has been lost due to damage sustained to the icon. The busts of SS Peter and Paul are at the top.The physiognomies of the Virgin and Child correspond to those of the Benedictine Virgin and the Prijeko icon. The Anapeson, unlike the one at Dubrovnik, is wrapped in a rich, red cloak decorated with lumeggiature, which covers his entire body except the left fist and shin. On the basis of the upper register of this icon, it can be concluded that the Master of the Benedictine Virgin is equally adept at applying the repertoire and style of Byzantine and Western painting alike; the lower register of the icon with its descriptive depiction of the martyrdom of St.Lawrence is completely Byzantine in that it portrays the Roman emperor attending the saint’s torture as a crowned Byzantine ruler. Such unquestionable stylistic ambivalence – the presence of the elements from both Byzantine and Italian painting – can also be seen on the icons of theBenedictine and Prijeko Virgin and they point to a painter who works in a “combined style.” Perhaps he should be sought among the artists who are mentioned as pictores greci in Dubrovnik, Kotor and Zadar. The links between Dalmatian icons and Apulia and Tuscany have already been noted, but the analysis of these paintings should also contain the hitherto ignored segment of Sicilian and eastern Mediterranean Byzantinism, including Cyprus as the centre of Crusader Art. The question of the provenance of the Master of the Benedictine Virgin remains open although the icon of the Virgin and Child from Prijeko points to the possibility that he may have been active in Dalmatia.However, stylistic expressions of the two icons from Zadar and Dubrovnik, together with the one which is today at Toronto, clearly demonstrate the coalescing of cults and forms which arrived to the Adriatic shores fromfurther afield, well beyond the Adriatic, and which were influenced by the significant, hitherto unrecognized, role of the eastern Mediterranean.

Purpose: The purpose of this research is to analyze the correlation between the job characteristics and satisfaction among production workers in the garments sector assembly line and also to examine the moderating impact of growth need intent on both variables. The five job characteristics were employed in this research. Design/Methodology/Approach: This research was carried out in seven garment factories in Lahore. Data has been collected from production workers of different departments; cutting, sewing, pattern making, washing, pressing, packaging, and quality checking of randomly selected factories. A structured questionnaire was used for data collection. Considering the sample size estimation, the ratio has not to be below 1:5. (Hair, Black, Babin & Anderson, 2010) and 125 have been selected by a convenient method of sampling. Smart PLS has been used as a statistical tool for data processing and testing the hypothesis. Findings: The research suggests two important findings. Firstly, the job characteristics significantly affect job satisfaction. Secondly, it shows that the relationship between job characteristics and satisfaction is significantly moderated by growth need intent. Implications/Originality/Value: This research will add value to the existing knowledge base and serve as a guideline for HR policymakers in the textile & garments industry to recognize the needs for the development of their workers.

The textile and apparel industries have grown tremendously over the last few years. Customers no longer have to visit many stores, stand in long queues, or try on garments in dressing rooms as millions of products are now available in online catalogs. However, given the plethora of options available, an effective recommendation system is necessary to properly sort, order, and communicate relevant product material or information to users. Effective fashion RS can have a noticeable impact on billions of customers’ shopping experiences and increase sales and revenues on the provider side. The goal of this survey is to provide a review of recommender systems that operate in the specific vertical domain of garment and fashion products. We have identified the most pressing challenges in fashion RS research and created a taxonomy that categorizes the literature according to the objective they are trying to accomplish (e.g., item or outfit recommendation, size recommendation, explainability, among others) and type of side-information (users, items, context). We have also identified the most important evaluation goals and perspectives (outfit generation, outfit recommendation, pairing recommendation, and fill-in-the-blank outfit compatibility prediction) and the most commonly used datasets and evaluation metrics.

Purpose The garment industry will be one of the major beneficiaries of advances in smart manufacturing, as it is highly labor-intensive and heavily depends on labor force. Manipulating robots in human environments has made great strides in recent years. However, the main research has focused on rigid, solid objects and core capabilities such as grasping, placing remain a challenging problem when dealing with soft textiles. The experimental results indicate that adopting the proposed bionic soft finger will provide garment manufacturers with smart manufacturing capabilities. Then, the purpose of this paper is to utilize the flexibility of the soft finger to transfer fabric layer by layer without damage in garment automation. Design/methodology/approach In this paper, a new way to separate layer by layer pieces of fabric has been inspired by the rise of soft robotics and their applications in automation. Fabric gripping is accomplished by wiping deformation and pinching the fabric. A single fabric piece is separated from cutting pile by the soft finger in four steps: making an arch by pressing, wiping deformation, grasping and separating, and placing. Findings The case study demonstrated that the soft finger arrangement for automated grasping of fabric pieces of a garment can be successfully applied to delicate fabric. A combination of cloth shape and weight determines the number of soft fingers. In addition, the soft finger was tested on different types of fabrics to determine its performance and application capabilities. The technology may be used to produce clothing intelligently in the future, such as intelligent stacking, intelligent transportation and intelligent packaging, to increase clothing industry productivity. Originality/value An industrial bionic soft finger gripping system is proposed in this paper for application in the field of fabric automatic manipulation. A piece of fabric could be picked up and released layer by layer from a stack by the proposed gripper without creating any damage to it. Soft grippers have the right proportion of softness and rigidity like a human being. A soft finger has a potential affinity for soft materials such as fabrics without damaging either their surface or their properties.

With the progression of age, the risk of falls in the elderly population escalates. Hip fractures are perceived as one of the most severe consequences of such falls and are often described as “the last fracture in one’s life,” with mortality rates reaching 20%−30% and accompanied by a significant rate of disability. To address this pressing issue, our study conducted an in-depth analysis of the mechanical properties of Artificial Cartilage Foam (ACF) and Carbon Fiber Reinforced Polymer (CFRP). Based on this research, we devised a laminated structure where ACF acts as the outer layer, with CFRP positioned centrally, capitalizing on the material’s intrinsic shock-absorbing attributes. Building on this structure, based on this structure, a specialized protective clothing design tailored for the elderly to counteract age-related balance impairments is proposed. Furthermore, we undertook experiments to gage user anxiety levels and assess the wearability comfort of the attire. Our findings indicate that this protective garment can effectively absorb the impact energy generated during falls, significantly reducing the risk of injury in the elderly. Additionally, its ergonomic design helps alleviate the psychological distress elderly individuals may experience due to the fear of falling. This research presents an innovative and effective strategy for enhancing fall protection in the elderly demographic.

Although the extant research in entrepreneurial innovation shows how organizational challenges could enact such innovations, the relationship between organizational challenges and organizational innovation under the small and medium enterprise (SME) context requires attention. Especially considering that SMEs face supply chain challenges, we need to know whether such challenges consistently enact supply chain innovations. Moreover, although those innovations can address the immediate SME challenges, extant research does not capture the life cycle of the innovations efficiently. To find an answer to this theoretical quest, we conduct participatory case research at Saha Textile, India. The founder of Saha Textile started his journey as a small garment shop owner in a Bazar. Within two decades, Saha Textile became one of the most prominent vertically integrated organizations in the Indian textile sector. Our reflexive process study reveals that the organization faced multiple survival threats throughout its journey. The uniqueness of the organizational crisis enacted sensemaking in the organization. The organization looked at unusual and unconventional resources within its access and creatively converted those into valuable resources to address the challenges. If successful with the creative attempts in addressing the pressing challenges—the organization further strengthened those resources into core competence. Over time, the organizational learning in converting crisis to core competencies through creative utilization of resources became rational heuristics and acted as a (higher-order) dynamic capability. Our inductive theorization makes a significant academic contribution as it proposes a generalizable dynamic capability process model of converting crisis into innovation and capitalizing such innovations as a core competence. Our research points out the possibility of standardizing and leveraging innovations-as-crisis-responses as core competence towards a sustainable competitive advantage for practice.

In the aftermath of Donald Trump’s election victory in 2016, feminist and online craft communities responded with a call to arms (or needles) aimed at resistance through collective action in thread, yarn, and textiles. One such project, Diana Weymar’s Tiny Pricks Project, records the incessant barrage of Trump’s media coverage: tweets, journalist reportage, and statements in stitched thread. Weymar started Tiny Pricks Project on 8 January 2018, stitching the 45th President’s bluster of a 6 January tweet, “I AM A VERY STABLE GENIUS”, in yellow thread across a field of tapestry flowers. Issuing an invitation for contributions from stitchers around the world, Weymar accrued a vast archive of over 5,000 individual textile works which transform political rhetoric into thread. Although the project has been exhibited in its material form in galleries around the United States (particularly in the lead-up to the 2020 election), its primary display is online, where the textured and tactile objects are imaged and uploaded to Instagram. Drawing on the associations of a medium associated with intimacy and femininity, @tinypricksproject traces Trump’s presidency, rejecting the immediacy of the 24-hour media cycle with careful, time-consuming stitching that bears the imprint of its makers. As an attempt to reshape Trump’s violent utterances as a material symbol of resistance, Tiny Pricks Project has a close parallel in the bright pink hand-knitted “pussyhats” that became the symbol of the 2017 Women’s March. With a pattern distributed online through platforms such as Ravelry and sold on online marketplaces such as Etsy, the Pussyhat Project exemplifies the ambitions of twentyfirst-century craftivism, that “creativity can be a catalyst for change” (Greer, 183), but also the neoliberal commodification of these ideals. The contested legacy of the Pussyhat Project, lauded as a means of participatory politics but criticised for the whiteness and transphobic essentialism of its chosen symbol, demonstrates the challenges in harnessing craft as collective activism (Black), and suggests the need for individualised, responsive ways of connecting politics and hand-making. The same phrase that inspired the Pussyhats, Trump’s recording of 2005 admitting sexual assault (“They let you do it. You can do anything. Grab ’em by the pussy.”) also appears across the Tiny Pricks Project as an embroidered text where it performs a very different role. In contrast to the performative use of knitted projects as a garment to wear in action, Weymar describes Tiny Pricks Project as a “stitched material record” and as “testimony”. Both acts, of stitching and posting, are acts of memory-making and communication, and as such, the cumulative posts of Tiny Pricks Project function as a feminist vernacular temporary memorial. Initially focussed exclusively on Trump, the project has expanded in both territory (with a dedicated Tiny Pricks Project UK) and politically to encompass direct statements of opposition. The intimacy and history of needlework in Tiny Pricks Project punctures distance, drawing the violence of Trump’s political rhetoric (against women, immigrants, the disabled, and the vulnerable) into a direct, affective contact with the bodies of stitchers and viewers. This article proposes the contact of Tiny Pricks Project as a form of haunting, where threads pierce through memories of the past and bodies in the present. Embroiderers have a term for stitching which follows a pattern from the other side – ghost stitching – allowing for the thread to create a pattern which is elsewhere but not visible, a tracing through to the inverse and across multiple layers of textile. To consider threads as conveying presence recognises the powerful affective charge of stitching. As Roszika Parker asserts in her influential work of feminist art history, The Subversive Stitch, “embroiderers … transform materials to produce sense” (6), making complex embodied meaning through thread and fabric. A digital ghost stitch, the tracing of online content in needlework that records the sense of its maker, which is then reposted elsewhere, draws out the affective quality of the material that “pricks” the user. Ghosts here are defined through the work of Avery Gordon, where they are “that special instance of the merging of the visible and the invisible, the dead and the living, the past and the present” (25). In their production of material effects, ghosts are the manifestation of haunting, which for Gordon is a particular form of mediation that breaks down distance: in haunting, organized forces and systemic structures that appear removed from us make their impact felt in everyday life in a way that confounds our analytic separations and confounds the social separations themselves. (19) A ghost stitch, then, is the specific quality of stitched thread in a digital post to puncture mediatised politics, drawing together otherwise invisible bodies and histories. To draw out the haunted nature of thread this article locates the affective quality of the stitched politics of Tiny Pricks Project in the context of contemporary memorial cultures, rather than the field of craftivism or digital activism. Focussing on the histories and politics of needlework, I begin by understanding the material use of thread and stitching in Tiny Pricks Project as a connection to intimate forms of memory-making, specifically American traditions of quilting. I then locate the specific form of @tinypricksproject, cumulative posts on Instagram in response and reaction to historical events, as a form of vernacular memorial that punctures the screen with the presence of stitchers, framing this discussion in relationship to new forms of public memory-making in both public spaces and online. Finally, I consider the combination of these forms, threaded stitches and digital memorials, as a “ghost stitch” that “pricks” me when I scroll through the feed, forcing an embodied relationship with its haunted political texts. The stitched thread has a powerful emotional charge that intimately traces the body, through the gestural mark of a hand, and evokes memory, through a connection to family heirlooms and domestic material culture. This nostalgic embodiment is exploited in the material form of Tiny Pricks Project, where Trump’s words in are stitched into vintage textiles, such as lace-edged napkins or printed children’s handkerchiefs, each carrying sentimental associations. Items of clothing sometimes appear as the support – as Trump’s response to the 2019 Senate inquiry that “I did nothing wrong” stitched in red on the front of a child’s dress decorated with red, white, and blue ric-rac and stars. The technical skill on display varies across the project, but most text is rendered in simple back stitch, creating a punctuated and punctured line that wobbles and reveals its handmade quality. Weymar’s own hand is evident in the use of bold, block lettering, often layered over tapestry – such in a repeat of “I AM A VERY STABLE GENIUS” in blue and yellow thread stitched over a stag tapestry by her grandmother. Some have the addition of more elaborative embroidered imagery or applique in the form of anachronistic illustrations and decorative motifs. Whilst information on individual panels (the stitcher, the source of the quote, and sometimes an account of the work’s production) is available in the Instagram caption in the feed and tag, each individual painstakingly stitched post is understood in relationship to the surrounding images. The combination of the individual panels of repurposed fabric of Tiny Pricks Project evokes the iconic American form of the patchwork quilt that pieces together textiles with their own histories and memories to make new form that is both fragmented and connected. On @tinyprickproject the visual similarity to a quilt is striking, as an image of each textile panel is joined to the next via Instagram’s gridded interface. In the individualised feeds of the account’s followers, each Tiny Pricks Project post is stitched together with other algorithmically selected images, generating a unique piecing together of politics with the personal, as a digital quilt. Although the image of quilting in the popular imagination remains dominated by images of white femininity (as in the 1996 film How to Make an American Quilt), quilts have historically also been a site of expression and memory-making for bodies otherwise effaced in American culture. The tradition of Black quilting, for example, has a complicated history, as bell hooks describes, where quilts were produced out of basic material need but were also a powerful form of aesthetic expression. Remembering her grandmother’s quilting, hooks identifies the way that the reuse of the family’s tattered and worn clothing in crazy quilts results in “bits and pieces of my mama’s life, held and contained there” (121). Peter Stallybrass similarly articulates the powerful communication of presence and absence of using worn garments for quilting, where “a network of cloth can trace the connection of love across the boundaries of absence, of death, because cloth is able to carry the absent body, memory, genealogy” (36-37). In their material and form, quilts have a powerful connection to memories outside dominant narratives as an assertion of the bodies who laboured on them, those bodies whose worn garments have been transformed into pattern, and the bodies they symbolically cover. This quality of intimacy, memory, and embodiment has a political potentiality, as exploited in the cumulative, community NAMES project AIDS Memorial Quilt. Founded by Cleve Jones and first displayed in 1987 in Washington D.C., each individual panel approximates the size of a body (or coffin) and is stitched with the name and memory of someone lost in the AIDS crisis. In its public display through the late 1980s and early 1990s, with the panels spread out on the ground in public spaces, AIDS quilts (both the original NAMES project and subsequent localised versions around the world) controversially drew individual memory into public politics, deploying feeling as a form of activism. At the height of AIDS crisis, Queer art theorist and ACT UP member Douglas Crimp, for example, positioned the spectacle of mourning in opposition to militancy, where “public mourning rituals may of course have their own political force, but they nevertheless often seem, from an activist perspective, indulgent, sentimental, defeatist” (5). Countering this position, Peter Hawkins argued that the quilt “made intimacy its object; it has enabled quite private reality (sometimes sentimental and homey, sometimes kinky and erotic) to ‘come out’ in public” (770), a powerful personification of social and political ambitions. The recent digitisation of the 50,000 panels of the quilt on the National AIDS Memorial Website makes more direct the connect between the intimate feeling of mourning and the “stitching” ability of digital memory. Beyond the specific form of the quilt, on a broader social level the nostalgic quality of Tiny Pricks Project’s accumulation of hand-stitched textiles draws together the past and the present. The rise of craft culture is underpinned by online platforms (including Instagram) that have facilitated DIY and craftivist communities, where historical material processes such as knitting, crocheting, needlework, and sewing provide powerful affective and political points of connection. Addressing the relationship of contemporary artists working in textiles to the economic, political, and social context of globalised late capitalism, Kirsty Robertson argues that such works are “haunted by their passages through time and space”, specifically the “ghosts of textile artists and workers” (195). This connection to bodies across history is wrapped up in the materiality and gestural process of needlework. These are the ghosts of those whose presence is rendered invisible in twentyfirst-century deindustrialised countries, where textile industries have largely disappeared and where feminism has fundamentally changed the ubiquity of domestic crafts in the home. Their return, either in art or the “hobby” sphere, carries both a radical political legacy and a complicated nostalgic charge. In the context of the United States, a further material trace in the stitched and embroidered works of Tiny Pricks Project is in the fibres of the materials themselves, in the bleached history of cotton’s brutal past that connects enslavement and contemporary capitalism (Beckert). The threads of handmade embroidery, quilt, and woven crafts move across time, as art historian Julia Bryan Wilson argues: textiles warp between the past and the present: relentlessly recruited for pressing contemporary concerns they are also tasked with reminding us of, and are often pulled back to, the traditions from which they sprung. (261) Ironically, then, the popularity of online textile and needlecraft projects such as Tiny Pricks Project can then be mapped alongside the rhetoric of Trump’s populist “recruitment” of America’s industrial history (Making America Great Again) as an emotive “pull” to an imagined past within contemporary politics more broadly (Kenny). This deployment of sentimentality untethered from facts is one part of what Lauren Berlant described as the “noise” of Trump, the concentration of feeling as the substance of his politics: Trump is sound and fury and garble. Yet—and this is key—the noise in his message increases the apparent value of what’s clear about it. The ways he’s right seem more powerful, somehow, in relief against the ways he’s blabbing. Rather than communicating a political messaging, Trump’s bluster exemplifies a mediatised politics that has taken on the logic of social media and 24-hour news cycles, fragmenting and dissipating attention (Crary). The disconnection of noisy mediatised politics makes it always just in the past, endlessly present in its digital archive, but evasive in its meaning. Tiny Pricks Project is just one example of drawing affective attention to Trump’s words through this same medium, recontextualising them as an act of memorial-making. Certain key quotes are recovered again and again in different hands alongside “I am a very stable genius” and “grab ‘em by the pussy”. Some are ironic, such as “I know words, I have the best words” (from a speech about Barack Obama in 2015) and “I don’t have a racist bone in my body” (a tweet in 2019); but many capture the most misogynist and racist records of Trump’s speech including “Nasty Woman” (directed at Hillary Clinton in 2016); and “send her back” (a rally chant about Ilhan Omar, 2019). Embroidering Trump’s tweets and soundbites into material form, then preserving these on a digital wall for all to see, Tiny Pricks Project appropriates into thread the American tradition of hagiographic presidential monuments that immortalise political actors through their speech made material. Across Washington D.C., epigraphs are carved into stone and cast in steel, as at the Lincoln Memorial (1922), which fixes its subject’s meaning in historical place with select quotations that evade the mention of slavery. The dominance of these forms of monument to America’s past efface the complex racial violence of the country’s past, as Kirk Savage has argued, and it is only when encountered with living bodies that this becomes legible again as in the iconic use of the Lincoln Memorial for Martin Luther King Jr.’s “I have a dream” speech (1963). Indicative of a shift in the culture of memory-making and memorials, this visible contest between vulnerable bodies and symbols of state power played out during Trump’s administration in sites across the country, most notably at Charlottesville in 2017, where conflict over the fate of the city’s Robert E. Lee statue boiled over into fatal white supremacist violence. Tiny Prick Project’s function as a collectively generated memorial is part of this broader cultural shift: what Erica Doss has described as America’s “memorial mania”, an explosion in fragmentary memory-making where an ever-growing number of official monuments are joined by individualised commemoration and contestation. Inscribing Trump’s words on repurposed materials, Tiny Pricks Project reshapes presidential monuments through the aesthetics of temporary memorials. Examples such as the spontaneous memorials around the city of New York in the wake of September 11 and mementos left in the chain fence near the 1995 Oklahoma City bombing site “embod[y] the faith that Americans place in things to negotiate complex moments and events” (Doss, 71). Such memorials rely upon stable and commodified ideas of identity such as teddy bears and American flags to assert the “comfort culture” (Sturken, Tourists of History, 6) of American consumerism in the midst of trauma and loss. This has created a visual lexicon for traumatic events that is predicated on the accumulation of the mundane and everyday of material culture. In the sheer scale of posts on the @tinypricksproject Instagram feed the effect is of a cumulative vernacular memorial where the stitched posts accrue over time like mementoes on a wall, each with an affective connection both individual and collective. In many ways the process of memory-making online mirrors the assertion of presence on physical sites, most directly in the convergence of selfies and social media posts at memorial sites: what Kate Douglas describes as “dark selfies” where the act of photographing and sharing is a form of witnessing that locates the self in relationship to the past. Like temporary memorials, on platforms such as Instagram the emphasis is on individualised traces of memories constituted through a shared use of a platform and set of recognisable imagery. The participatory function of digital culture connects memory to identity and communication, through “mediated memories”: media theorist José van Dijck’s term for "the activities and objects we produce and appropriate by means of media technology for creating and re-creating a sense of past, present, and future of ourselves in relation to others” (21). The specific agency of Instagram to hold memory (a capacity built into functionality such as “on this day” or “Memories” features) casts all its posts into memory, but with the potential to return as “mediatised ghosts to haunt participants” (Garde-Hansen et al., 6). There is a distancing effect facilitated by the mediation of digital memory, a re-directing of absence into the presence of participation in social media consumption, echoing the participatory consumption of memorial culture more broadly. As Martin Pogačar argues, digital memorials online facilitate the “exteriorization of intimate and affective … practices of memory and remembering”, but he claims there is still a subversive potential here, “to elude these constraints by negotiating and revising the institutionalized forms and canons of memory and remembering” (33). Similarly, despite official intentions or commoditisation, physical memorials are also sites of feeling that can rupture any containment: they are “haunted” as Marita Sturken describes in her analysis of the Ground Zero Memorial in New York as an official memorial that cannot “contain the ghosts that live there” (“Containing Absence”, 314). In her analysis, Sturken is drawing on Gordon, who argues that haunting has the capacity to produce counter-memory by allowing for unexpected and potentially contradictory connections to be formed that challenge official structures. For Sturken it is the direct embodied trace of individual experience, such as recordings of victims’ voices, that is the ghost here. The difference between the official, intended meaning of a memorial and the haunted counter-memory is akin to the distinction between Roland Barthes’s studium and punctum in a photograph. Where the studium is the communication of conventionalised forms of meaning across a surface, the punctum pierces the viewer’s body, it is “that accident which pricks me (but also bruises me, is poignant to me)” (27). The “prick” of the punctum is, in the context of haunted memorials, the ghost making its presence felt as a material impact. The “prick” of the stitched thread in the posts of Tiny Pricks Project is a similar form of haunting, a ghost stitch that allows direct feeling through in the externalised context of mediatised politics and digital memory as followers scroll and touch each post in close and intimate contact or see the works exhibited in a gallery. As Weymar has said of the project as a site of feeling, “if you can stay present long enough to read what he’s saying, you will become politically active. You will feel a sense of urgency” (Chernick). With its ironic use of nostalgia, the ghost stitch of the Tiny Prick Project posts also punctures through contemporary political rhetoric, exposing the artifice and contradictions of sentimentality for an American past. Instead, Tiny Pricks Project proposes a counter-memorial of Trump’s presidency. A counter-memory of stitched thread runs through American political history, and when introduced to the space of digital memory this thread has a capacity to “prick” by bringing with it an affective connection to the familiar, intimate, and embodied presence distinct to hand-stitching. Defying the fragmentary nature of digital culture, thread sutures and connects, but also punctures and pierces, bringing together but also allowing points of escape. Considering Tiny Pricks Project as an example of digital ghost stitching opens up possibilities for the active role of thread as a way to “prick” the viewer and pull through connections across and between bodies and social systems as a form of political resistance. References Barthes, Roland. Camera Lucida: Reflections on Photography. Trans. Richard Howard. Hill and Wang, 1981. Beckert, Sven. Empire of Cotton: A Global History. Alfred A. Knopf, 2014. Berlant, Lauren. “Trump. Or Political Emotions.” Supervalent Thought Blog, 4 Aug. 2016. <https://supervalentthought.com/2016/08/04/trump-or-political-emotions/#more-964>. Black, Shannon. “KNIT RESIST: Placing the Pussyhat Project in the Context of Craft Activism.” Gender, Place and Culture: A Journal of Feminist Geography 24.5 (2017): 696–710. Bryan-Wilson, Julia. Fray: Art + Textile Politics. U of Chicago P, 2017. Chernick, Karen. “US President Donald Trump’s Angry Tweets Recorded in Tiny Pricks.” The Art Newspaper, 20 Sep. 2020. <https://www.theartnewspaper.com/2020/09/21/us-president-donald-trumps-angry-tweets-recorded-in-tiny-pricks>. Crary, Jonathan. Scorched Earth beyond the Digital Age to a Post-Capitalist World. Verso, 2022. Crimp, Douglas. “Mourning and Militancy.” October 51 (1989): 3-18. Douglas, Kate. “Youth, Trauma and Memorialisation: The Selfie as Witnessing.” Memory Studies 13.4 (2020): 384–399. Doss, Erika. Memorial Mania: Public Feeling in America. U of Chicago P, 2010. Garde-Hansen, Joanne, et al. Save As... Digital Memories. Palgrave Macmillan, 2009. Gordon, Avery. Ghostly Matters: Haunting and the Sociological Imagination. 2nd ed. U of Minnesota P, 2008. Greer, Betsy. “Craftivist History.” Extra/Ordinary: Craft and Contemporary Art. Ed. Maria Elena Buszek. Duke UP, 2011. 175-183. Hawkins, Peter S. “The Art of Memory and the NAMES Project AIDS Quilt.” Critical Inquiry 19.4 (1993): 752-779. hooks, bell. ‘Aesthetic Inheritances: History Worked by Hand.” Yearning. 2nd ed. Routledge, 2015. 115-122. Kenny, Michael. “Back to the Populist Future?: Understanding Nostalgia in Contemporary Ideological Discourse.” Journal of Political Ideologies 22.3 (2017): 256-273. Parker, Rozsika. The Subversive Stitch: Embroidery and the Making of the Feminine. New ed. I.B. Tauris, 2010. Pogačar, Martin. “Culture of the Past: Digital Connectivity and Dispotentiated Futures.” Digital Memory Studies: Media Pasts in Transition. Ed. Andrew Hoskins. Taylor & Francis, 2017. 27-47. Robertson, Kirsty. “Rebellious Doilies and Subversive Stitches: Writing a Craftivist History.” Extra/Ordinary: Craft and Contemporary Art. Ed. Maria Elena Buszek. Duke UP, 2011. 184-203. Savage, Kirk. Standing Soldiers, Kneeling Slaves: Race, War, and Monument in Nineteenth-Century America. New ed. Princeton UP, 2018. Stallybrass, Peter. “Worn Worlds: Clothes, Mourning, and the Life of Things.” Cultural Memory and the Construction of Identity. Eds. Liliane Weissberg and Dan Ben-Amos. Wayne State UP, 1999. 27-45. Sturken, Marita. Tourists of History: Memory, Kitsch, and Consumerism from Oklahoma City to Ground Zero. Duke UP, 2007. ———. “Containing Absence, Shaping Presence at Ground Zero.” Memory Studies 13.3 (2020): 313–321. Van Dijck, José. Mediated Memories in the Digital Age. Stanford UP, 2007.

On 10 September 2012, a cat named Tuxedo Stan launched his campaign for mayor of the Halifax Regional Municipality in Nova Scotia, Canada (“Tuxedo Stan for Mayor”). Backed by his human supporters in the Tuxedo Party, he ran on a platform of animal welfare: “Tuxedo Stan for Mayor Because Neglect Isn’t Working.” Artwork Courtesy of Joe Popovitch As a feline activist, Tuxedo Stan joins an unexpected—if not entirely unprecedented—cohort of cats that advocate for animal welfare through their “cute” appeals for humane treatment. From Tuxedo Stan’s internet presence to his appearance on Anderson Cooper’s CNN segment “The RidicuList,” Tuxedo Stan’s cute campaign opens space for a cultural imaginary that differently envisions animals’ and humans’ political responsibilities. Who Can Be a Moral Agent? Iris Marion Young proposes “political responsibility” as a way to answer a question central to human and animal welfare: “How should moral agents—both individual and organizational—think about their responsibilities in relation to structural social injustice?” (7). In legal frameworks, responsibility is connected to liability: an individual acts, harm occurs, and the law decides how much liability the individual should assume. However, Young redefines responsibility in relation to structural injustices, which she conceptualizes as “harms” that result from “structural processes in which many people participate.” Young argues that “because it is therefore difficult for individuals to see a relationship between their own actions and structural outcomes, we have a tendency to distance ourselves from any responsibility for them” (7). Young presents political responsibility as a call to share the responsibility “to engage in actions directed at transforming the structures” and suggests that the less-advantaged might organize and propose “remedies for injustice, because their interests [are] the most acutely at stake” and because they are vulnerable to the actions of others “situated in more powerful and privileged positions” (15). Though Young does not address animals, her conception of responsible agency raises a question: who can be a moral agent? Arguably, the answer to this question changes as cultural imaginaries expand to accommodate difference, including gender- and species-difference. Corey Wrenn analyzes a selection of anti-suffragette postcards that equate granting votes to women as akin to granting votes to cats. Young shifts responsibility from a liability to a political frame, but Wrenn’s work suggests that a further shift is necessary where responsibility is gendered and tied to domestic, feminized roles: Cats and dogs are gendered in contemporary American culture…dogs are thought to be the proper pet for men and cats for women (especially lesbians). This, it turns out, is an old stereotype. In fact, cats were a common symbol in suffragette imagery. Cats represented the domestic sphere, and anti-suffrage postcards often used them to reference female activists. The intent was to portray suffragettes as silly, infantile, incompetent, and ill-suited to political engagement. (Wrenn) Dressing cats in women’s clothing and calling them suffragettes marks women as less-than-human and casts cats as the opposite of human. The frilly garments, worn by cats whose presence evoked the domestic sphere, suggest that women belong in the domestic sphere because they are too soft, or perhaps too cute, to contend with the demands of public life. In addition, the cards that feature domestic scenes suggest that women should account for their families’ welfare ahead of their own, and that women’s refusal to accept this arithmetic marks them as immoral—and irresponsible—subjects. Not Schrödinger's Cat In different ways, Jacques Derrida and Carey Wolfe explore the question Young’s work raises: who can be a moral agent? Derrida and Wolfe complicate the question by adding species difference: how should (human) moral agents think about their responsibilities (to animals)? Prompted by an encounter with his cat, Jacques Derrida follows the figure of the animal, through a variety of texts, in order to make sensible the trace of “the animal” as it has appeared in Western traditions. Derrida’s cat accompanies him as Derrida playfully, and attentively, deconstructs the rationalist, humanist discourses that structure Western philosophy. Discourses, whose tenets reflect the systems of beliefs embedded within a culture, are often both hegemonic and invisible; at least for those who enjoy privileged positions within the culture, discourses may simply appear as common sense or common knowledge. Derrida argues that Western, humanist thinking has created a discourse around “the human” and that this discourse deploys a reductive figure of “the animal” to justify human supremacy and facilitate human exceptionalism. Human exceptionalism is the doctrine that humans’ superiority to animals exempts humans from behaving humanely towards those deemed non-human, and it is the hegemony of the discourse of human exceptionalism that Derrida contravenes. Derrida interrupts by entering the discourse with “his” cat and creating a counter-narrative that troubles “the human” hegemony by redefining what it means to think. Derrida orients his intellectual work as surrender—he surrenders to the gaze of his cat and to his affectionate response to her presence: “the cat I am talking about is a real cat, truly, believe me, a little cat. The cat that looks at me naked and that is truly a little cat, this cat I am talking about…It comes to me as this irreplaceable living being that one day enters my space, into this place where it can encounter me, see me, even see me naked” (6-9, italics in original). The diminutive Derrida uses to describe his cat, she is little and truly a little cat, gestures toward affection, or affect, as the “thing…philosophy has, essentially, had to deprive itself of” (7). For Derrida, rationalist thinking hurries to “enclose and circumscribe the concept of the human as much as that of reason,” and it is through this movement toward enclosure that rationalist humanism fails to think (105). While Derrida questions the ethics of humanist philosophy, Carey Wolfe questions the ethics of humanism. Wolfe argues that “the operative theories and procedures we now have for articulating the social and legal relation between ethics and action are inadequate” because humanism imbues discourses about human and/or animal rights with utilitarian and contractarian logics that are inherently speciesist and therefore flawed (192). Utilitarian approaches attempt to determine the morality of a given action by weighing the act’s aggregate benefit against its aggregate harm. Contractarian approaches evaluate a given (human or animal) subject’s ability to understand and comply with a social contract that stipulates reciprocity; if a subject receives kindness, that subject must understand their implied, moral responsibility to return it. When opponents of animal rights designate animals as less capable of suffering than humans and decide that animals cannot enter moral contracts, animals are then seen as not only undeserving of rights but as incapable of bearing rights. As Wolfe argues, rights discourse—like rationalist humanism—reaches an impasse, and Wolfe proposes posthumanist theory as the way through: “because the discourse of speciesism…anchored in this material, institutional base, can be used to mark any social other, we need to understand that the ethical and philosophical urgency of confronting the institution of speciesism and crafting a posthumanist theory of the subject has nothing to do with whether you like animals” (7, italics in original). Wolfe’s strategic statement marks the necessity of attending to injustice at a structural level; however, as Tuxedo Stan’s campaign demonstrates, at a tactical level, how much you “like” an animal might matter very much. Seriously Cute: Tuxedo Stan as a Moral Agent Tuxedo Stan’s 2012-13 campaign pressed for improved protections for stray and feral cats in the Halifax Regional Municipality (HRM). While “cute” is a subjective, aesthetic judgment, numerous internet sites make claims like: “These 30 Animals With Their Adorable Miniature Versions Are The Cutest Thing Ever. Awwww” (“These 30 Animals”). From Tuxedo Stan’s kitten pictures to the plush versions of Tuxedo Stan, available for purchase on his website, Tuxedo Stan’s campaign positioned him within this cute culture (Chisolm “Official Tuxedo Stan Minion”). Photo Courtesy of Hugh Chisolm, Tuxedo Party The difference between Tuxedo Stan’s cute and the kind of cute invoked by pictures of animals with miniature animals—the difference that connects Tuxedo Stan’s cute to a moral or ethical position—is the narrative of political responsibility attached to his campaign. While existing animal protection laws in Halifax’s Animal Protection Act outlined some protections for animals, “there was a clear oversight in that issues related to cats are not included” (Chisolm TuxedoStan.com). Hugh Chisholm, co-founder of the Tuxedo Party, further notes: There are literally thousands of homeless cats — feral and abandoned— who live by their willpower in the back alleys and streets and bushes in HRM…But there is very little people can do if they want to help, because there is no pound. If there’s a lost or injured dog, you can call the pound and they will come and take the dog and give it a place to stay, and some food and care. But if you do the same thing with a cat, you get nothing, because there’s nothing in place. (Mombourquette) Tuxedo Stan’s campaign mobilizes cute images that reveal the connection between unnoticed and unrelieved suffering. Proceeds from Tuxedo Party merchandise go toward Spay Day HRM, a charity dedicated to “assisting students and low-income families” whose financial situations may prevent them from paying for spay and neuter surgeries (Chisholm TuxedoStan.com). According to his e-book ME: The Tuxedo Stan Story, Stan “wanted to make a difference in the lives of tens of thousands of homeless, unneutered cats in [Halifax Regional Municipality]. We needed a low-cost spay/neuter clinic. We needed a Trap-Neuter-Return and Care program. We needed a sanctuary for homeless, unwanted strays to live out their lives in comfort” (Tuxedo Stanley and Chisholm 14). As does “his” memoir, Tuxedo Stan’s Pledge of Compassion and Action follows Young’s logic of political responsibility. Although his participation is mediated by human organizers, Tuxedo Stan is a cat pressing legislators to “pledge to help the cats” by supporting “a comprehensive feline population control program to humanely control the feline population and prevent suffering” and by creating “an affordable and accessible spay/neuter program” (Chisholm TuxedoStan.com). While framing the feral cat population as a “problem” that must be “fixed” upholds discourses around controlling subjected populations’ reproduction, Tuxedo Stan’s campaign also opens space for a counternarrative that destabilizes the human exceptionalism that encompasses his campaign. A Different ‘Logic’, a Different Cultural Imaginary As Tuxedo Stan launched his campaign in 2012, fellow feline Hank ran for the United States senate seat in Virginia – he received approximately 7,000 votes and placed third (Wyatt) – and “Mayor” Stubbs celebrated his 15th year as the honorary mayor of Talkeetna, Alaska, also in the United States: Fifteen years ago, the citizens of Talkeetna (pop. 800) didn’t like the looks of their candidates for mayor. Around that same time resident Lauri Stec, manager of Nagley’s General Store, saw a box of kittens and decided to adopt one. She named him Stubbs because he didn’t have a tail and soon the whole town was in love with him. So smitten were they with this kitten, in fact, that they wrote him in for mayor instead of deciding on one of the two lesser candidates. (Friedman) Though only Stan and Hank connect their candidacy to animal welfare activism, all three cats’ stories contribute to building a cultural imaginary that has drawn responses across social and news media. Tuxedo Stan’s Facebook page has 19,000+ “likes,” and Stan supporters submit photographs of Tuxedo Stan “minions” spreading Tuxedo Stan’s message. The Tuxedo Party’s website maintains a photo gallery that documents “Tuxedo Stan’s World Tour”: “Tuxedo Stan’s Minions are currently on their world tour spreading his message of hope and compassion for felines around the globe" (Chisholm TuxedoStan.com). Each minion’s photo in the gallery represents humans’ ideological and financial support for Tuxedo Stan. News media supported Tuxedo Stan, Hank for Senate, and Mayor Stubbs’s candidacies in a more ambiguous fashion. While Craig Medred argues that “Silly 'Alaska cat mayor' saga spotlights how easily the media can be scammed” (Medred), a CBC News video announced that Tuxedo Stan was “interested in sinking his claws into the top seat at City Hall” and ready to “mark his territory around the mayor's seat” (“Tuxedo Stan the cat chases Halifax mayor chair”), and Lauren Strapagiel reported on Halifax’s “cuddliest would-be mayor.” In an unexpected echo of Derrida’s language, as Derrida repeats that he is truly talking about a cat, truly a little cat, CNN journalist Anderson Cooper endorses Tuxedo Stan for mayor and follows his endorsement with this statement: If he’s serious about a career in politics, maybe he should come to the United States. Just look at the mayor of Talkeetna, Alaska. That’s Stubbs the cat, and he’s been the mayor for 15 years. I’m not kidding…Not only that, but right now, as we speak, there is a cat running for Senate from Virginia. (Cooper) As he introduces a “Hank for Senate” campaign video, again Cooper mentions that he is “not kidding.” While Cooper’s “not kidding” echoes Derrida’s “truly,” the difference in meanings is différance. For Derrida, his encounter with his cat is “a matter of developing another ‘logic’ of decision, of the response and of the event…a matter of reinscribing the différance between reaction and response, and hence this historicity of ethical, juridical, or political responsibility, within another thinking of life, of the living, within another relation of the living, to their own…reactional automaticity” (126). Derrida proceeds through the impasse, the limit he identifies within philosophical engagements with animals, by tracing the ways his little cat’s presence affects him. Derrida finds another logic, which is not logic but surrender, to accommodate what he, like Young, terms “political responsibility.” Cooper, however, applies the hegemonic logic of human exceptionalism to his engagement with feline interlocutors, Tuxedo Stan, Hank for Senate, and Mayor Stubbs. Although Cooper’s segment, called “The RidicuList,” makes a pretense of political responsibility, it is different in kind from the pretense made in Tuxedo Stan’s campaign. As Derrida argues, a “pretense…even a simple pretense, consists in rendering a sensible trace illegible or imperceptible” (135). Tuxedo Stan’s campaign pretends that Tuxedo Stan fits within humanist, hegemonic notions of mayoral candidacy and then mobilizes this cute pretense in aid of political responsibility; the pretense—the pretense in which Tuxedo Stan’s human fans and supporters engage—renders the “sensible” trace of human exceptionalism illegible, if not imperceptible. Cooper’s pretense, however, works to make legible the trace of human exceptionalism and so to reinscribe its discursive hegemony. Discursively, the political potential of cute in Tuxedo Stan’s campaign is that Tuxedo Stan’s activism complicates humanist and posthumanist thinking about agency, about ethics, and about political responsibility. Thinking about animals may not change animals’ lives, but it may change (post)humans’ responses to these questions: Who can be a moral agent? How should moral agents—both individual and organizational, both human and animal—“think” about how they respond to structural social injustice? Epilogue: A Political Response Tuxedo Stan died of kidney cancer on 8 September 2013. Before he died, Tuxedo Stan’s campaign yielded improved cat protection legislation as well as a $40,000 endowment to create a spay-and-neuter facility accessible to low-income families. Tuxedo Stan’s litter mate, Earl Grey, carries on Tuxedo Stan’s work. Earl Grey’s campaign platform expands the Tuxedo Party’s appeals for animal welfare, and Earl Grey maintains the Tuxedo Party’s presence on Facebook, on Twitter (@TuxedoParty and @TuxedoEarlGrey), and at TuxedoStan.com (Chisholm TuxedoStan.com). On 27 February 2014, Agriculture Minister Keith Colwell of Nova Scotia released draft legislation whose standards of care aim to prevent distress and cruelty to pets and to strengthen their protection. They…include proposals on companion animal restraints, outdoor care, shelters, companion animal pens and enclosures, abandonment of companion animals, as well as the transportation and sale of companion animals…The standards also include cats, and the hope is to have legislation ready to introduce in the spring and enacted by the fall. (“Nova Scotia cracks down”) References Chisolm, Hugh. “Tuxedo Stan Kitten.” Tuxedo Party Facebook Page, 20 Oct. 2012. 2 Mar. 2014. Chisholm, Hugh. “Official Tuxedo Stan Minion.” TuxedoStan.com. 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