Outfit for Ben

February—July 2025
Spring jacket and pants set featuring Ben’s film photography.
Made from midweight unbleached cotton canvas, unbleached cotton thread, cyanotype dye, kakishibu-dyed sashiko thread, mother of pearl buttons.

This project was the first time I made clothes for someone else. And it shows. Both the jacket and pants went through numerous iterations, where I added extra ease in the side seam to both the jacket and pants, underarm gussets, a pants yoke (to fit the waist better), and waist darts. In the end, I learned a lot about how to streamline the fitting process.

Given the assignment of printing film photos of detailed subjects, rather than the more abstract patterns of my earlier experiments, I made changes to my cyanotype process that vastly improved the print quality.

In June, as the jacket was nearing completion, I began experimenting with kakishibu. Some of my early tests, where I dyed sashiko thread and small pieces of canvas, are on this piece as contrast stitching and other details, such as the hook loop.

The result was a beautiful, lyrical, and organic matching set forged by the unpredictable process.