This knitwear collaboration is a playful exploration of the role of the fashion critic

First published in 2020, Dal Chodha’s Show Notes is comprised of the kind of writing that rarely, if ever, find an audience beyond their author: pretty alien to readers of fashion writing, wholly familiar to anyone who’s at some point been tasked with analysing a 20-minute catwalk show in real time. Key descriptors and, occasionally, whole sentences (but never full stops) are formatted almost like poetry, darting across white pages in varying lengths, to a strict but impulsive rhythm. Lifted from the notes that subsequently became Chodha’s show reviews for Wallpaper*, the book foregrounds the act of writing in an increasingly image-led culture.

‘I found it a really formative and terrifying prospect, to go to a show and have to formulate an opinion immediately. In a visual age, everyone's looking at the pictures of the show at the same time as I am. So what's my role here?’ asks Chodha, pathway leader of the BA Fashion Communication & Promotion course at Central Saint Martins and a contributing editor at Wallpaper*, recalling the three-year period referenced in the book. ‘My role wasn’t to necessarily explain what I was seeing, it’s almost about what I'm feeling. I don't mean that to sound esoteric or poetic even, but it became really interesting – the kind of panic that hits you when the show starts. I found myself writing down the most inane notes, and after the season the notes app in my phone was just full of these broken things. But I quite enjoyed how they read and what they might resay about what I had just seen; how abstract they were, and playful.’

The book has just been printed for a third time (new copies feature a look from Rick Owens Men’s AW17 collection on the cover, photographed by Jason Lloyd Evans) and is also the subject of a new collaboration with Waste Yarn Project, a knitwear initiative founded by Siri Johansen in 2020, with the aim of repurposing surplus yarns. ‘We’re good friends, and we've done a couple of projects together,’ shares Chodha. ‘She is a wonderful doer and just gets on with stuff. She sent me a text saying, “I want to put some words on jumpers. I haven't done that before, so can I use some words from Show Notes?” I was like okay, not really thinking about it – she sent me a sketch within an hour, and a couple of months later, I literally got a picture of a jumper on someone.’

Produced in two colourways with shades of grey, sky blue, maroon, pale pink and guava green (leftovers from a production run from a fashion house), the jumpers have been designed in response to Chodha’s own aesthetic, which leans towards a square cut, decorated with passages lifted from the book, including such lines as ‘minimal, sharp, a city slickness’ and ‘a cool attentive leisureliness’. ‘Making the words themselves access different places – not making it accessible, but having these words out and about in a different format – is something I'm really interested in, because I'm so wedded to paper,’ says the editor. ‘I'm really excited, just about seeing these words in different formats, different places, on different people.’

This desire to find new ways to engage with words beyond the phone screen, computer screen or printed page, echoes certain elements of the landscape in which Show Notes first arrived, its author then (and still) immersed in the different and sometimes obscure ways we can talk about fashion. ‘There was a mood in the air [in 2020], a community of publications that were very academic and unafraid, talking about clothes away from that glare of commerce and marketing, and basically my brain was in that world of thinking,’ notes Chodha, characterising the book’s genesis. ‘I think as all of us are becoming so literate in the way that we read images, it really throws up some bigger questions about the point of writing. So Show Notes is a collection of words or lines that I hope evoke a gesture or a feeling or a sort of sentiment, rather than just telling you what something looks like.’

The WYP x DC sweater is exclusively available at Tenderbooks. The third edition of Show Notes is also available from Tenderbooks.

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