WFH Is Not The Work of Homemaking

"Homemade" is another appropriate word for the moment. Large swaths of the world's population are under some version of stay-at-home order. There’s working from home, and the work of homemaking. The work that happens outside of homes is "essential"—before the pandemic, "unskilled"—yet offers the least security and most meager pay. Our homes vacillate between claustrophobic and consolatory by the minute, perhaps most especially for those paid by the hour. Or not paid at all.

The handmade quilt is patchwork's most conspicuous canvas. There are geometric ones, like those preferred by Bode for expert reconstitution, with tiled triangles and squares of color that tessellate from corner to corner. There are scenic ones that tell biographies in milestones, with appliqué mountains and trees and birds. There are feats of precision like the dizzying Amish starbursts that appear ripped from visual-spatial IQ tests, and there are organic, lyrical quilts like the improvisational masterpieces of the quiltmakers of Gee's Bend, Alabama.

Patchwork quilts made their way to North America with European settlers who could afford to import the textiles from India. Patchworking was a leisure activity for wealthy women; something to practice and vary the days while it was socially unacceptable to pursue any otherwise meaningful work. Other times, patchwork was outsourced to slave labor on American plantations. Black women were forced to sew quilts for white enslavers' homes by day; by night, they'd use salvaged remnants for their own designs.

The Victorian era gave rise to crazy quilts, a fad that combined the excess fabric from dressmaking into one comforter. The textiles tended to be opulent velvets, silks, and brocades, and the patterns were irregular, hence the name—a look echoed in recent Marni trenches and shift dresses that crackle with panels of rich amber suede and metallic leather. During the Great Depression, fabric became so scarce that families turned to feedsacks for quilting. Patchwork was considered a democratic tool of frugal reuse.

Now, the patchwork quilt is nostalgic comfort. It's the patron saint of every holiday romcom, as prevalent in the quaint early-aughts homes of Stars Hollow as in the Ingalls's log cabin. It's the symbol of enduring kinship in Calvin Klein's Solange and A$AP Mob-fronted family campaign. The mascot of perfectly imperfect unions in How To Make An American Quilt, a particolored tractor beam drawing Winona Ryder toward marriage. There's a romantic wholesomeness to patchwork lent by its inherent domesticity, an implied purity to its homemadeness.

Until recently, patchwork clothing had not enjoyed the same charming reputation. In medieval Europe, motley was the garish uniform of court jesters and fools; during the Renaissance, of commedia dell'arte's Harlequin. Their costumes, patterned with lozenges of bright yellow, green, and red, signalled that these characters—often servants, often portrayed in blackface—were the court's pin cushion. The words "fool" and "patch" were even used interchangeably, both connoting social inferiority. These characterizations echo through the development of Jim Crow and the scourge of racist minstrel shows that followed. There was a schism between patchwork quilts and patchwork clothes, where one was beloved and the other reviled. Was it a reaction to style and skill, or a symptom of which lives are sheltered under social scaffolding?

After centuries maligned as a women's hobby, the American bicentennial vaunted patchwork as high art. The Whitney Museum of American Art exhibited quilts on its walls as if they were Pollocks, yet hardly credited the women who made them—a note made more egregious by the memory that just the year before, the Ad Hoc Committee of Women Artists had protested against the museum's profound underrepresentation of female artists and artists of color. Ad Hoc's Faith Ringgold would subsequently evolve her art practice to include politically incisive story quilts. Beyond art, the back-to-the-land movement encouraged patchwork, on clothing as well as bedding, as a resourceful tool for countering mass consumption—we see a similar ethos in the current pendulum swing toward DIY maximalism as an antidote to Calabasas athleisure suits.

As patchwork's popularity rose, so did quilt prices. In 1993, the Smithsonian contracted a company to reproduce a few designs from its collection, but the museum's decision to use overseas labor inspired outrage and demonstrations from the American quilting community. Some argued that an influx of factory-made quilts would dilute the value of their work. Others wanted the replicas made domestically, citing both economic and xenophobic reasons.

Any children’s map of the United States illustrates why patchwork is such a seductive symbol of unique Americana, but countries all over the world have versions of the textile practice predating the Mayflower. Appliquéd cloths were found in ancient Egyptian tombs. There are colorful kaudis in India, patterned rallis in Pakistan, storytelling arpilleras in Peru, and impressive boro, like Kapital's grailed denim jackets and pants, in Japan.

The myth of American patchwork persists because it reinforces a national identity of self-reliance and ingenuity, but much like its ideological double, the bootstrapping idiom, it abrades American identity with little sensitivity to difference—of gender, of race, of class—ignoring the way that difference shaped patchwork’s very development. The symbolic American patchwork quilt also bolsters a notion of national "innocence," imbuing the geographically domestic with a semblance of righteousness.

The tension between labor and domesticity inherent to patchwork runs parallel to the long arc of the fashion industry—trades that started in homes and have since been stratified. There are designers investing in the stability of United States-based manufacturing (Noah and Reese Cooper come to mind), but in large part, design happens in the developed world while production is outsourced to developing nations. It's our pandemic-era labor divide on a global scale. As lockdown has shuttered stores and factories, major retail brands have paused payments for orders already in progress, leaving the garment workers to front both materials and labor costs, suspended in a chain they have little power over. Labor—in fashion, and in most other industries—has been steadily devalued over the course of generations, severing it from product and pushing it out of sight and into the margins.

Patchwork bedspreads, along with their utilitarian and decorative purposes, are connected to a tradition of activism. It's said that codes were sewn into the patterns of abolitionists' quilts, marking routes along the Underground Railroad. Susan B. Anthony's first suffrage speech was given at a quilting bee in Cleveland. When the activist Cleve Jones first conceived of the AIDS Memorial Quilt—an enormous patchwork memorial, each of its 48,000 panels dedicated to a life lost to the disease—he was struck that even the thought comforted him. For him, the quilt conjured the tenderness of grandmothers, the dependability of pioneer women. It was a reinvention story for the victims of the disease; castoffs and leftovers coming together to make something exquisite. For others, the quilt was too conciliatory a symbol for the trauma of widespread death and government neglect. As a counterpoint, AIDS activist group ACT UP (AIDS Coalition to Unleash Power) organized an action to scatter the ashes of their lovers and friends on the White House lawn during one of the quilt's public displays. "This is a way of showing there is nothing beautiful about it," activist David Robinson, who inspired the action, said, "this is what I'm left with, a box full of ashes and bone chips." Gert McMullin, the long-standing caretaker of the AIDS Memorial Quilt, now leads volunteers in using its stockpile of fabric to sew masks for nurses and doctors. "I never would've guessed I would go through two pandemics," she reflected recently in an interview, "and I'd be able to sew for both of them."

On April 2nd, Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer sent a letter to the president. "America cannot rely on a patchwork of uncoordinated voluntary efforts to combat the awful magnitude of this pandemic," he warned. Governors competing with city mayors for supplies. Healthcare workers in garbage bag scrubs. CPAP machines retrofitted as ventilators. It’s an accurate review of the moment but a cynical use of the metaphor; it misses half the word. Without the unifying work, they're just patches.

For all its contradictions, patchwork is most itself when considered both product and process: a multitude of fractured elements, mending happens as a way to heal. What's happening now is a proliferation of mutual aid efforts and relief funds, like Kerby Jean-Raymond's Your Friends in New York program, connecting gaps with food, supplies, and financial assistance—for restaurant workers, for freelancers, for small businesses, for elderly and infirm neighbors. It's not nearly enough, but it's what we have for now. These are the fragments—both sensible and sentimental—we've made into our variegated weighted blanket, stitched toward the future.

Gaby Wilson is a writer and journalist based in New York. Her work has appeared on HBO's VICE News Tonight and MTV.