This first issue shares a text by artist and researcher María Naidich titled The Tseltalero Dress: A Story About Resistance, Creation and Sharing.
Slide 8: Tseltalero dress form Floridalma, "I wait for you". San Gregorio la Esperanza, Chiapas, 2021. By María Naidich
This text is shared in both English and Spanish within the magazine. Find more information about the content of this issue here.
Besides the contributors’ text it carries a prologue by researcher Femke de Vries. This text is shared in Arabic, Chinese, English and Spanish.
Booklook is a research project by Anouk Beckers that fuses the fashion magazine with the garment, resulting in a series of wearable fashion magazines. Each issue can be unfolded into another type of wearable item and carries stories about the role of garments in lives, cultures and practices from various artists, designers, writers, thinkers.
The fabric-like paper carries stories that stem from the situatedness of garments in non-commercial, cultural, and daily realities. Booklook plays with familiar and important agents in the fashion industry: the garment, the fashion magazine, and as the title suggests, the lookbook, a publication in which brands traditionally offer buyers an overview of their collection (their ‘looks’). Booklook instead aims to address this dominant consumerist fashion discourse. Instead of denying and cutting the cords with the reality of production, cultural situatedness, historical references and practices of use, Booklook opens up these narratives and tells exactly these stories.
The first issue – Booklook Apron-Delantal – shares a text (in both English and Spanish) by artist and researcher María Naidich about the Tseltalero dress, a garment created and worn by women from both Tseltal and Tojolabal communities in the Lacandon jungle, in southeastern Mexico. The Tseltalero dress represents an expression of women’s resistance to centuries of control over their clothing since the colonial times. It is a garment that is produced collectively and strengthens relationships between women, allowing them to organize and function autonomously. The Tseltalero dress represents the relationships between the community, its environment and other human and non-human beings. Based on the Tojolabal understanding that endows all beings with a heart, the Tseltalero dress has a hart too, suggesting the dress is alive. María’s research on this dress is developed in conversation with the Tojolabal community of San Gregorio la Esperanza. It explores the complex value of this dress within the Tojolabal and Tseltal worldview, sharing some ideas about beauty, garments and the body from a non-Eurocentric perspective.
Care instructions:
This object is made from a washable paper;
Neobond 60.200 SUPER.
Please wear* and wash with care:
–Preferably wash by hand.
–Machine wash: max 30 degrees with delicate program.
–Do not tumble dry.
*Disclaimer; this object is made of Neobond 60.200 SUPER. This is a synthetic paper that doesn’t contain the OEKO TEX label.
Limited edition of 195 copies.
Dimensions magazine: 20,5 x 29,5 cm
Dimensions apron: 58,5 x 81,5 cm
Pages: 16
Art Direction: Anouk Beckers
Design and Research: Anouk Beckers & Alessandra Varisco
Graphic Design: Rietlanden Women’s Office
Text: María Naidich, Femke de Vries
Editors: Valentina Sarmiento Cruz, Hanka van der Voet
Spanish Copy Editor: Davo Valdés
English Copy Editor: Kat Addis
Translators: Carmelino Méndez Jiménez, Valentina Sarmiento Cruz, Nassima Nejjari, Dakota Guo, Guadalupe Castillo Vizuete
Full colour, printed at robstolk
