*Maggie Nelson is a poet, a scholar, and a writer of non-fiction. Her work is known for bending genres, refusing to sequester academic rigor from lived experiences of intimacy. She is perhaps best known for her 2015 book of memoir and analysis, *The Argonauts*, as well as *Bluets*, a 2009 prose meditation on loss and the color blue. She has a PhD in English from the Graduate Center, CUNY and is currently a Professor of English at USC. Harvard Advocate President and staff writer Lily Scherlis corresponded with Nelson by email over the course of a month. *



 



*****



 



*Let's start on a style note. You've described your ideal prose as hot, as writing that "puts the needle right into the vein." What does good prose feel like, for you? How about bad? Is it easy to tell the difference? How do you calibrate your mental prose-barometer?*



 



You mean, my own prose, or that of others? Other people’s writing is infinitely easier to judge, because while reading it I’m not struggling to get any thoughts out. As for my writing, I generally ignore questions of style while I’m writing, & go back in with an eye to sound later. Poetry is a little different, as there I’m not trying to get at an idea that could be separated from its inaugural sound.



 



*In *Bluets *and elsewhere you talk about how your writing is often comported towards a "you." Your work often makes me think of Lauren Berlant's discussion of apostrophe, which builds off Barbara Johnson's ideas. She talks about how in writing we conjure up other subjectivities, phantasmagoric spectres who are really parts of our selves that have broken off so that we have someone to talk to, to address. Elsewhere Berlant writes:**"To intimate is to communicate with the sparest of signs and gestures... but intimacy also involves an aspiration for a narrative about something shared, a story about both oneself and others."*



*Here I think she's getting at the same tension you address when you talk about wanting "the you no one else can see, the you so close the third person need never apply." Do you feel like writing about intimacy while, as you've put it, serving two gods––the "you" that you love, and the deity on the page––is like writing a letter that's meant to be intercepted? Or is it the work of translating private shorthand into plaintext?*



 



This is lovely—I will look up the exchange of ideas between Berlant and Johnson, both of whom are important to me. I have often used the need to address someone in language as a spur to write, but the more I write of a given project, the more it’s quite clear that I’m not actually addressing that person any more, even though I might have been in the moment of composition. In that sense I never really think, by the time of publication, that I’m writing an intimate letter, or that there’s any doubling of purpose—I’ve been around the block too many times to delude myself on that account. I mean, it can feel great to be addressed in someone’s poem, to be the beloved memorialized in print, to sit in the audience feeling important, but even then both parties know that it’s one-sided literature and not the full relation, so that can feel lousy and cause pain. Exulting in being someone’s muse and feeling used are closely related, always have been. It’s a pharmakon.



 



*Reading your review of Fred Moten's new book, *Black and Blur*, I was admiring how conscientiously you commit to writing plainly about language you describe as "a field defined by incessant motion, escape." For me, the sheer firepower of Moten's prose together with his tendency to defer satisfying our desire to "figure out" what's being said makes the inability to cleanly parse his sentences is a pleasurable kind of pain. I'm curious how you would situate yourself on the imaginary spectrum between writers religiously dedicated to transparency and those inclined towards more viscous or opaque prose. What do you think these different modes have to offer, especially in the context of the project of consenting not to be a single being?*



 



That’s well put, about parsing sentences being a pleasurable kind of pain. I relate to that, re: some of my favorite writers. Moten himself has said some very smart things about plainness, & about precision. I won’t try to reproduce what he’s said here but I will say that the conversation has been fruitful to me, challenging, important. Generally speaking I kind of doubt that writers really choose their idiom—I think people have a way of thinking and talking and addressing, and then usually find an explanation, political or spiritual or what have you, after the fact, that gives their approach a certain kind of meaning. Which is fine, you just have to watch out that you’re not valorizing what you do as a privileged aesthetic just because that’s the way you happen to express yourself. I mean, even if I wanted to write in a very viscous or opaque way, I likely just don’t have it in me (which is why it kind of delights me when someone thinks I’ve been unclear or baroque, even if they’re saying it as an insult). I don’t think writing should be any one way or another, or that any one style is better suited to the project of consenting not to be a single being. Really the opposite—we need everything, everybody, all sounds. Because part of that consent, so far as I understand it, is endlessly recognizing our difference, while also understanding that difference as part of the world as a plenum, as da Silva has put it. If there were only one way forward, then only one single being would make it.



 



*You wrote about your mentor Christina Crosby in *The Argonauts*. You've also written poetry about visiting her in the hospital in *Something Bright, Then Holes*. Reciprocally, she wrote about these poems and your relationship more broadly in her book, *A Body, Undone*. How do you feel about relationships of mutual literary use, mutual museship? Do they offer new possibilities for intimacy, or are they doubly precarious? *



 



Each situation is distinct, and demands its own negotiation, comes with its own set of possibilities and challenges. In the case of Christina, our enmeshment in person and on the page has brought me much happiness & satisfaction, probably more than any other instance of writing about someone/ being written about that I’ve had. In my experience, being written about doesn’t usually bring the subject very much pleasure. So the fact that Christina valued my being there to bear witness, in writing, some of her most difficult, indeed catastrophic moments, and that she said so in her own book – that meant a lot to me. A LOT.



 



*In an interview with The Creative Independent, you said:*



*People often say they feel like they know me, but I know they don’t—they’re just responding to an effect created by artifice. Which isn’t to say there isn’t real intimacy created—there is. It just means that they’re responding to a sort of “use artifice to strip artifice of artifice” loop.*



*What has it been like to meet your own page-dwelling mentors, your "many-gendered mothers of the heart"? Do these encounters change their work for you? Do you feel like matching up voices with real embodied people is anticlimactic, or conducive to more meaningful relationships on or off the page? *



* *



I think I’ve been around long enough to no longer ever feel “disappointed” or some such by meeting anyone I admire in person. I usually feel just fascinated and grateful. I’ve noticed that my students often report feelings of anticlimax on this account, maybe because they still expect a certain one-to-one relation between the written word / art practice and the human being. I don’t expect that. I can remember a whole class of poetry students being so disappointed after we read John Ashbery and then I took them to an Ashbery reading – they were like, “he’s not a good reader of his own work!” I was like, there is no good or bad reading of his own work; this isn’t a theater audition. It’s JOHN ASHBERY!!



 



*You told* Poetry Foundation* that you're (understandably) getting tired of the phrase "personal writing." Any thoughts on how we could recontextualize or change how we talk about the genre it refers to?*



 



Not really. I don’t think personal writing refers to a genre. I’d like it if people gave up this fetish of “she seems to be speaking just for herself, but the miracle is that it ends up a universal truth!” – on the one hand, good writing always does that, and on the other, trying to get to some universal transcendent shared experience or feeling is part of the problem anyway.



 



*As a college lit mag, much of what we publish is juvenilia our writers may eventually disown. How much of yourself do you recognize in work from, say, your early twenties? Do you feel a sense of contiguity with your younger voice? Or is the "I" in those pieces a discrete individual, distinct from your present "I"? *



 



O I recognize all of it. My ‘I’ has always been the same ‘I.’ Mostly I’m amazed that I had the chutzpah to think that my innermost musings and language experiments were worth publishing as soon as I’d written them. But I’m glad I did – because without that kind of chutzpah, you probably won’t go very far as a writer.



 



*Can young writers (or older writers!) have too much chutzpah? Moreover, I have the sense that eventually we all start to develop grumpy language-foreclosing super-egos. Do you have one? If so, how do you negotiate with it? *



 



I’m not concerned about too much chutzpah. If you’re a self-important jerk or your politics are rotten, all that will come out in your writing and personhood eventually, so if you care about that, you should engage in some good old-fashioned self-examination and transformation. And you’ve got to do your work – just because you wrote some cute tweets doesn’t mean you should or will sail into a fat book contract. But chutzpah is necessary for writing, and I don’t worry too much about grumpy language-foreclosing super egos. Just make sure you give yourself the time and space somewhere to express yourself without fear of what readers will think. You can worry about that later.



 



 

I was eighteen the time I wore an ISSEY MIYAKE dress, and it immediately struck me: there was too much fabric. The sleeves were three times the length of my arms—the neck, intended for a giraffe. It fit me like a glove, but it flowed past the floor, pooling around my feet. But procuring some scissors, the shop girls explained: “Make of it what you want.” They pointed to some lines deftly hidden in the fabric. “There are many options.” And just like that, the consumer becomes the creator and the boutique becomes a personal workshop.



An inversion of the consumer-creator relationship and a reconsideration of the place of technology and engineering in fashion design, the dress was a product of the now famous collaboration between Issey Miyake and Dai Fujiwara.



Viewed today as the Godfather of Japanese fashion, Miyake already had world renowned for his groundbreaking designs. Miyake created the ISSEY MIYAKE design studio in 1970, and spent the following decades challenging the conventional shapes and European traditions of high fashion. Miyake demonstrated particular interest in the intersection of fashion and technology, most notably with his launch of his Pleats Please line in 1993. A production technique that uses a special heat press technique to infuse simple, colorful fabrics with shape and texture, the results are light yet defined, free-flowing yet highly constructed. Further, the polyester clothing requires minimal sewing and corresponds with Miyake’s mission for beauty and function in innovative form.A-POC, which stands for “a piece of clothing,” and rhymes with “epoch,” is the latest technologically-driven line from the Mikaye-Fujiwara collaboration. , Fujiwara and Miyahi’’s collaboration, and their technologically inspired designs and production lines, respond to timeless a question for the fashion world: the delicate balance between high art and a commercial success.



Fashion has always toed a fine line between its dual identitiest’;it is pulled towards the two poles of ready-to-wear street clothes and haute couture. For many designers, the answer comes through the creation of two lines. Designers will show their hand-made high fashion on the runways of Paris and Milan, and spread their names with special, factory-produced collections for lower-end merchandisers. Yohji Yamamoto partnered with Addidas, John Varvatos with Converse, Isaac Mizrahi with Target. These partnerships allow a designer to meet the demands of a more consumer-minded business as well as maintain the freedom of high fashion expression.



The answer for Miyake and Fujiwara, however, came not from the production of two lines, but from use of a new means of production. Merging computer technology with the creativity of the consumer, the design duo founded A-POC—“A Piece of Cloth,” and rhyming with ““epoch.”” A revolutionary design technique, A-POC transforms a single thread into clothing sans coudre. The designer develops a pattern program, funnels a single thread into the knitting machine and presto—out comes a tubular piece of cloth, size and shape dependent on its intended use. Sewing is superfluous. Reliance on sweatshops disappears, as do long hours of hand sewing in Parisian ateliers. In a way, then, A-POC piggy-backed on the work of Miyake’s earlier work, using technology to bring new vigor and innovation to the fashion industry.



Yet despite the use of machine production, A-POC defies the tedium of the mass, factory-produced clothes. It is the consumer who adds the final artistic element, who becomes the final designer. Cutting along faint lines embedded in the production of the cloth, the customer chooses sleeve length, garment length, neck style and more—transforming a long tubular creation into a functional piece of clothing. With a pair of scissors, then, mass produced clothing becomes a custom-made dream.



The power of this form-function solution brought the duo much acclaim, and shifted Fujiwara’s career notably from the textile engineer to the fashion designer. In 2006, Fujiwara became the Creative Director for ISSEY MIYAKE, Miyake himself moving on to new pursuits, and in this role, he has continued the MIYAKE tradition of fusing technology and fashion. Preferring to focus on the new, the original, Fujiwara rarely takes inspiration from the past. His shows are never send-backs to the 1920s flappers nor an homage to Versailles circa Louis XIV. He emphasizes what is new, different, and possible in the modern age. His philosophy is simple: “I do not believe that any discussion of art is possible without bringing technology onboard.”



And even in his most recent work focused on nature, Fujiwara has maintained this dependence on the mechanical and the industrial. Exploring the ways in which technology mimics, preserves, even enables the natural, he illuminates the connection he sees between the typically opposing forces. Last month in Paris he showed “Color Hunting.” In preparation for this show—the Spring 2009 collection—Fujiwara took over 3,000 color swatches to the Amazon Rainforest, aiming to capture the exact, quintessential shades of the jungle. For Summer 2008, Fujiwara was captivated by all things Wind. “To observe the wind is to be aware of nature, to think about the flow of air that envelopes us and the environment in which we exist,” the ISSEY MIYAKE Team explained. The collection thus included clothes unconventionally intended not to protect a person from the elements, but to enhance a person’s interaction with their surroundings.



For both collections, technology was the bridge to the successful partnership between fashion and nature. For “Color Hunting,” Fujiwara identified the natural hues he desired—creating some clothes to achieve the natural element—but he also experimented with the transformation of these colors in the urban landscape, capturing the effect a glass prism or metallic reflection create. To truly create the effect of Wind, Fujiwara partnered with Dyson—the high-tech British vacuum producers. Together the duo built an enormous cyclone to simulate the many forms of wind—mechanically engineering the very natural environment he hopes his clothes will enhance.



For some designers, their fashion shows seem an opportunity to shock and stun. Twice a year, the runway creates an opportunity to smile smugly and say, “Oh yes, I dared.” We love them for it. We love John Galiano for filling Parisian Vogue with models garbed as pirates. We love Marc Jacobs for throwing Grunge-wear in the face of New York’s most fashionable elite. Their dedication to the fabulous—even the absurd—is captivating. It frees us from the daily convention of what one wears.



But what’s interesting about ISSEY MIYAKE is that despite the utter originality of his work, Fujiwara is far from smug. He intends neither to shock, nor stun. Instead, he is eerily nonchalant about his originality, matter of fact, even. Whether by recreating the natural through the mechanical or by creating an entire evening gown from a single thread, Fujiwara will defy every fashion convention in existence all while suggesting that the convention never existed. He makes his innovation seem apparent—obvious creations the circumstance. His models add to this effect. Awash in perfectly engineered color-hues and surrounded by yards of free-flowing, crafted cloth, they seem entitled to the ingenuities enabled by modern engineering.



In conjunction with his participation with Harvard’s Project East fashion show, Fujiwara spoke with The Advocate, and he spent considerable time discussing the place for innovation. His design philosophy helps explain the aura of nonchalance: “Nothing, whether it is new media or emerging circumstances or matters, ever springs into existence suddenly or from nothing,” Fujiwara explains. New thinking and new designs come from precise situations that demand solutions. In a complex society of evolving desires and circumstances, innovative design is but a necessary reaction—a simple, inescapable reality.



***



Harvard Advocate: Issey Miyake is famous for his integration of design, technology, engineering and fashion, and you clearly greatly influenced this practice. Can you describe the relationship you see between fashion, technology, and directed research? Why is this important in fashion, and how do you imagine it will influence the future of design? How or does the relationship with technology morph fashion from the world of art into the world of science?



Dai Fujiwara: During the latter half of my research aimed at creating the A-POC brand, I came to embrace a vague image in my mind. Using the flow of a river as a metaphor, apparel is located in the downstream sector of the textile industry infrastructure. Apparel designers must wait for the items produced upstream and there is no great need to worry about how materials used in fashion are made. This approach and thinking had become fixed in the industry, and I was beginning to grow fed up with it.



Computers offer the convenience of guaranteed information operation, with costs remaining low [as well as] the ability to turn out highly adaptable items despite being created through automated mass production. I did not see much evolution in production lines controlled by machines, or in the production methods that required human hands.



Thus, just as I came to the conclusion that production lines not controlled by machines and production methods not requiring human hands were in fact necessary for fashion, I felt that the conventional image of the river had become hackneyed. Much like fish swim from habitats in vast ocean realms to congregate in plankton generated at the boundary line between warm and cold currents, new visions are being drafted and implemented in the midst of capitalist society – the scene of complex interactions between money, people, commodities and now the Net society.



Naturally, it is impossible to discuss fashion outside the realm of clothing, it is also true that it is no longer feasible to ponder fashion solely in terms of clothing. When, at crucial turning points, new information, new commodities, new images and new characters emerge, people will demand those new elements, along with other information, things and images. I believe that creating methods to initiate these new flows is extremely important. I also feel that proposing such changes from the viewpoint of fashion is an effective means of corroborating the performance of potential catalysts. Within my work at present, I strive to fully embrace these concepts.



It is difficult for individuals to generate turning points. However, it may be possible to bring about new movements by joining with different partners or consolidating different categories. If the time can be found to unravel circumstances or situations already in existence, and then find compatible partners to mutually discuss the world around us, our actions and discussions will lead to new ideas and movements.



In the same right, it is also necessary to forge the future of design. A vast array of accountability derived from the structure of society has spread to the design domain, prompting the need for capable designers to respond to this need. Based on the belief that easily manageable solutions are necessary, the A-POC design concept was launched Though it is my impression that there is little change in the scope demanded of fashion design, I can only conclude that the design clout of organizations unable to create items from the stance of environmental engineering will inevitably weaken. Design, by definition, is the work of formulating certain balances, coordinations and other elements. There is thus a need, I feel, to clarify what specific balances need to be struck. For the very reason that diversity is expanding within the sphere of fashion, the demands of design are much greater. Because the social responsibility in this area is in another increasing trend, it is clear that the sphere of design (referred to as balancing abilities here) is expanding and it will be vital to mount effective responses to social demands.



HA: With the continued collaboration of fashion designers and various technicians—from within and outside the world of design—how do you envision fashion’s place within society evolving? How do the technologies now available to fashion designers change the identity of high art and more consumer fashion?



DF: It is impossible to truly discuss the diversity demanded in fashion in terms of a system that looks to Paris or Milan as the pinnacles. Each new logistical revolution in today’s Web society raises momentum explosive to fashion, threatening the status of the conventional collections (twice yearly fashion markets).



Within the Web society, the demand is for “graspable clothing.” This refers to so-called “real clothes” – that is, apparel which easily appeals to consumers and is readily understood by purchasers. In a world that now expands across borders of time and distance, such fashions are beginning to take on the power to change values and thinking. I believe that this impact is also being felt at the “fashion week” events in New York, Milan and Paris – forums for showcasing new creations.



There is also the concern, however, that on the flip side of excessive demands for easily understood results, the overall scene will become tedious. When proceeding with a focus on creation in an era in which both information and commodities have begun to take on their own values, it will likely become difficult to continue to hold up both sides of diverse and “graspable” clothing.



Basically speaking, I believe that fashion must be allotted a major degree of freedom within the world we live in. In the quest for freedom, failure to resolve new issues characterized by strong demands for social qualities will render it impossible to nurture the freedom that everyone recognizes and wants. In that sense, fashion designers who continue to exist in environments of freedom while fulfilling their social responsibilities may very well represent the “new cool.”



With regard to high art and consumer fashion, while the ability of designers to make ready use of technology may place major restrictions on their work, it will also become easier to successfully benefit from cost balance and quality guarantees. Likewise, while the use of technology by designers signifies the transition into work with a high degree of social impact from a management standpoint, it also means that designers are taking on heavy social responsibilities at the same time. If this foundation can be mobilized to render new proposals for consumers through the act of supplying the world with clothing, it will also come to wield great clout in society.



HA: Last year you teamed up with Dyson to create “Wind” as an element of the Spring show and this year the colors of the Amazon influenced your show. Please comment on the relationship between nature and fashion. What is the role of nature in your work? How has your relationship with and your vision of nature changed over the years? How do the natural elements of the show connect with your more technological leanings?



DF: Any worthwhile discussion of nature is incomplete without the inclusion of technology. It is patently clear, therefore, that technology has become indispensable in sustaining the Earth, as we know it. These influences have already been internalized in the realm of fashion as well.



HA: Conventionally, nature and technology seem as opposing forces, and yet both greatly influence your designs. How do they come together in for you in design? How do they complement one another, oppose one another, etc.?



DF: Please conceive that nature is you, yourself. Technology, furthermore, is also encapsulated within your being. While as you say, nature and technology appear to act as opposing forces, in reality they exist in a mutually complementary, give-and-take relationship.



HA: Academy has routinely placed fashion on the sidelines of scholarship, and yet museums and design forums are increasingly acknowledging the place of fashion as a historical artifact and commentary. How do you see fashion and design as a social commentary? Do you have advice for scholars on ways to study and analyze these artifacts?



DF: In recent years, the reality that fashion differs from its conventional image as an extravagant and festive celebration, and is in fact one component of the overall social fabric, has come to be understood through the lens of economic angles. Someday, perhaps, an economist specializing in fashion may be honored with the Nobel Prize in Economic Sciences!



HA: Would you like to share anything more on your design philosophy?



DF: Nothing, whether it is new media or emerging circumstances or matters, ever springs into existence suddenly or from nothing. Rather, I believe it is people who sense that the old ideas and thinking no longer do the trick are the forces behind such evolution. Toward that end, to enter new realms through the medium of design, I believe in the need to create, through your own effort and volition, specific opportunities for encounters which demand decisive situations and events. Once you take part in something that needs change, you have put yourself on the path

        “There is no darkness

behind the sun” you say, you who have not

seen the sun in months, it being winter.

You thought about it once and couldn’t

stop, calculating volumes, investigating

temperatures of surface and depth.

You don’t remember depth.  You don’t remember

color, you spent days searching for a lamp

the color of the sun.

The sun is not a color but a disk

whose wavelength resonates your skin.



Plato mistook the good for the sun,

that day in Amsterdam the clouds parted,

you leapt up from the war memorial and

the world had been given back

finally.  You heard of people lost their eyes this way.