Common Language - N°14
* Unfortunately, we are not able to guarantee a specific cover at time of order. Thank you for your understanding.
This fourteenth issue of Common Language focuses on history—on our understanding of it, its transmission, and the way it shapes our view of the present.
As art historian Camille Morineau points out, writing history is never a neutral act. Recording, identifying and connecting trajectories produces information; this information in turn generates recognition, and thus a form of power. Naming, archiving, transmitting: these are all acts that determine what remains visible and what disappears.
Journalist Yvane Jacob invites us to take a closer look at an area often overlooked by official narratives: clothing. For clothing, far from being a mere aesthetic commentary, is one of the most precise languages of social change. It tells the story of the constraints and freedoms, the norms and acts of resistance, and the desires of an era.
Through our little dictionary of lingerie, a history of the female body in motion thus emerges. The invention of nylon mesh that modernised tights, the bicycle that revolutionised social mores and gave rise to modern knickers, the corset that gradually broke down to give birth to the first bra: all these technical innovations accompany, and sometimes precede, profound changes in society. These transformations are often subtle, almost invisible, yet they play a part in redefining women’s place in society, their mobility and their autonomy.
These pages explore these slow-unfolding stories, woven from gestures, materials and customs. An archaeology of everyday life that resonates particularly strongly today, as Chantelle celebrates its 150th anniversary. For a century and a half, the house has accompanied—and sometimes anticipated—these developments, observing how bodies transform, how expectations change, and how women reinvent their relationship with themselves.
Other narratives run through this issue, drawing unexpected connections between lives, continents and eras. The photocopied daily life of American artist Pati Hill thus engages in dialogue with the artistic and sociological investigation conducted by Camille Lévêque around the figure of the father. Two ways of exploring the intimate, traces and legacies. An introspective work that finds an echo in the philosophical poems—sometimes absurd, always incisive—of photographer Coco Capitán.
Through these accounts, images and fragments of thought, a conviction emerges: history is never set in stone. It is written in the archives, in works of art, but also in everyday actions, in the objects we carry, and in the forms we invent to inhabit our bodies. And perhaps this is one of the invisible threads running through this issue: understanding where the forms that surround us come from, so that we can better imagine those yet to be invented.
© Chantelle
© Common Language
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Description
* Unfortunately, we are not able to guarantee a specific cover at time of order. Thank you for your understanding.
This fourteenth issue of Common Language focuses on history—on our understanding of it, its transmission, and the way it shapes our view of the present.
As art historian Camille Morineau points out, writing history is never a neutral act. Recording, identifying and connecting trajectories produces information; this information in turn generates recognition, and thus a form of power. Naming, archiving, transmitting: these are all acts that determine what remains visible and what disappears.
Journalist Yvane Jacob invites us to take a closer look at an area often overlooked by official narratives: clothing. For clothing, far from being a mere aesthetic commentary, is one of the most precise languages of social change. It tells the story of the constraints and freedoms, the norms and acts of resistance, and the desires of an era.
Through our little dictionary of lingerie, a history of the female body in motion thus emerges. The invention of nylon mesh that modernised tights, the bicycle that revolutionised social mores and gave rise to modern knickers, the corset that gradually broke down to give birth to the first bra: all these technical innovations accompany, and sometimes precede, profound changes in society. These transformations are often subtle, almost invisible, yet they play a part in redefining women’s place in society, their mobility and their autonomy.
These pages explore these slow-unfolding stories, woven from gestures, materials and customs. An archaeology of everyday life that resonates particularly strongly today, as Chantelle celebrates its 150th anniversary. For a century and a half, the house has accompanied—and sometimes anticipated—these developments, observing how bodies transform, how expectations change, and how women reinvent their relationship with themselves.
Other narratives run through this issue, drawing unexpected connections between lives, continents and eras. The photocopied daily life of American artist Pati Hill thus engages in dialogue with the artistic and sociological investigation conducted by Camille Lévêque around the figure of the father. Two ways of exploring the intimate, traces and legacies. An introspective work that finds an echo in the philosophical poems—sometimes absurd, always incisive—of photographer Coco Capitán.
Through these accounts, images and fragments of thought, a conviction emerges: history is never set in stone. It is written in the archives, in works of art, but also in everyday actions, in the objects we carry, and in the forms we invent to inhabit our bodies. And perhaps this is one of the invisible threads running through this issue: understanding where the forms that surround us come from, so that we can better imagine those yet to be invented.
© Chantelle
© Common Language
