The Virginia Dress (for the Knitwear Project)

Name: Sadie Laing
Class: DS 319, Cloth to Clothing, Carolyn Kallenborn
Major: Apparel Design


The Virginia Dress was designed to embody the experience of living with depression, and was inspired by the author Virginia Woolf. After a lifetime of battling depression, Woolf committed suicide by weighing down her pockets with stones and walking into a river. The Virginia dress manifests what Woolf might have felt as she committed this act, and reflects on the state that all those who deal with depression find themselves in: the state of being simultaneously burdened with too much feeling yet empty of it. By weighing down a knitted wool dress with stones, felting it, and then removing the stones, I created the bulbous, empty forms that give the garment a sense of both heavy weight and the absence of it. The dress was also distressed and needle-felted, to give its surface the semblance of being riddled with wounds; this is meant to describe the pain of living with a chronic mental illness.