Earn a badge in the style brigade
I blame the whole thing on Alessandro Michele. Ever since the hugely influential design mind at Gucci started slamming down embroidered hearts pierced with daggers, glittering sequin Chinese dragons and roaring tigers on everything from satin baseball jackets to men’s tuxedos, I have suddenly found myself re-intrigued with the notion of patches.
You know, those sewn, or even ironed-on bits of machine-made embroidery one could earn as merit “badges” as a cub or girl scout? Patches used to be a “thing” back in the original heyday of denim; wearing your heart, or your politics, on the sleeve of your jean jacket. But this time around, it’s about referencing high fashion.
Or, maybe, it’s actually a reflection of some larger pop-culture phenomenon. And Signor Michele was inspired to play cut-and-paste with random cultural references by the huge popularity of emoji?
Either way, if fashion truly is a language, its latest slang is definitely a patched-on motif or symbol.
Which is probably why, on a visit to the Yorkdale flagship of the Japanese retailer Muji just the other day (and, really, one of the few things that could beckon me inside the gaping soulless maw of any large shopping mall is the presence of a Muji), I found myself eyeing an enormous digital embroidery machine.
A soft-spoken girl with shiny black hair named Alice, who mans the counter by the machine, pointed me to a collection of binders with different samples of embroidered patches, some geared to different holidays or activities, just like emoji.
Also, letters of the alphabet in different fonts, and a fetching selection of fun, stylized motifs from nature like a ’70s rainbow or a Hokusai wave.
Each motif was $5; it would take a couple of business days for the lovely Alice to print my selections on virtually anything that could fit through her machine in the store — a set of linen handkerchiefs, a can- vas tote, a cotton tank top.
The prospect of designing my very own Gucci rip-off was suddenly just too thrilling. While it was true that Muji’s motifs leaned more toward the cutesy (or as the Japanese say, kawaii) than anything in Gucci’s wildly baroque roster, I decided to work with the tools at hand.
Grabbing a blue button-down from Muji’s excellent selection of men’sstyle shirts, Alice and I got right down to business.
Aiming for a sort of earthly realm theme, with the shirt as my background landscape, I chose a variety of flora and fauna that might transform my Muji shirt into a crude sort of tapestry, with birds and dragonflies gathering near the shirt’s collar and fish and frogs swimming at its hem.
Instead of making it entirely symmetrical, with matching patches on each side of the buttons, I tried for a balance of harmonious themes and colours — a red plum flower, for instance, across from a camellia, and a green frog opposite a school of blue fish.
And then, just for fun, I slapped a sunflower on one bicep, just like a badge of yore — but this one was for merit in the style brigade. Karen von Hahn is a Toronto-based writer, trend observer and style commentator. Her new book, What Remains: Object Lessons in Love and Loss is published by the House of Anansi Press. Contact her at kvh@karenvonhahn.com.