Say It with Thread

To my amazement, embroidery is finding a role beyond fashion, beyond craft, beyond museums. Companies and organizations, with no affinity to needlework at all, are choosing embroidery as a medium to communicate. Yes, they are sending us subliminal messages through embroidery. And before you ask, I haven’t been drinking.

A  Swatch

Out Christmas shopping, I passed a display at Swatch, that plastic digital watch loved by trendy teens. The shop’s window was decked with snowmen, cross-stitched in white on a red back ground. They created a backdrop for the display cases, filled with funky timepieces. Sure, the figures in XXX’s had been computer-generated to simulate embroidery. I was not being fooled.  

Yet for me the question was why simulate embroidery? Heaven knows chocolate-box pictures of Swiss alpine villages might have worked too.  What qualities was this techie company trying to get across that it could best by suggesting embroidery? Tradition? Embroidery does have a long tradition, longer than Swiss watches.  Craftsmanship? Do they want us to overlook the synthetic materials and industrial process need to mass produce plastic watches?  Embroidery does conjure up “the handwork quality” to non-stitchers. Well, that is what I read into what I was seeing. But then I’ve got embroidery on the brain. Overall, the hidden messages, reaching me for one, were positive.

This was not so with another image I stumbled upon in the Harvard Business Review (HBR), when I was researching how widely contemporary English uses stitching terms. I consulted HBR on a lark. 

Now, HBR is not a periodical one finds in the arts and crafts section of a news-stand. It is a very serious journal, widely read by the captains of industry and those waiting to join the ranks. So if any organization is mindful of Marshall McLuen’s adage “the medium is the message”, it’s this lot.

Just click here to see the image I mean.

To my astonishment, the HBR website displayed a piece of needle work. I kid you not.  The editor chose to promote an article entitled HBR“The Big Lie of Strategic Planning” by Roger L. Martin with a pseudo-sampler beautifully stitched by Nicole de Vries. A message overlaying the embroidery reads “A detailed plan may be comforting, but it's not a strategy.”  

The HBR embroidery is a spoof on a traditional sampler style and a take off on “Home Sweet Home.” The hearts and stylized flowers are meant to telegraph conventional wisdom of yesteryear.  Strategy is not enough in contemporary business.The HBR may be right about business.  Maybe detail, care, plan, and comfort do not cut it if you want to get ahead in corporate life. However, as an embroiderer, I found their illustration with its overlay most unfortunate.

The negatives in the message I picked up on were:  needlework, just like strategy, is old-fashioned, useless, and outmoded. The graphic’s qualities may reinforce the article, but, in the process they belittle needlework, and samplers in particular, which require considerable attention to detail, persistence, and careful planning. 

How unfortunate for a male-dominated business school  to pick  a quintessentially female form of art and expression to emphasize negative qualities. The Harvard crowd maybe at the fore of business thoughts, but, when it comes to needlework they sure are stuck in stereotypical thinking, which is precisely what they abhor. How ironic.

Thank goodness for more hip publications like Wired and the  New York Times. Both have cottoned onto the work of thread-graphic designer Evelin Kasikov.  

She revamps traditional cross-stitch and other straight stitching techniques to introduce to a wider public the possibilities of needlework in a digital age. 

Typography by Evelin Kasikov published in Wired Magazine

Despite using a traditional medium, let’s face it thread is an old medium, the subliminal message of the Kasikov’s work is that embroidery, done her way, is in step with the computer generation.   Evelin builds on the positives of  traditional needlework – care and precision - and smashes through the widely- held negative preconceptions sticking to needlecraft such as repetitive and unoriginal.  

And it sure doesn’t hurt her embroidery’s allure that it appears next to a name brand Swiss watch.

I cheer on Evelin’s success. She is making inroads in the world of advertising as well.  Have a look at the logo she created for the women’s line of Nike sportswear which should go on sale in January 2014. How wonderful that hand stitching is aligned with young women, vigorous, active, and “with it.” . But you can see more on her site.

Nike logo produced by Evelin  Kasikova for line of women's wear

Sure the Nike design, like the snowman in the Swatch display, will be produced mechanically. Never the less the logo is likely to retain that worked-by-hand quality. 

Although Evelin came to hand stitching less than a decade ago, she is doing a fabulous things to modernize the image -- graphic and PR - of stitching. In her work, the medium is the message, too. For once, both are modern and positive. Needlework can appeal to the young, as Evelin is showing us. Embroidery can survive in the digital age.