Konrad Schulze

Back story

My Grandfather went through WW1 as a child which was a traumatic experience for him whilst he was in Germany so in order not to go through WW2 he escaped to Brazil on 29.08.1930 from Hamburg to Porto de St.Fransisco by ship where he set up his butcher shop and years later where he met my grandmother in St.Paulo. He always wore suits, so as a token of his love she sewed by hand my grandmother a bag and a matching coin purse out of his old suit. “...It might have been lost or discarded as a result of damage, soiling, or heavy use. There are no signs that the suit has faded or been dyed, and in general, the suit displays few signs of wear...” (Mida and Kin 2015:147).

Garment construction

For this look, I made a 3 piece suit including a shirt and tie to emphasize how much he wore suits throughout the majority of his life. For the fabric of the suit, I used wool which was quite difficult to sew through using my cosmetic machine so I had to use an industrial sewing machine which was still difficult and ended in 5 needles breaking due to the thickness, to resolve this issue I had to sew slower and sometimes even manually move the needle so that the thread doesn’t break.

Prints

For the overall print of the suit, I screen-printed my grandfather's full name in a pinstripe motif in the style of a signature going vertically down the entire suit. As for the shirt I looked through the family archive and my grandfather’s German passport survived and just underneath his photograph on the left-hand side is his thumb print which I took and made into a print in illustrator. Sir Galton’s view in Etienne pillion’s thesis mentions the different types of fingerprints and their overall shape which is known as Level 1 Detail. The various types include plain arches, tented arches, radial loops, ulnar loops, plain whorls, double loops, central pocket loops, and accidental patterns. Which are generally simplified into their categories: Loops, Whorls, and Arches. (Pillin, 2019: 11).