Last week, popular fashion patternmaker Papercut Patterns posted a short video on Instagram of one of their patterns being reprinted. The clip was just long enough to see the name of the pattern, the Kochi jacket, passing through the rollers.
Three weeks ago, that pattern had a different name. The square-cut short jacket, with optional side ties, was released in June 2017 with the name Kochi Kimono. For 18 months, amateur sewers — most prefer the term “sewist”, for reasons of homonym — had been making their own versions and sharing the results on Instagram tagged with #Kochikimono.
Then, on 13 May, Asian-American woman Helen Kim replied to a new photo of the garment to say that to call it a kimono, without any connection beyond a certain boxiness about the sleeves to the traditional Japanese garment, was cultural appropriation.
The post blew up. Those who agreed with Kim were accused of conducting a witch hunt against a female-owned company; those who rejected it were accused of racism. Japanese-American woman Emi Ito, a campaigner against cultural appropriation, was tagged in. She and Kim were suddenly fielding racist commentary on their own accounts.
The debate spread rapidly through Instagram stories, an ephemeral medium that allows users to post photos and videos of up to 15-second in length in short, ever-scrolling clips that will disappear after 24-hours. It was waged in long, impossible-to-follow comment threads under Instagram posts until Papercut Patterns deleted the post and closed comments on subsequent posts, sparking another wave of criticism. The same failings that made Instagram a difficult platform for lengthy debate made it the perfect vehicle for outrage.
The 16-hour time difference between New Zealand, where the small company is based, and the United States, where most of the angst was coming from, made the company appear slow to respond.
“It was just a shitshow,” says Mary Rockcastle.
Rockcastle is a sewing blogger based in New York State, writing at Sablecraft. She watched it unfold from afar. The one-sided nature of Instagram meant that if you were not following bloggers from different social and cultural backgrounds, you were only seeing half the story.
“If you’re only looking at it from one point of view, as a person who is just following Papercut Patterns, you’re like: what could this pattern company possibly be doing, to be fucking up this bad?”
Instagram is the network of choice for at-home sewists and knitters who are looking to show off their handiwork and the community is growing rapidly as consumers look for more sustainable and ethical alternatives to fast fashion. A scroll through the most popular accounts shows a familiar Instagram aesthetic: slim, mainly white women in their 20s and 30s, wearing dramatic woollen or linen shapes.
It is particularly active during May, where the month-long #MeMadeMay challenge encourages sewists to post daily selfies showing off their self-made outfits.
Suddenly, everyone was talking about the Kochi kimono.
Ito is a teacher and ethical fashion advocate, on Instagram at @little_kotos_closet. In January she wrote a much-cited article about the cultural appropriation of kimonos, writing about the significance of her family’s kimonos as cultural items and urging designers to consider if another name might work.
She was one of a number blocked from the Instagram page, after being tagged by the company in a follow-up post.
Kim told the Guardian she did not expect small businesses to be perfect, but did expect they would react to criticism with “empathy and awareness”.
“When Papercut Patterns deleted my comments and blocked BIPOC [Black, Indigenous, and people of colour] accounts who called for change, they demonstrated what can go wrong when a company fails to demonstrate empathy in rectifying a racially insensitive mistake,” Kim says. “Companies that label themselves as ethical/inclusive/sustainable have an obligation to take responsibility for the harm they inflict, to mitigate that harm, to address how their mistakes are at odds with their values, and to proactively support inclusivity beyond public relations.”
This process, Kim says, is “emotionally and intellectually labour-intensive for the marginalised” who challenge companies on “cultural and racial harm,” but is often “twisted into a business’s redemption story rather than a visible change in practice and awareness.”
It took one day for Papercut Patterns to promise to rename the garment and one week for that video of the newly printed Kochi jacket patterns to appear. Bookending that story, saved to their Instagram page, is a statement from director Katie Romagnoli.
“I want to thank everyone who let us know the mistake we made in giving one of our patterns a culturally sensitive name,” she says.
“There has been plenty of important conversation on my last post, and I have truly appreciated the chance to listen and learn … Thank you everyone. I will be continuing my own education.”
The Guardian contacted Papercut Patterns but did not receive a response.
It was the second reckoning over racial and cultural insensitivity to rock the craft community this year. The knitters got there first.
On 7 January, Karen Templer, a knitwear designer, published a blog about a planned trip to India and likened her excitement and personal anxiety about going, in an offhand line, to visiting Mars.
It was widely panned. The post was called othering and imperialistic; her descriptions of India “deeply racist and reductive”.
Templar apologised in a comment on her original post, and in a second post five days later titled “words matter” .
It is easy to dismiss both these debates and the very existence of Instagram-based knitting and sewing communities as trivial. Is this what political correctness has wrought: a culture war in knitting?
Until the rise of Instagram, and particularly Instagram stories, knitters and sewists connected via blogs and local sewing classes. Now, that community is both global and immediate. It was only a matter of time until broader debates around racial and body inclusivity, which have been happening at the edges of that community for years, wormed their way into the centre.
Take size inclusivity. There has been a growing push for ready-to-wear clothing brands to expand their size range to accommodate the average American woman, who according to a 2016 study wears a size 16-18 US (size 20-22 in Australia and the UK). Plus-size women who sew have become used to grading patterns up, cutting multiple muslins, and reworking them to fit.
This debate also kicked off in January on the back of a blog listing the technical pattern-drafting reasons why designers may not provide an extended size range. Several large indie pattern companies, the biggest of which was Canadian Closetcase Patterns, responded in furious agreement, saying their decision not to run larger sizes was “about resources,” not exclusion.
“It hurt a lot of people’s feelings, including mine,” Rockcastle says. “Right now I fit into Closetcase’s sizes but three years ago I didn’t.
“The sewing community really works in these trends where a pattern will become trendy and then theres a sew-along and everyone wants to make it and everyone’s sharing their pictures and it’s super fun, so you want to participate and oh — you don’t fit into that pattern. That’s a bad feeling.”
Closetcase currently runs to a size 20, but in January announced plans following criticism from a number of sewing bloggers, including Rockcastle, to expand its size range later in the year.
Other companies had already begun doing so. Rockcastle names Helen’s Closet as always being slightly ahead of other companies in responding to community feeling: it began re-releasing its existing patterns up to a size 30 in January and changed the name of its Suki kimono to the Suki robe immediately after the Kochi kimono debate started.
Carolyn Norman, a plus-sized black woman from the east coast of the United States who blogs at Diary of a Sewing Fanatic, says independent pattern companies were not pushed to be truly inclusive until they faced that widespread consumer criticism earlier this year.
She has been sewing for more than 50 years and is frequently discriminated against in sewing shops.
“I’ve been followed, questioned about my ability to pay for something and disparaged by the questioner’s unbelief of my answer,” she tells The Guardian.
She refuses to shop at companies that don’t stock her size, despite having the skills to adjust the pattern, until they change their ways.
“The world is not one colour or one body shape,” she says. “Most people start to sew to address the inadequacies they face in purchasing ready-to-wear clothing. If the same thing occurs in the sewing world, what recourse does someone have?”
Francesca Bleeker is a queer artist and maker from regional New South Wales, Australia. They gained weight after children and would now be considered plus-sized, but even before then, they would rarely find a pattern that fit their six-foot frame.
Bleeker studied textile design at an art school in Canberra and argues that the risk of cultural appropriation is greater in a community of self-taught sewists who do not know the history and the theory of the work they are doing. But is that level of critical theory necessary if you’re just making clothes for yourself? Probably not, they say.
“It’s both extremely true and very wrong to say it’s just sewing, calm down,” they say.
“If you’re just making garments for yourself to wear around home: it is just sewing, and do just calm down. But when you sell things and make things available and reach this global community you really need to be aware of the feelings of the global community.”
This article was amended on 2 June to state that it was Helen Kim, not Emi Ito, who first raised the issue of cultural appropriation with Papercut Patterns
