Emily Crane & Micro-Nutrient Couture

Emily Crane is a new breed of designer working at the intersection of molecular gastronomy and textile innovation. Invested in the material exploration and alchemy of processes, she is growing, cultivating and forming new hybrid fashion futures. She borrows skills from molecular cuisine at the service of envisioning a future where fast fashion is supplanted by a slow-food culture of “home-cooking”. Based on a zero-resource concept, the “Micro-Nutrient Couture” (MN-C) project is aimed at envisioning a future where food is the sustainable solution to textile production due to its inherent local availability, recyclable capacity and environmentally-friendly impact. What MN-C highlights is not only the potential of food-cultures as textile resources, but the project forces us to closely consider the organic dimension of textiles as an integral answer to sustainable design.

For Emily, the kitchen is the new couture atelier. Using food bi-products (i.e. animal gelatin) she creates edible bubbles, skins, bio lace, and dried textures or shells which are body-oriented, even at times molded and “cooked” on the body. Setting up a lab/kitchen environment – Emily wears a lab suit and displays the accoutrements of the scientist/cook while mixing food-stuffs live in front of a public. The performance is half science experiment and half cooking show – where forgivably some results are pre-prepared for full performative effects. What is interesting about Emily’s process is its ability to transform the identity and perception of food and clothing in one bold gesture. We see food transformed in front of our very eyes from the comestible to the textile, while fashion creation is upturned from a technical industry to a hands-on at-home cooking experimentation. Such a work is MN-C, a sensory world of transient fashion where unique bespoke fashions are performatively crafted for each individual event and person.

Jane Bennett, in her recent book “Vibrant Matter” and especially the chapter “Edible Matter”, probes our dialectically intimate relationship to food wherein we are food and food becomes us all in the same vein. Or, as Mickey in Maurice Sendak’s children’s classic book “In the Night Kitchen” would say: “I’m in the milk and the milk’s in me”! Food always resides at that mysteriously uncanny threshold of the me and not-me. Emma Roe, in her phenomenology of eating practices “Material Connectivity”, further notes: “a carrot as it first enters the eater’s mouth is a full flown entity, with a distinctive taste, color, odor, texture; once swallowed, however, its coherence gradually dissipates until, if one were to continue to observe it via a tiny camera inserted into the gut, the difference between carrot and eater vanishes altogether. In this way – MN-C exteriorizes the phenomenon of food-stuff as a “second skin”, transgressing exterior with interior with an aim to recompose our very mortal tissues. This intimate relationship, this transfer of energies has been previously explored by philosophers such as Friedrich Nietzsche with his interest in social formations via nutrition and Henry David Thoreau’s observations of psychic and physical transformation via foods.

MN-C is also at heart an artistic illusion, a kind of culinary-couture mirage. It is a work which is meant to be witnessed and whose alchemical transformation relies on the presentation, belief and evolution of the “magic trick”. It’s not to say that it is not real – or not material – but much like any illusion – part of the not-knowing is the motor behind our interest, our fascination, and the key to an enduring curiosity. Hence: the kitchen is the lab is the atelier is the magic trick. In a recent interview conducted with the artist, Emily notes that she would indeed be interested in commercializing her recipes and would market them with obscure invented names so as to protect the cachet and integrity of the “magic”. Indeed, we are charmed, indeed we are! I cannot wait to order my set of *magic* MN-C bubble-garment kit!

Further read: Emily Crane Interview on Fashioning Technology.

This series of blog posts are an analysis of the works recently presented at the V2_ Institute for the Unstable Media Text_Lab “Clothing without Cloth” event I curated which included: Emily Crane (UK), Carole Collet (UK), Christien Meindertsma (NL), Grado Zero Espace (IT), Pauline van Dongen (NL) and Freedom of Creation (NL).