Simply complex
Simplicity is only a way into a problem set. It’s like a broken clock: perfection in a timey context; otherwise, anywhere from a little to massively off.
I’m fairly certain, in our current society, that you wear clothes. You know enough about clothes, probably, to have a gut instinct about which ones you’ll feel comfortable wearing. Have you ever sewn clothes?
From the outside, making clothes looks pretty simple: pick fabric, pick a pattern, have at. Easy peasy, “anyone” can do it, why waste the time and effort when the finished product, made on an industrial scale, can be purchased and worn in 10 minutes. This is a very common simple take, but it’s far from the whole story.
Let’s break this down into seven levels of complexity.
Level one, the simplest:
Walk in, find it, done.
The simplest way to solve a problem is to focus on a ready-made outcome: a product on a hanger to take home right now. Never consider how it’s made, what goes into it, or how it got to be on that hanger. Yay, you (or a person you are responsible for) have no relevant social reason to be naked.
Level two:
Fabric, pattern, sew it.
The next simplest is to just think about the broad strokes that goes into it. Non-nakedness is a matter of time and production; get a bead on that, and you at least know the future state of non-nakedness and can plan social functions accordingly.
Level three:
Build according to understood details.
Every piece of fabric has it’s own qualities. Stretch, hand, texture, transparency, content are the start. How that fabric is cut to be repieced back together — the pattern — impacts how it will fit and move with a body. Get them all lined up in a row for the final outcome (pants), and it will fall into place.
Level four:
Connect the details.
If a person want a garment that will function, fit, and last, they have to consider how all the details of those simple functions interact. Silk will fray if it’s constructed too conscious to the underlying body; what are the mitigating factors, and does it work for this pattern? Can the construction — the tool use — be leveraged (a different seam, or even a covered seam?). The fabric purchased and in hand, does it actually seem to be a better choice for a different kind of garment entirely?
Level five:
Using the “simple” output of others affects a decision-to-be-made.
Walking through a fabric store, most people don’t make an internal formal account of the fabric against a checklist; they just feel the fabric, think about what they want to make (or could make) with it, and do a quick ‘gut check’. Yet, that first piece of fabric purchased, how it looks usually is the key consideration. It sparked imagination and the newbie sewist yearned to see it made.
If someone is shopping for fabric online, the written, descriptive content may or may not account for these core quality (stretch, hand, texture, transparency, content). Many focus on describing how it looks. And the color can actually make a difference; different dyes can affect the fabric in different ways, subtly changing the stretch/hand/texture/transparency spider graph.
And patterns: hoo, yeah. The way they are structured is a tiny insight into the problems the pattern developer wanted to solve. Where do they assume a sewist’s skills are? Do they assume the sewist is raw, just bought their first pair of scissors and didn’t know pins would be useful? Or do they assume the sewist is experienced enough to just say, “use interfacing appropriate for the fabric, outcome, and application method you prefer,” or, “stitch a French seam using scant allowances.” Is the pattern drafted for zero waste? Perfect fit? Average height only? Easily altered? Are they depending on a certain amount of stretch, and are they implicity or explicitly communicating that dependency?
Let’s not even start on tools. Some people, like me (I’ve been doing this for decades), have decided that a core of expertly wielded, really great tools is all that’s really necessary. Others have decided that they need rooms filled with specialized tools that work perfectly in their use case. Both are viable. Both are approaching the same set of problems-to-solve with different prioritization and different core behavior. As in most behaviors and skills, most people fit into a spectrum, not the extremes.
Which is all a long way of saying: there is no one single answer. “Best practice” is a rational percentages game that can fall completely flat if it’s the only pathway allowed and built for.
Level six:
Time is an accumulation of decisions made, and is always part of the simplest node picked as the “problem solved”.
Actually, I’m not going to dive too deep into a clear explanation here, nor am I going to do it for all the simplified functions. You literally can skip it after this paragraph; the intent is to show how much thinking and analyzing can go into something that we’re able to parse down to simply “fabric”. It won’t match exactly what went into the decisions that went into building it. That, in turn, affects the other decisions the current decision maker it going through — and more so the deeper the experience, because they’ve already explored more avenues and have a robust set of options to balance the whole.
I think (non-robustly) about fabric in terms of:
Content usability: wash, dry, warming, cooling, wicking, breathable, temperature regulating, etc.
Content types: natural, manmade; cotton, wool, alpaca, bamboo, tencel, silk, linen; polyester, lycra, etc.
Fabric light factor: opaque, translucent, transparent; how to mitigate it per use, how that might affect pattern alterations and construction methods; etc.
Fabric drape: crisp, fluid, structured, etc.
Fabric finishes/texture: twill, poplin, knit, charmeuse, brocade, etc.
Fabric stretch: mechanical (e.g., knit) or content (e.g., lycra); curl, snagging; some fabric finishes provide stretch when cut on a bias; etc.
Environmental: organic, deadstock, recycled, biodegradable, certified GOTS, certified OEKO-TEX, certified FSC, certified BCI cotton, clear/tracable sourcing; blends can’t currently be recycled; linen improves soil health, cotton degrades; bamboo grows fast, tencel (trees) grows slow; wool and alpaca are animal-based without (generally) harming the animal; silk is insect-based and kills the insect (although research with traction is happening here); etc.
Level seven:
Understand the decisions being processed are a fractal of the decisions previously processed. Time is an accumulation of decisions made AND behaviors built into action.
Human behaviors and interactions never stop impacting the information and information-sharing happening, especially when the information sharing includes a physical component like “fabric”. Even when you never meet a person, their decisions as they weave, knit, and/or dye fabrics, draft patterns, and make tools impact our world. Their priorities while they do this become lost as the simplified outcomes of the decisions make their way downstream. Unless we make a concerted effort, two or three steps down the line and we don’t know what decisions they made, why, or how it affected the immediate environment. It is rife with potential danger. This is a core consideration with climate change.
For the average, still-learning-their-competency sewists, by the time they are deciding on fabric yardage, they are focused on their problems to solve — which are many. Most don’t look at the fabric and wonder where it’s been; they’re focusing on where it might go next. They don’t think about how the fabric production dyes, solvents, sizing, etc., are dumping tons of toxic waste into a stream and/or ocean, harming people, wildlife, agriculture, and biodiversity along the way. They don’t know that the owner — so successful! look at the profit and viability of their thinking, production, and process! They’ve been around for a century! — is getting there by paying sub-subsistence wages (the workers have a family, just pool resources), with aged tools (it’s a 2% mortality rate, nothing in the grander scheme of things), toxic chemicals (it does what’s needed, for cheap), leveraging raw materials that are dumping so much nitrogen into the soil that what was beneficial to the problem-at-hand has now tipped over into poisoning the larger environment.
There are thousands/millions/trillions/infinite amount of possibilities to get to the simple. Yes, a sewist can grab any piece of black fabric, sew a seam to make it a tube, cut it to length and pop on a hem, find a way to cinch it at the waist and call it a skirt (pants are more complex). On the right body, that skirt can still be beautiful or functional or hit whatever parameters that body’s mind was looking for in a black skirt — it just needs to find the right body.
In the right context, with trust all the way up the line of decisions-made that are being leveraged in the next step of problem solving, simple can work. Simple can find it’s expression and be perfect.
But let’s be very clear: simple is an act of deep trust. It gets more complicated when it’s the time of day (the wearer) doesn’t match the broken clock (the simple skirt) to manage to be correct (the expression of form and function).
Just because something works in one time/area does not mean the larger system isn’t broken.
Simple is the beginning
We need simple. It’s the way to get people moving on with the problems they are interested in solving, and it’s the way to give people an entry point into developing interest into new problem sets to solve. Without simple, we’re all solving all of the problems all the time with all the data and all the possible permutations. It’s overwhelming to consider it. But simple is just the beginning.
This is the other danger of simplicity: we take the simplified node (a pair of pants on a rack, or a company’s profit), compare it to other nodes in context against a set of pre-defined parameters (e.g., pants: right length, easy to move in, this price range, available in this time range; e.g., business: EBITDA, P/E, P/B, simple profit/loss). Then we come to a simple conclusion of good/bad, right/wrong, buy/keep-looking.
That black skirt from the previous section? On a different body it will look or function horrendously. Convincing someone to wear it becomes a matter of interpersonal behavior. If it’s truly horrendous, our more problematic behaviors can come into play: aggression (just do it! now! now! now!), goal-post-moving (here, I’ll put in a pocket, cut it shorter, put on a flounce to make it longer…), dismissiveness (don’t worry your pretty little head about how it looks to others), gaslighting (it’s the bestest, the greatest, the ever-loving most perfect skirt on the planet, and I pity the fool who can’t see it).
In a simple business environment that only cares about profit? People are expendable. Resources are expendable. Poison is fine. Sustainable? Pshaw, Someone else will use it if I don’t. It’s all for good reason: the goal of profit can be attained this way.
Take those interpersonal behaviors that I listed to try to get someone to wear a skirt, and think about some marketing you’ve seen — predicated as another avenue for profit-building. A company that sends ten emails a day, or takes your single purchase as owning your attention for a week? That’s aggression. The salesperson that takes every, “yeah, but,” despite you clearly saying no, and finds a way to address it? That’s goal post moving. The disparagement of other companies doing something similar? That’s dismissiveness. Reiterating that the service/product you have is the service/product you bought, despite clear discrepencies? That’s gaslighting. All of these are normal tactics in business, the “moats” many investors are looking for as they consider viability.
All of these are behaviors in the narcissist handbook. All of them are legal, and all of them are expected to an extent. They improve profitability.
Profit is a simple metric of evidence. How it gets there isn’t.
Trusting experts, the makers of simple
As experts find their way, they show the way to others; again, it’s on a spectrum. Some experts share with more fluidity and ability to build comprehensible explanations. Some experts embrace their expertise like a coat of armor, every question an arrow to be deflected or mowed down. Sometimes an expert can see how their decisions impact downstream. Sometimes they’re just working the problems they have to work, in whatever way they can think of and/or copy and tweak from others. Every expert is human, building their knowledge within a sea of human interactions. Every repository of expert knowledge is the documented data of all those interaction-informed decisions without context. AI has all the human behavior implicitly baked into its data, and obfuscating the source and context in the process.
For experts, the goal is their end. What others do with the simplified output of their expertise is beyond their control. Some approach the goal with as much ethics and as holistically sound thinking as they can capture. Some find and leverage anything legal, unregulated, or able to invoke mob mentality (everyone’s doing it) along the way as just another tool to use.
I’ve written before how simple, in the form of hierarchy, is inherently exclusionary. Building the simple is also saying, “trust me.” Accepting the simple without question is deeply trusting. Simple while dismissing the complexity of it? It’s there, in two words situated closely together: trust and dismissing. It is not the expression of our healthiest human behaviors.
So design for the complex, too. Build information architecture that at the very least acknowledges that the complex happens, that the simple form and function of a user flow has edge cases that need an outlet, and the support system(s) in place, to address it.
Transparency is a core requirement to build real trust.
