TROUSERS/PANTSIf you can agree that a single trouser is basically a tube, and that a sleeve is basically also a tube, and a skirt is tube, and so is a dress, and a top and a jumper and a collar/hood, as is a coat/shirt/jacket if you introduce front openings and facings? Then whatever you can do to a tube you can also do to pretty much ALL garments, with experimentation, prototyping, refinement, and fitting. Creative experimentation in the realm of the technical is easily transferable when it comes to garments. So if you can get your head around the ‘Tunnel Technique’ for a dress, which is a tubular method of flat cutting, then what prevents you from exploring it also in other garment forms? I expect very much it is PRACTICE. You actually cannot EVER fully get your head around Subtraction Cut garments until you first start making them. Lots and lots of them! They can’t possibly be second guessed, but rather the designs are only realised AFTER making them. So with trousers i start with simple rectangular tubes, plenty big enough top&bottom to get your leg through, and twice as long as a legs length. I then fold these tubes exactly like i do Tunnel Technique dresses. There are many ways to fold, and the material usually teaches you where to fold it. Follow the textiles! The paired-holes cut for trousers have circumferences big enough to easily pass a leg through, joined always in pairs, never singular.The difference with trousers is that i make up and explore multiple tubes before fitting them and photographing them on human legs, remembering that a human leg always moves and flexes dynamically, which must be accounted for. I work in multiples to maximise the chance of happening upon something amazing. Single attempts stunt innovation. Be prolific. Eventually, after experimentation i graft these experimental folded trouser tunnel tubes onto a pair of trouser shorts, slotting one into the other. This gives me the right fit around the crutch and bum on the top part, and loads of fluidity lower down. I spend a long time perfecting this integration and fit on the body. Once you join a pair of trouser shorts to a folded tunnel tube, the pattern can easily be taken off the leg and cut apart flat, and the joins between the two patterns blurred so they become one-piece patterns. This all requires at least a two-step prototyping process to get right. It’s not something that can be done in just one go. Fitting and refinement on the human body (not mannequin dummy) is essential. Once you vaguely understand this methodology then i sometimes throw all the cards in the air by also freehand painting trouser tubes with ink and a paintbrush, because of course a tube does not have to be straight or rectangular or measured. You can elaborate a tube radically. This produces even more unlikely end results. The point is of course that explaining all this in words is pretty futile, because it is only through making in flexible soft materials without any conscious preconception of an end result that you chance upon new complexities and wonders for trousers, dresses, sleeves, collars, skirts, jumpers, shirts, jackets, coats…. It is something you have to at least attempt making a few times before you can say it doesn’t make any sense. Subtraction Cutting doesn’t make sense initially, that’s the point! That’s why it’s great and keeps evolving unexpectedly. Seeing me demonstrate or perform a trouser pattern in person, live, in action, physically present would of course help make things much clearer and real. Garment patterns are physical manifestations of the maker after all, distinctly human not robot ✌️🤖
