Tag Archives: fashion

Good Luck to Bleed on Designs in Fashion Industry

Nationality: Afro-Latinx
Age: 20
Occupation: FIDM Student in Fashion Design, Food Service
Residence: 2715 Portland St Los Angeles CA 90007
Performance Date: 4/13/21
Primary Language: English

This friend is a student studying fashion design at FIDM, and she often alters housemates’ old clothes or creates new designs when she doesn’t have schoolwork. She attends one particular class that requires she use a small mannequin and canvas to create fabric patterns.

Three females including myself were in the kitchen when I asked her whether the fashion industry has any superstitions. We held this conversation after a day of work, and we discussed other folk beliefs in the same sitting. The speaker said that it is good luck to bleed on new fashion designs because this means the designer put their ‘blood, sweat and tears’ into the piece.

*

In the fashion industry, “It is good luck to bleed on things. Like if you’re pinning stuff on your body form, and you prick your finger a little bit, and you get like a little blood on like your costume or your design, it is considered good luck.” The speaker said that she had accidently done this while creating her own designs, and that she learned this tip from a female professor.

Designers are not supposed to bleed on purpose. Doing so ruins the sentiment. I asked if blood was still a good sign if the design were made out of expensive fabric, and the speaker said yes, that’s not a problem because blood is very easy to wash out with hydrogen peroxide and warm water.

The speaker said that this superstition meant a lot to her because she has bled on past designs and believes this helped make these projects successful. “It’s kind of like that statement, like I put my blood sweat and tears into this. So like, I can’t tell you how many countless nights I have cried over literal costumes, trying to get them done. And then when they come out amazing. Like, that’s how I know. Like, I can feel that good luck, because you know, you experience it.

*

This speaker has struggled to get where she is now. She did not go immediately to FIDM after graduating high school, and she started her first year in Fall 2020. She has needed to share a room with an incompatible roommate, and she has needed to take up two food service jobs to continue working toward her passion even when is is difficult. I think the idea that blood as a symbol of struggle resonates with the speaker in part because she has needed to struggle to complete her designs.

Style of Dress – American

Nationality: Mexican-American
Age: 33
Occupation: IT Manager
Residence: Westlake, Los Angeles, CA
Performance Date: April 19, 2011
Primary Language: English
Language: Conversational French

Some American men wear very baggy pants and let them sag to show their boxers. The informant learned the following folk explanation as to the origin of the style “maybe right around high school, or, um, when [she] was just past high school and [her] little brother was doing it when he was in high school. She doesn’t remember from whom she first heard the explanation, but she recalls first seeing the style in high school: “Um, it seemed to be something that, uh, a lot of the African-American guys would do in high school. Uh, but now I see a lot of people do it and it’s just . . . it’s not good [laughter].”

The informant heard that the style originated in prison, where the low man on the sexual totem pole would wear saggy pants: “Basically, uh, young boys and even grown men tend to wear baggy pants or pants that they sag down past their boxer shorts, showing almost all of their boxer shorts, wearing pants that are, you know, a good ten sizes too bit for them. What they don’t realize is the true meaning of the sagging jeans, sagging pants. Uh, it actually stems from prison. Uh, the man who would wear the saggy pants, um, that were sagging past his butt actually indicated that he was the man that men would go to, uh, for, uh, for intercourse. And it showed that he was basically the bitch of the cellblock. So, uh, basically indicated that he was the one who would, uh, take it in the rear, for lack of better terms.”

The informant regards the style itself with a mixture of rue and amusement: “This nugget of knowledge is something that I wish more younger men would understand . . . Um . . . but I don’t think most men get that today who sag their pants. They think it looks cool but they don’t really see that is indicated that they are the, the prison bitch. So I think that that’s interesting. Um, if they do know this they don’t seem to care. Uh, but I think it’s just something that most people who sag their pants aren’t familiar with. So they are, um, unassumingly, uh, displaying their wares, as it were.

The informant shared the explanation with her nephew, “who actually seemed to have gotten the hint once it was explained to him.” She says that she would share it with anyone she felt comfortable with and wanted to have more respect for him- or herself: “If I was comfortable with approaching the individual, egh, like if it was my nephew. Or my brother, or somebody who, um, who is younger than me who I would be an authority—kind of an authority figure to, who would respect my, uh, input. I’m not just going to stop a random guy on the street and say, ‘Hey, you know that means you’re a prison bitch?’ ’cause that’s just not cool. But I think I would if it was somebody that I cared about, like a relative or a workmate or somebody that I, y’know, had a little bit more respect for and wanted them to respect themselves more, I would share that information with them.”

The folk explanation could be true, although it does seem like a story that might be dispensed by parents and other adults to discourage children from wearing a style their relatives find distasteful, as the informant used it on her nephew. It would be effective for that purpose because prison inmates are looked down upon and anal sex is still somewhat taboo, so impressionable boys might not wish to associate themselves with the former or symbolically invite the latter. Saggy pants could be considered an American folk costume, since the style has not been much endorsed by authorities—the folk group being, if this story is true, prison inmates and their imitators.