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Featured Guest:
Susan Ashdown, PhD Emerita Professor, Cornell University Adjunct Professor, Ontario College of Art & Design Published July 30, 2025 In this 6th interview for Wisdom for Wannabes, host Jackie Morreale interviews Susan Ashdown PhD, a renowned expert in the field of apparel design and fit technology. They discuss Professor Ashdown’s journey from a small town in North Carolina to becoming a professor at Cornell University, her passion for making and designing, and the challenges she faced in her educational journey, including dyslexia. The conversation delves into the evolution of apparel design, the impact of technology on fit and customization, and the pressing need for sustainability in the fashion industry. Professor Ashdown shares her insights on research, the importance of learning how to learn, and her current passion for stained glass art, highlighting the creative process that drives her work. Listen to/watch the full podcast recording, or read the transcript below: |
Full Interview with Susan Ashdown, PhD:
"Create your own educational journey. Shape it to yourself. You need to learn how to learn. That's the key to success in anything, education as well as your life. Be a student of life." - Susan Ashdown, PhD (Wisdom for Wannabes podcast episode 14, 23:40)
Great quotes from the interview with Susan Ashdown, PhD:
(More great quotes throughout the transcript in magenta below.)
- "I consider myself a maker."
- "I love draping."
- "Ready-to-wear can't work."
(More great quotes throughout the transcript in magenta below.)
Susan Ashdown, PhD
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Key Takeaways:
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Stained Glass Artwork by Susan P. Ashdown, PhD:
Laundry on the Line I
4x5.5" stained glass artwork, from the 'Laundry on the Line' series, by Susan P. Ashdown. |
Unique Oak Leaf
Stained glass artwork by Susan P. Ashdown. |
Nuthatch
Stained glass artwork from the ‘Early Spring in the Woods' series, by Susan P. Ashdown. |
Interview Transcript:
Jackie Morreale (00:00): Hello! My name is Jackie Morreale and I'm the host of Wisdom for Wannabes, a new podcast series that seeks to discover wise words and business, beauty and betterment. Today I am joined by a very special guest who I have had the pleasure of knowing, learning from, working for, and researching with for over 20 years.
She brings these three facets together, having taught me and many other students the business of fashion, the beauty in carefully crafted design and finding the right apparel fit, and how perceived fit can make someone feel better about their body as a whole. It is my pleasure to introduce Susan P. Ashdown, PhD, Emerita Professor of Human-Centered Design for the College of Human Ecology at Cornell University.
Professor Ashdown taught at Cornell for almost three decades, starting in the College of Arts and Sciences in 1980, and then she became a member of the faculty for the College of Human Ecology in 1991 upon the completion of her PhD research at the University of Minnesota on the topic of perception of apparel fit. The questions that informed her research and teaching focused on body variation and the sizing and fit of apparel.
She also investigated the use of half-scale dress forms developed from body scans in academia and the apparel industry. Professor Ashdown's research publications are prolific. Professor Ashdown and her body scan research group generated more than 100 research publications. Since retiring, she has turned to editing textbooks, starting with the fourth edition of Helen Joseph Arnold's Draping for Apparel Design.
She is currently collaborating with Nora McDonald in editing the fifth edition of her outstanding textbook, Principles of Flat Pattern Design. Professor Ashdown is a professor emeritus at Woxen University in Hyderabad, India, and an adjunct professor at the Ontario College of Art & Design in Toronto, Canada. A very, very warm welcome to you, Professor Ashdown. Thank you so much for joining us today.
Susan Ashdown (02:04): Thank you for that great introduction. It's always amazing to hear it all at once and say, yeah, I did all those things.
Jackie Morreale (02:10): You did all those things and so many more. That's just the tip of the iceberg.
I want to be better at research and I look forward to learning more about you today since you have already taught me and so many others so much. Let's start off the interview questions with your full name, where you're from, and your current hometown.
Susan Ashdown (02:22): Susan Perkins Ashdown. I adopted the Southern tradition when I married of keeping my maiden name as my middle name. That's what Perkins is about. I grew up in a very small town in North Carolina called Ossipee. Country girl, Southern girl. I currently live in Ithaca, New York. Soon to move to Toronto, so I'm going to change from a small-town girl to a city girl.
Jackie Morreale (02:55): I'm so excited to see what adventures that brings for you in Toronto. What do you do and what is your passion?
Susan Ashdown (03:01): I consider myself a maker because as much as I like the intellectual life, and it's a big part for me, I really like working with my hands and I like working with materials. All the years at Cornell and before, my passion was pattern making and draping for apparel. Creating for a wide range of body types, never just the fashion figure, with a wide range of materials, whatever we can make, wrap around a body and then a wide range of different styles and shapes and silhouettes. It's that whole interaction that I love, and very hands-on.
Jackie Morreale (03:35): I remember it well, in my own undergraduate studies with you at Cornell University, Sizing and Clothing, Developing Effective Sizing Systems for Ready to Wear Clothing.
Susan Ashdown (03:44): That was the intellectual side, you trying to understand sizing and fit. That was amazing to spend all those years looking at it with really smart graduate students. It was very exciting. It was also frustrating.
I think I was trying to answer an unanswerable question, but through all that work, I have come to a very clear understanding of why our clothes don't fit.
Jackie Morreale (04:07): How many years have you been doing this?
Susan Ashdown (04:08): The family lore is that my mother sat me down at a sewing machine at age three. No thread, no thread, yeah. no thread, no thread. Not fabric, a piece of paper, and very strong instructions not to put my fingers anywhere near the needle.
Jackie Morreale (04:17): Oh my gosh. Can you imagine a three-year-old at a sewing machine? No thread. Okay. Actually, that's a great way to learn, right? I think you even taught us that in class just to feed the paper through the machine and see where the lines go.
Susan Ashdown (04:43): Yep. I started being a maker very young. I always wanted to do things. I remember the books you could get at the library. 101 projects you can do at home. How to make a birdhouse out of a soda bottle.
With fabric, I made my clothes, of course, but probably the real fascination with it started with theatrical costuming. That would have been in 1969. What's that? I retired in 2018. So 50 years.
Jackie Morreale (05:10): 50 years. Wow. What a career you've had and still have. So many people have been impacted by your publications, your research, your teaching, your design. I know a little bit about you because we've known each other for more than 20 years now, but I don't know necessarily your favorite things.
Let's do a series of quickfire questions to get to know you as a person a little bit better, Professor Ashdown. So, what is your favorite food?
Susan Ashdown (05:37): Chocolate.
But seriously, I think during the summer and fall anyway, whatever is freshest at the farmers market. Yeah, I really try not to buy things out of season. Oh boy, when those strawberries come in season, I'm there.
Jackie Morreale (05:41): Me too. Favorite place?
Susan Ashdown (05:56): That's a tough one. I traveled all over the world when I worked at Cornell and I loved everywhere I went. It was just great. I think it's wherever I'm closest to nature; can be in my garden or walking in the woods.
Jackie Morreale (06:08): Ithaca is so beautiful. Ithaca is gorges as they say, right? The connection to nature there in Ithaca is unique. It's so beautiful. Favorite work of fiction?
Susan Ashdown (06:10): Yes. One of the reasons it's great to live here.
Ah, fiction. I have always loved science fiction and lately fantasy, but not the kind of science fiction I read when I was a kid. The things that are being written now by women. That's what I love.
There's so many amazing fantasy and science fiction female writers that are not all shoot them up, monsters, guns, spaceships, but really looking at our world and why it's the way it is and how people interact and yeah, a little magic in there. That's always fun.
Jackie Morreale (06:57): I completely agree. What is your favorite type of music?
Susan Ashdown (07:00): I'm not one of those people that went around with music in my ears or even in the background. It would have to be the Appalachian music that my mother introduced me to. That's where her family was from and some of those old time singers were really great. There’s a singer from the area of North Carolina that I grew up in. She's a banjo player, a guitar player, and a singer, and she's pretty amazing. Rhiannon Giddens, that's her name.
Rhiannon Giddens. I'd call her a world musician. She's just amazing. And she grew up not that far from me.
Jackie Morreale (07:36): I have to look her up. Favorite university?
Susan Ashdown (07:38): Another tough one. Of course, Cornell, but right now the Ontario College of Art & Design. Wherever I am in moment.
Jackie Morreale (07:41): Favorite sport?
Susan Ashdown (07:49): Oh boy. When I was a kid, I loved horses, and I wanted to learn to ride horses. I never had an opportunity till I came to Cornell. Then I took horseback riding lessons. I owned a horse for a while and I rode for 20 years maybe. I loved it.
It's not a good sport for an older woman with osteoporosis, though.
Jackie Morreale (08:10): I had no idea you were an equestrian! A beautiful sport.
Do you have a favorite inspirational quote for life?
Susan Ashdown (08:18): There's a bunch of them. The ones that really stick with me are the ones that say, whatever you do, it's on the shoulders of giants. That no one ever does anything by themselves, ever. There's no such thing as the creative spirit that just creates. You build on what other people do.
There's a great quote about poets, that say that bad poets copy, and good poets adopt and expand and turn something on its head. They always start with someone else. That's what I like.
(Continued below)
She brings these three facets together, having taught me and many other students the business of fashion, the beauty in carefully crafted design and finding the right apparel fit, and how perceived fit can make someone feel better about their body as a whole. It is my pleasure to introduce Susan P. Ashdown, PhD, Emerita Professor of Human-Centered Design for the College of Human Ecology at Cornell University.
Professor Ashdown taught at Cornell for almost three decades, starting in the College of Arts and Sciences in 1980, and then she became a member of the faculty for the College of Human Ecology in 1991 upon the completion of her PhD research at the University of Minnesota on the topic of perception of apparel fit. The questions that informed her research and teaching focused on body variation and the sizing and fit of apparel.
She also investigated the use of half-scale dress forms developed from body scans in academia and the apparel industry. Professor Ashdown's research publications are prolific. Professor Ashdown and her body scan research group generated more than 100 research publications. Since retiring, she has turned to editing textbooks, starting with the fourth edition of Helen Joseph Arnold's Draping for Apparel Design.
She is currently collaborating with Nora McDonald in editing the fifth edition of her outstanding textbook, Principles of Flat Pattern Design. Professor Ashdown is a professor emeritus at Woxen University in Hyderabad, India, and an adjunct professor at the Ontario College of Art & Design in Toronto, Canada. A very, very warm welcome to you, Professor Ashdown. Thank you so much for joining us today.
Susan Ashdown (02:04): Thank you for that great introduction. It's always amazing to hear it all at once and say, yeah, I did all those things.
Jackie Morreale (02:10): You did all those things and so many more. That's just the tip of the iceberg.
I want to be better at research and I look forward to learning more about you today since you have already taught me and so many others so much. Let's start off the interview questions with your full name, where you're from, and your current hometown.
Susan Ashdown (02:22): Susan Perkins Ashdown. I adopted the Southern tradition when I married of keeping my maiden name as my middle name. That's what Perkins is about. I grew up in a very small town in North Carolina called Ossipee. Country girl, Southern girl. I currently live in Ithaca, New York. Soon to move to Toronto, so I'm going to change from a small-town girl to a city girl.
Jackie Morreale (02:55): I'm so excited to see what adventures that brings for you in Toronto. What do you do and what is your passion?
Susan Ashdown (03:01): I consider myself a maker because as much as I like the intellectual life, and it's a big part for me, I really like working with my hands and I like working with materials. All the years at Cornell and before, my passion was pattern making and draping for apparel. Creating for a wide range of body types, never just the fashion figure, with a wide range of materials, whatever we can make, wrap around a body and then a wide range of different styles and shapes and silhouettes. It's that whole interaction that I love, and very hands-on.
Jackie Morreale (03:35): I remember it well, in my own undergraduate studies with you at Cornell University, Sizing and Clothing, Developing Effective Sizing Systems for Ready to Wear Clothing.
Susan Ashdown (03:44): That was the intellectual side, you trying to understand sizing and fit. That was amazing to spend all those years looking at it with really smart graduate students. It was very exciting. It was also frustrating.
I think I was trying to answer an unanswerable question, but through all that work, I have come to a very clear understanding of why our clothes don't fit.
Jackie Morreale (04:07): How many years have you been doing this?
Susan Ashdown (04:08): The family lore is that my mother sat me down at a sewing machine at age three. No thread, no thread, yeah. no thread, no thread. Not fabric, a piece of paper, and very strong instructions not to put my fingers anywhere near the needle.
Jackie Morreale (04:17): Oh my gosh. Can you imagine a three-year-old at a sewing machine? No thread. Okay. Actually, that's a great way to learn, right? I think you even taught us that in class just to feed the paper through the machine and see where the lines go.
Susan Ashdown (04:43): Yep. I started being a maker very young. I always wanted to do things. I remember the books you could get at the library. 101 projects you can do at home. How to make a birdhouse out of a soda bottle.
With fabric, I made my clothes, of course, but probably the real fascination with it started with theatrical costuming. That would have been in 1969. What's that? I retired in 2018. So 50 years.
Jackie Morreale (05:10): 50 years. Wow. What a career you've had and still have. So many people have been impacted by your publications, your research, your teaching, your design. I know a little bit about you because we've known each other for more than 20 years now, but I don't know necessarily your favorite things.
Let's do a series of quickfire questions to get to know you as a person a little bit better, Professor Ashdown. So, what is your favorite food?
Susan Ashdown (05:37): Chocolate.
But seriously, I think during the summer and fall anyway, whatever is freshest at the farmers market. Yeah, I really try not to buy things out of season. Oh boy, when those strawberries come in season, I'm there.
Jackie Morreale (05:41): Me too. Favorite place?
Susan Ashdown (05:56): That's a tough one. I traveled all over the world when I worked at Cornell and I loved everywhere I went. It was just great. I think it's wherever I'm closest to nature; can be in my garden or walking in the woods.
Jackie Morreale (06:08): Ithaca is so beautiful. Ithaca is gorges as they say, right? The connection to nature there in Ithaca is unique. It's so beautiful. Favorite work of fiction?
Susan Ashdown (06:10): Yes. One of the reasons it's great to live here.
Ah, fiction. I have always loved science fiction and lately fantasy, but not the kind of science fiction I read when I was a kid. The things that are being written now by women. That's what I love.
There's so many amazing fantasy and science fiction female writers that are not all shoot them up, monsters, guns, spaceships, but really looking at our world and why it's the way it is and how people interact and yeah, a little magic in there. That's always fun.
Jackie Morreale (06:57): I completely agree. What is your favorite type of music?
Susan Ashdown (07:00): I'm not one of those people that went around with music in my ears or even in the background. It would have to be the Appalachian music that my mother introduced me to. That's where her family was from and some of those old time singers were really great. There’s a singer from the area of North Carolina that I grew up in. She's a banjo player, a guitar player, and a singer, and she's pretty amazing. Rhiannon Giddens, that's her name.
Rhiannon Giddens. I'd call her a world musician. She's just amazing. And she grew up not that far from me.
Jackie Morreale (07:36): I have to look her up. Favorite university?
Susan Ashdown (07:38): Another tough one. Of course, Cornell, but right now the Ontario College of Art & Design. Wherever I am in moment.
Jackie Morreale (07:41): Favorite sport?
Susan Ashdown (07:49): Oh boy. When I was a kid, I loved horses, and I wanted to learn to ride horses. I never had an opportunity till I came to Cornell. Then I took horseback riding lessons. I owned a horse for a while and I rode for 20 years maybe. I loved it.
It's not a good sport for an older woman with osteoporosis, though.
Jackie Morreale (08:10): I had no idea you were an equestrian! A beautiful sport.
Do you have a favorite inspirational quote for life?
Susan Ashdown (08:18): There's a bunch of them. The ones that really stick with me are the ones that say, whatever you do, it's on the shoulders of giants. That no one ever does anything by themselves, ever. There's no such thing as the creative spirit that just creates. You build on what other people do.
There's a great quote about poets, that say that bad poets copy, and good poets adopt and expand and turn something on its head. They always start with someone else. That's what I like.
(Continued below)
“Immature poets imitate; mature poets steal; bad poets deface what they take, and good poets make it into something better, or at least something different. The good poet welds his theft into a whole of feeling which is unique, utterly different from that from which it was torn.” - T.S. Eliot
(Continued)
Jackie Morreale (08:50): Whether it's design of products or with words or song, it's, taking something that exists and building upon it.
Let's talk about education because I'm pretty sure you know everything there is to know about education.
What was your own education process like?
Susan Ashdown (09:06): I had a rough time as an elementary school student. I had a very smart older sister. It's that situation where any class I went into, of course, my sister had been there the year before and the teachers expected me to be something I wasn't.
That was hard and I would probably be a different person if it hadn't been for my parents. They were so accepting of each of us with our own different skills. Whenever I got frustrated with that, they'd say, Don't worry about it. You have your own skills. You have your own strengths. They're different from Ginny's and that's fine. Don't expect it to be the same as her. And don't worry about these teachers because they don't know what they're doing.
It turns out that I had a fairly severe dyslexia, which was not known or recognized when I was a kid. But because my parents had so much faith in me and just said, hey, just put your head down, work hard. And I did. I learned to work hard.
I had great success that way and through my whole life. It's always taken me longer than my colleagues to do anything. It takes me longer. But that's just the way I am.
Jackie Morreale (10:16): This is the first time I've ever hearing of that, and by the way, you have to be the fastest responder to any email, the fastest editor of any paper I've ever submitted, so if it takes you longer, I don't know what everybody else is doing.
Susan Ashdown (10:31): Well, I think dyslexia made me stronger in the end. And I really like that.
Jackie Morreale (10:50): I'm also familiar with dyslexia in my own family. What you said about being a poet and the great ones will turn it upside down and figure out their own way to do it. I always tell my own that you will figure it out in your own time, and you have the ability to think your own way, and to think big. I call it their ‘superpower’ and I would say that maybe it's yours too.
Susan Ashdown (10:55): OK. I'll take that.
Jackie Morreale (11:09): So that was your elementary school experience. Those building years are tough when you're learning how to read and then you get past it and then you develop this passion for it, right?
Susan Ashdown (11:14): Yeah, and spell, too. Spelling was my real downfall. But again, my parents said, don't worry about it. That's not your strength.
Now, hey, I'm vindicated, aren't I? Nobody needs to know how to spell if you work on a computer.
Jackie Morreale (11:29): Exactly! You have edited my work so many times with such precision that I'm shocked that this was ever or is ever an issue for you.
Anyway, you figured out your own way of learning and you're so good at it. What then inspired you to study theater arts in college?
Susan Ashdown (11:47): I think it was the maker in me when I went to college. I had decided I was going to be a Spanish major, probably the influence of a high school teacher that I adored. That's always the case, isn't it?
I was OK at Spanish, but I wasn't great. I liked reading it better than writing or doing anything else with it. Then someone told me, I should come to the theater shop, which is the best place in the world for someone who's basically a maker.
There was a great person, Rosemary Ingham, who ran that shop. She was fantastic and she taught me so much. One of a long string of mentors that have made my life what it is. This was a small college called Grinnell College, and she's unfortunately passed away now, but she was a great mentor. She wrote a book on Technical Costuming for the theater. The first edition of it has pictures of me draping!
Jackie Morreale (12:40): Now I really need to put it at the top of the list. Were there any people who inspired or encouraged you to pursue your career in research and academia?
Susan Ashdown (12:54): Lots of people, starting with Susan Watkins, for getting my master's degree. I'd just come out of theatrical costuming, which I loved, but I was getting frustrated with it, because how creative you could be as a costumer depended on the director, because he was the ultimate decider about what those costumes were for. Were they just to be pretty costumes on a person, or were they to actually express something about the person wearing them? Of course, I like the ones that express something about the person wearing them. I knew I needed to move on. I wanted to teach.
The natural place to go was fashion, as the theatrical costuming teaching opportunities were only lecturers. The other thing I wanted was security. I wanted to be here where I am now, which is secure ability to move to another city, not to worry about money. I wasn't going to do that in the theater.
I knew I wasn't really interested in fashion, but I found Susan Watkins, who was teaching functional apparel design. She was the person who came up with the concept of functional apparel design and the need to teach it at universities. Now a lot of places teach it, but it originated with her. That was my transition to getting into a field that I felt comfortable in using my maker skills. That's my master's.
Then I went to the University of Minnesota for my PhD. There I learned about research in a different way and got fascinated with this question of apparel fit. So many people were my guides in terms of research along the way. I can't begin to name them all.
Every bit of my life has been possible because of my mother, who really taught we girls that we needed to look for and follow our own passion and that we could do anything we wanted. And that was pretty rare at that stage of history and I'm eternally grateful.
She's the one that made it possible for me to realize that this whole question of apparel and apparel making was not being given the understanding and the value that it should be, which has led me to describe what we do in apparel as apparel engineers. We are the engineers that are creating clothing. Because it's women's work and because it's fashion and frivolous, people don't understand or think or acknowledge the difficulty of what we do when we make clothing that fits people. The engineer that makes a bridge or a road or a building, they're working with such a limited number of materials and they don't have to fit a body. They just need to put it on the earth. We're working with a wide range of different body shapes, body types, postures, ways of moving.
Jackie Morreale (15:53): And all different kinds of fibers, fabrics, ways of putting it together. It's coming to the forefront for me right now, but that clothing is our immediate environment. I think I learned this from you in our graduate program.
How do you fit a completely unique body in that completely unique phase of that person's life? How do you fit a bunch of flat pieces of fabric together so that they can fit and complement and make someone feel comfortable, beautiful, whatever you want them to.
Thinking about it as a fit engineer is completely on target for me. It's one of the most difficult things to fit clothing to someone. And you've really mastered it. This inspiration came from your mom who told you that you can do whatever you want to do, whatever you put your mind to.
Susan Ashdown (16:41): That she did. It made me understand that if you're undervalued, that's on the other person.
You know and can understand what your value is. I feel the same about myself and the students that I worked with. They're not given the same respect that an engineer of other materials is.
Engineers of other materials can often reduce it to a set of formulas. You can't reduce the human body to a set of formulas. Working with the 3D scanner really made me realize that viscerally that you can't reduce it to a bunch of numbers. It's not possible.
Jackie Morreale (17:15): Your 3D body scan work really transcended research, teaching, the fashion industry as a whole in terms of business, that there were companies that were using this 3D body scanning technology to try to fit people better. You really were one of the fore founders in the world of AI for fashion if you think about it, because here you are doing this 3D fit technology body scanning that's reshaping, repositioning the way that we think about fit in our bodies and how we create that second skin, that environment for them.
Susan Ashdown (17:47): The work that's being done is moving forward as people are beginning to realize the complexity. The first commercial endeavors thought it was going to be easy, take a few measurements and apply them to the patterns and make clothing. Now, I think the research that's going into it is acknowledging the complexity of what they're trying to do.
I said when I retired, I wasn't going to continue with research, but I keep getting drawn back by people that are doing really exciting things. The current work that's being done now by a few people is looking at posture and understanding posture. And I think that's a big step forward.
Jackie Morreale (18:18): Yes. There are so many factors that that affect just the posture alone for the fit. Speaking of your mom and your sister, and you, I'm just curious, do have a good relationship? Do you do totally different things?
(Continued below)
Jackie Morreale (08:50): Whether it's design of products or with words or song, it's, taking something that exists and building upon it.
Let's talk about education because I'm pretty sure you know everything there is to know about education.
What was your own education process like?
Susan Ashdown (09:06): I had a rough time as an elementary school student. I had a very smart older sister. It's that situation where any class I went into, of course, my sister had been there the year before and the teachers expected me to be something I wasn't.
That was hard and I would probably be a different person if it hadn't been for my parents. They were so accepting of each of us with our own different skills. Whenever I got frustrated with that, they'd say, Don't worry about it. You have your own skills. You have your own strengths. They're different from Ginny's and that's fine. Don't expect it to be the same as her. And don't worry about these teachers because they don't know what they're doing.
It turns out that I had a fairly severe dyslexia, which was not known or recognized when I was a kid. But because my parents had so much faith in me and just said, hey, just put your head down, work hard. And I did. I learned to work hard.
I had great success that way and through my whole life. It's always taken me longer than my colleagues to do anything. It takes me longer. But that's just the way I am.
Jackie Morreale (10:16): This is the first time I've ever hearing of that, and by the way, you have to be the fastest responder to any email, the fastest editor of any paper I've ever submitted, so if it takes you longer, I don't know what everybody else is doing.
Susan Ashdown (10:31): Well, I think dyslexia made me stronger in the end. And I really like that.
Jackie Morreale (10:50): I'm also familiar with dyslexia in my own family. What you said about being a poet and the great ones will turn it upside down and figure out their own way to do it. I always tell my own that you will figure it out in your own time, and you have the ability to think your own way, and to think big. I call it their ‘superpower’ and I would say that maybe it's yours too.
Susan Ashdown (10:55): OK. I'll take that.
Jackie Morreale (11:09): So that was your elementary school experience. Those building years are tough when you're learning how to read and then you get past it and then you develop this passion for it, right?
Susan Ashdown (11:14): Yeah, and spell, too. Spelling was my real downfall. But again, my parents said, don't worry about it. That's not your strength.
Now, hey, I'm vindicated, aren't I? Nobody needs to know how to spell if you work on a computer.
Jackie Morreale (11:29): Exactly! You have edited my work so many times with such precision that I'm shocked that this was ever or is ever an issue for you.
Anyway, you figured out your own way of learning and you're so good at it. What then inspired you to study theater arts in college?
Susan Ashdown (11:47): I think it was the maker in me when I went to college. I had decided I was going to be a Spanish major, probably the influence of a high school teacher that I adored. That's always the case, isn't it?
I was OK at Spanish, but I wasn't great. I liked reading it better than writing or doing anything else with it. Then someone told me, I should come to the theater shop, which is the best place in the world for someone who's basically a maker.
There was a great person, Rosemary Ingham, who ran that shop. She was fantastic and she taught me so much. One of a long string of mentors that have made my life what it is. This was a small college called Grinnell College, and she's unfortunately passed away now, but she was a great mentor. She wrote a book on Technical Costuming for the theater. The first edition of it has pictures of me draping!
Jackie Morreale (12:40): Now I really need to put it at the top of the list. Were there any people who inspired or encouraged you to pursue your career in research and academia?
Susan Ashdown (12:54): Lots of people, starting with Susan Watkins, for getting my master's degree. I'd just come out of theatrical costuming, which I loved, but I was getting frustrated with it, because how creative you could be as a costumer depended on the director, because he was the ultimate decider about what those costumes were for. Were they just to be pretty costumes on a person, or were they to actually express something about the person wearing them? Of course, I like the ones that express something about the person wearing them. I knew I needed to move on. I wanted to teach.
The natural place to go was fashion, as the theatrical costuming teaching opportunities were only lecturers. The other thing I wanted was security. I wanted to be here where I am now, which is secure ability to move to another city, not to worry about money. I wasn't going to do that in the theater.
I knew I wasn't really interested in fashion, but I found Susan Watkins, who was teaching functional apparel design. She was the person who came up with the concept of functional apparel design and the need to teach it at universities. Now a lot of places teach it, but it originated with her. That was my transition to getting into a field that I felt comfortable in using my maker skills. That's my master's.
Then I went to the University of Minnesota for my PhD. There I learned about research in a different way and got fascinated with this question of apparel fit. So many people were my guides in terms of research along the way. I can't begin to name them all.
Every bit of my life has been possible because of my mother, who really taught we girls that we needed to look for and follow our own passion and that we could do anything we wanted. And that was pretty rare at that stage of history and I'm eternally grateful.
She's the one that made it possible for me to realize that this whole question of apparel and apparel making was not being given the understanding and the value that it should be, which has led me to describe what we do in apparel as apparel engineers. We are the engineers that are creating clothing. Because it's women's work and because it's fashion and frivolous, people don't understand or think or acknowledge the difficulty of what we do when we make clothing that fits people. The engineer that makes a bridge or a road or a building, they're working with such a limited number of materials and they don't have to fit a body. They just need to put it on the earth. We're working with a wide range of different body shapes, body types, postures, ways of moving.
Jackie Morreale (15:53): And all different kinds of fibers, fabrics, ways of putting it together. It's coming to the forefront for me right now, but that clothing is our immediate environment. I think I learned this from you in our graduate program.
How do you fit a completely unique body in that completely unique phase of that person's life? How do you fit a bunch of flat pieces of fabric together so that they can fit and complement and make someone feel comfortable, beautiful, whatever you want them to.
Thinking about it as a fit engineer is completely on target for me. It's one of the most difficult things to fit clothing to someone. And you've really mastered it. This inspiration came from your mom who told you that you can do whatever you want to do, whatever you put your mind to.
Susan Ashdown (16:41): That she did. It made me understand that if you're undervalued, that's on the other person.
You know and can understand what your value is. I feel the same about myself and the students that I worked with. They're not given the same respect that an engineer of other materials is.
Engineers of other materials can often reduce it to a set of formulas. You can't reduce the human body to a set of formulas. Working with the 3D scanner really made me realize that viscerally that you can't reduce it to a bunch of numbers. It's not possible.
Jackie Morreale (17:15): Your 3D body scan work really transcended research, teaching, the fashion industry as a whole in terms of business, that there were companies that were using this 3D body scanning technology to try to fit people better. You really were one of the fore founders in the world of AI for fashion if you think about it, because here you are doing this 3D fit technology body scanning that's reshaping, repositioning the way that we think about fit in our bodies and how we create that second skin, that environment for them.
Susan Ashdown (17:47): The work that's being done is moving forward as people are beginning to realize the complexity. The first commercial endeavors thought it was going to be easy, take a few measurements and apply them to the patterns and make clothing. Now, I think the research that's going into it is acknowledging the complexity of what they're trying to do.
I said when I retired, I wasn't going to continue with research, but I keep getting drawn back by people that are doing really exciting things. The current work that's being done now by a few people is looking at posture and understanding posture. And I think that's a big step forward.
Jackie Morreale (18:18): Yes. There are so many factors that that affect just the posture alone for the fit. Speaking of your mom and your sister, and you, I'm just curious, do have a good relationship? Do you do totally different things?
(Continued below)
Susan Ashdown, PhD her studio at Cornell University, with half scale dress forms based on 3D body scans.
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An excerpt from Draping for Apparel Design. In her edit of this textbook, Ashdown introduced a wide variety of body sizes and shapes beyond the traditional fashion figure.
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(Continued)
Susan Ashdown (18:35): Yes, absolutely, with both my sister and my brother. We're very close. Not in distance; my brother lives in North Carolina, my sister lives in South Carolina. But we have a great relationship. My sister had an entirely different life than I had. She had four kids. She lived abroad most of her life. When she got back to this country with her teenage kids, she went back to college. She got a master's degree. She got a PhD in mathematics and taught for several years before she retired at a university.
Jackie Morreale (19:02): Good for her, wow. So, you're both in academia at the end of the day, both extremely powerhouse, intelligent women who got their PhD and informing other minds and the way we think about things and research. Interesting!
Susan Ashdown (19:11): Yes!
Jackie Morreale (19:23): Were there any key learnings from the way that you grew up that you applied to your textile and apparel research?
Susan Ashdown (19:30): Certainly, as a young person making my own clothes, I certainly practiced all those skills. I've always been interested in our world and in the things that touch us most closely.
In theater, you have to do a fast costume change sometimes, so you have to have this beautiful, exquisite costume and get them into another beautiful, exquisite costume in 30 seconds. It's a challenge and that's what made that fascinating to me.
I'm glad I started out in theater because in theater I was fitting so many different bodies and body types with so many different objectives.
Of course, movement was always primary as the actress let you know.
We had to teach the actresses how to move in a corset. If you were in a corset and tried to move in a modern way, you're not going to be able to breathe. If you had to stop the posture and keep it and move in the way that was appropriate for that period, then you'll be fine.
Jackie Morreale (20:20): Let alone sing, right?
Susan Ashdown (20:22): We did not do opera, thank goodness. We did a couple of musicals, but that's as far as we went.
Jackie Morreale (20:26): One of the things I really love about theater is how so many different artists come together to create the production. Whether you're the costume designer or you're the scenic designer or the lighting designer or choreographer or talent on stage, it comes together to create the masterpiece. It's such a collaborative effort. That's the beauty behind theatrical projects for me.
Susan Ashdown (20:50): Theater teaches you collaboration – but it's deeper than that.
That way of interacting with other creative people that you NEED in order to be creative yourself. You can't do it yourself in any area of theater, it's obviously out there right front and center. But it's true of anything.
Jackie Morreale (21:12): Agree. You need the other areas to excel. It's beyond collaboration.
What advice would you give to someone looking to start a new graduate journey?
Susan Ashdown (21:15): It's important to keep your eyes open for those ways that you need to find to make it your own, because you'll never be a good student if you're just following the path that someone else has led you to.
I think one of the biggest problems with education today, starting with elementary school, and quite frankly, a big reason we're in the situation we are today in this country.
For the longest time, students have been taught that they're in school to learn. That is absolutely wrong. You are not there to learn. Your teachers are not there to teach you. They can't open your head up and pour stuff in. You shouldn't let them try because that's not what education is all about.
You are in school to create your own educational journey and to shape it to yourself. You need to learn how to learn. You don't need to be taught. You need to learn how to learn! That's the key to success in anything, education as well as your life, is being able to be a student of life.
As a student in some kind of educational program, you can lose track of that and you're going to be a student of whatever that topic is. But you need to be a student of life and frame everything around that.
Jackie Morreale (22:45): That’s so inspiring! I'm ready to go and do some life study. I'm very motivated. Thank you for that. I agree with you. It starts at all levels. But the PhD in particular is something that's so personal, it is so customized to you with a dissertation and a specific study that you're interested in.
You always were supportive of whatever topic I pitched your way. I appreciate that outlook and that advice. Thank you. So, let's talk about research in fit technology. How did you become a professor at Cornell University?
Susan Ashdown (23:20): Oh boy, well there's a story too. I had been working in the theater department, a lecturer in costume technology, and basically got to a stage where I knew that wasn't where needed to be. So did the master's program. Then of course they didn't have PhD program at that time. I hadn't really done much when I finished my master's towards looking for a place to go.
I don't know if it appeared on a bulletin board or someone told me there's a research stipend at the University of Minnesota. You might want to look into that. And so said, OK, I'll do that. When I graduated from my undergraduate degree, I'd gone to Minnesota and started a master's degree in apparel and costuming. Never finished it. Got into a head's butting with my advisors who wanted me to do a written thesis, and I wanted to do a practical thesis, the maker in me coming out again.
Jackie Morreale (24:15): Oh my gosh, can't picture it.
Susan Ashdown (24:17): I knew the city. I knew I loved living there. At that point, I just married my husband, and we just bought a house in Ithaca. But hey, you know… we sold the house, moved to Minneapolis. So, I was doing that degree.
It would normally be a three-to-five-year degree, but because I had been at Minnesota and taken so many of their classes when I was in the theater department, I had a leg up. After two years, I was ready to start my dissertation. I heard that a position at Cornell that had been filled was open again. The person that they had hired had declined to come. It was open again! I called him up and I said, Could I come in and interview? I'm not finished my PhD, but I'd love to come interview. They said yes.
I went back to Ithaca, interviewed for the position that I eventually got. They basically said, we'll hold it for you for a year while you finish your dissertation. Well, that was the fastest dissertation on record. The original concept for the published dissertation was one year!
I knew I loved it because I loved Cornell. That's how I ended up here.
(Continued below)
Susan Ashdown (18:35): Yes, absolutely, with both my sister and my brother. We're very close. Not in distance; my brother lives in North Carolina, my sister lives in South Carolina. But we have a great relationship. My sister had an entirely different life than I had. She had four kids. She lived abroad most of her life. When she got back to this country with her teenage kids, she went back to college. She got a master's degree. She got a PhD in mathematics and taught for several years before she retired at a university.
Jackie Morreale (19:02): Good for her, wow. So, you're both in academia at the end of the day, both extremely powerhouse, intelligent women who got their PhD and informing other minds and the way we think about things and research. Interesting!
Susan Ashdown (19:11): Yes!
Jackie Morreale (19:23): Were there any key learnings from the way that you grew up that you applied to your textile and apparel research?
Susan Ashdown (19:30): Certainly, as a young person making my own clothes, I certainly practiced all those skills. I've always been interested in our world and in the things that touch us most closely.
In theater, you have to do a fast costume change sometimes, so you have to have this beautiful, exquisite costume and get them into another beautiful, exquisite costume in 30 seconds. It's a challenge and that's what made that fascinating to me.
I'm glad I started out in theater because in theater I was fitting so many different bodies and body types with so many different objectives.
Of course, movement was always primary as the actress let you know.
We had to teach the actresses how to move in a corset. If you were in a corset and tried to move in a modern way, you're not going to be able to breathe. If you had to stop the posture and keep it and move in the way that was appropriate for that period, then you'll be fine.
Jackie Morreale (20:20): Let alone sing, right?
Susan Ashdown (20:22): We did not do opera, thank goodness. We did a couple of musicals, but that's as far as we went.
Jackie Morreale (20:26): One of the things I really love about theater is how so many different artists come together to create the production. Whether you're the costume designer or you're the scenic designer or the lighting designer or choreographer or talent on stage, it comes together to create the masterpiece. It's such a collaborative effort. That's the beauty behind theatrical projects for me.
Susan Ashdown (20:50): Theater teaches you collaboration – but it's deeper than that.
That way of interacting with other creative people that you NEED in order to be creative yourself. You can't do it yourself in any area of theater, it's obviously out there right front and center. But it's true of anything.
Jackie Morreale (21:12): Agree. You need the other areas to excel. It's beyond collaboration.
What advice would you give to someone looking to start a new graduate journey?
Susan Ashdown (21:15): It's important to keep your eyes open for those ways that you need to find to make it your own, because you'll never be a good student if you're just following the path that someone else has led you to.
I think one of the biggest problems with education today, starting with elementary school, and quite frankly, a big reason we're in the situation we are today in this country.
For the longest time, students have been taught that they're in school to learn. That is absolutely wrong. You are not there to learn. Your teachers are not there to teach you. They can't open your head up and pour stuff in. You shouldn't let them try because that's not what education is all about.
You are in school to create your own educational journey and to shape it to yourself. You need to learn how to learn. You don't need to be taught. You need to learn how to learn! That's the key to success in anything, education as well as your life, is being able to be a student of life.
As a student in some kind of educational program, you can lose track of that and you're going to be a student of whatever that topic is. But you need to be a student of life and frame everything around that.
Jackie Morreale (22:45): That’s so inspiring! I'm ready to go and do some life study. I'm very motivated. Thank you for that. I agree with you. It starts at all levels. But the PhD in particular is something that's so personal, it is so customized to you with a dissertation and a specific study that you're interested in.
You always were supportive of whatever topic I pitched your way. I appreciate that outlook and that advice. Thank you. So, let's talk about research in fit technology. How did you become a professor at Cornell University?
Susan Ashdown (23:20): Oh boy, well there's a story too. I had been working in the theater department, a lecturer in costume technology, and basically got to a stage where I knew that wasn't where needed to be. So did the master's program. Then of course they didn't have PhD program at that time. I hadn't really done much when I finished my master's towards looking for a place to go.
I don't know if it appeared on a bulletin board or someone told me there's a research stipend at the University of Minnesota. You might want to look into that. And so said, OK, I'll do that. When I graduated from my undergraduate degree, I'd gone to Minnesota and started a master's degree in apparel and costuming. Never finished it. Got into a head's butting with my advisors who wanted me to do a written thesis, and I wanted to do a practical thesis, the maker in me coming out again.
Jackie Morreale (24:15): Oh my gosh, can't picture it.
Susan Ashdown (24:17): I knew the city. I knew I loved living there. At that point, I just married my husband, and we just bought a house in Ithaca. But hey, you know… we sold the house, moved to Minneapolis. So, I was doing that degree.
It would normally be a three-to-five-year degree, but because I had been at Minnesota and taken so many of their classes when I was in the theater department, I had a leg up. After two years, I was ready to start my dissertation. I heard that a position at Cornell that had been filled was open again. The person that they had hired had declined to come. It was open again! I called him up and I said, Could I come in and interview? I'm not finished my PhD, but I'd love to come interview. They said yes.
I went back to Ithaca, interviewed for the position that I eventually got. They basically said, we'll hold it for you for a year while you finish your dissertation. Well, that was the fastest dissertation on record. The original concept for the published dissertation was one year!
I knew I loved it because I loved Cornell. That's how I ended up here.
(Continued below)
(Continued)
Jackie Morreale (25:27): Wow, so you had gotten married in Ithaca, bought a home together in Ithaca, sold it to go do your PhD in Minnesota, and then came back to Ithaca. At a profit! So it worked out, and hopefully you came back and found an even better house.
Susan Ashdown (25:32): Yes. That's a story in itself. While we were in Minnesota, I decided I'd probably end up at a Midwestern university. Why not? Great universities there. So we had bought a house in Minnesota. Three years later, we're selling the house at a loss and moving back to the country.
Jackie Morreale (26:00): You never know what you're going to get in life, but it sounds like it worked out for the long term in Ithaca.
Susan Ashdown (26:05): I've always been confident that life will give me opportunities if I'm willing to take them and steer me in directions that end up being good for me. If it's not happening, then there's a reason. I've always felt that strongly.
Jackie Morreale (26:15): Yes. What was your favorite topic to teach while at Cornell?
Susan Ashdown: Draping.
Jackie Morreale: Draping. Honestly, I think we all felt that. From the second we walked into the draping class that you taught, I think it was second year. Whenever I see a bolt of muslin, I just kind of get excited. The idea that you can create anything from a flat pattern if you drape it the right way, is amazing.
Susan Ashdown (26:23): I love draping. That's the ‘hands-on’ part for me. Anything that I can touch and create and shape and create makes me I love the process of passing on that knowledge of how to manipulate it and what the value is in creating on a 3D object.
Jackie Morreale (27:01): I remember you taught us that anything haute couture if you were to put it on a hanger it just wouldn't have that hanger appeal and that's when you know that something is draped and someone has thought about it in 3d and has that designers touch to it.
Susan Ashdown (27:06): Yes. You remember all these good things. I like it.
Jackie Morreale (27:20): Absolutely. It's amazing what a good teacher will do. It just sticks in your head and you can never get rid of it. Thank you.
I really enjoyed all your classes and draping was one of my favorites. So, I can see that. When you really love teaching something, your students can feel it. What was your research journey like? Are there any highlights from among your published books or articles? Anything that you want to share?
Susan Ashdown (27:46): The research journey was very interesting. I had thought that I would do functional apparel design, but I got so fascinated with this question of sizing and fit while I was at Minnesota. So, the beginning, for almost 10 years, I was working on sizing research.
Cornell is a major research institution. They have really high expectations for their faculty. It also attracts wonderful students. The great thing was, I had amazing students. We didn't have a PhD program at that point, but great students that did much more advanced work than the normal Master’s student, that's for sure. That really helped me in my research to have those wonderful, wonderful colleagues, basically. But I was working with the tape measure, and you can't really generate much when it takes you 45 minutes with each subject, with each person that you're studying to try and understand the variation in the population and how that interacts with our ready-to-wear fitting system, which is basically what my research was.
When I got that body scanner, which was just a wonderful happenstance, we were only the second apparel program in the country to get a body scanner. This was right at the beginning of that technology. It was an alumna that came and talked to me about something else entirely and called the college up a year later and said, Susan needs a body scanner. How can we make that happen? That changed everything.
For the last almost 20 years of my research, I had that really powerful tool. It was difficult because we were new and we're doing research that no one had done before. That meant that the publications were tricky because academic publishing literally builds in tiny increments on previous work. And there was no previous work. So, we had to validate what we were doing at the same time as we were writing about the project. Sometimes that took four or five iterations of the article to get that through. But we were pretty successful. That was great.
Jackie Morreale (29:38): Over 100 articles later, I would say yes.
Susan Ashdown (29:59): What was really interesting was, maybe four years before I retired, I came to the conclusion that all the work we'd done, although valuable, was mostly valuable in showing how what we were trying to do, make ready to wear work, was not going to happen. Ready to wear can't work. Ready to wear is not a valid way of fitting the population. I know worldwide it's what we're doing, but it's not valid. You can't do it. You leave too many people out of this system. That was interesting. When we made the transition from custom to ready-made clothing, those first 20, 30, 40 years, it was never intended to be ready-to-wear.
It was ready made. Yes, you made a garment in advance. And then the process was to fit it on a person and alter it to fit. In a department store, that meant you went straight to the alterations department. The cost was included in the cost of the garment, and it was shaped to you. At home, that meant that the wife or the aunt or the sister or somebody who knew how to sew, would alter it to fit you. But we lost that.
Suddenly, Ready Made became ready-to-wear and became an impossible system.
Jackie Morreale (31:08): Agree. You can't fit everybody and you also can't customize for everybody. Is there some sort of a middle ground, like a mass customization, or is it in the alterations once you, get that ready-made clothing? What's the solution? Just curious.
Susan Ashdown (31:21): Right. Considering that apparel right now is disastrous, it's totally unsustainable. It's creating horrible environmental and social ills all over the world. Yeah, fashion. Yeah. That's the first step. It's to step back from so much clothing.
Jackie Morreale (31:33): Sustainability wise, because of fast fashion.
Susan Ashdown (31:41): Every one of us has closets stuffed with clothing we don't wear. Yeah, every single person in this country. There might be two or three people who don't do that, but they're rare. Because the system forces you into it. You need something for an event or your life, whatever, and you go and buy something and it's okay.
You wear it for a while and then it gradually morphs to the back of your closet, where you go back to those old favorites, that you wear over and over and over again because they fit you well and because they function well. There are so few pieces in your closet that do that, that you keep wearing those. Unfortunately, we don't often, when those start to wear out, mend them or try and extend their life, which would be a good thing to do. We just don't have the skills or the ability to do that. So that's what we need.
First, we need people to buy fewer clothes.
Second, we need to take the clothes that work and extend their life by providing ways for them to be mended and made ⁓ fresh, made to work.
Third, we need something closer to custom. It quite literally could be the same as a farmers’ market for our food system. Not everyone can go to a farmer's market. I understand that. But a good part of the population can. And a good part of the population can say, I'm not going to eat things out of season. I'm not going to buy strawberries that have been shipped from California because it's unsustainable. I think we can do the same thing with clothing if we support local seamstress and seamstresses and make it work. Can I get on a hobby horse?
Jackie Morreale (33:12): Yes, please do!
Susan Ashdown (33:21): I think I have an answer to how that can work because it's hard to make clothing that fits. No question.
It takes a really skilled person to do that and not every community will have that. I think the way technology can help us is that it can make custom dress forms and the fact that you can make them half scale and work in half scale on a dress form.
Yes, that they can either give to a family member that know how to sew, or a person in a close town to you that knows how to use them. Then that eliminates or reduces drastically the fitting part of that, which is the part that takes such skill and is so hard to do. That's my hobby horse for the moment.
Jackie Morreale (34:03): I'm inspired. I want to get out my singer and think about my half dress form.
Wow, to think about apparel in the way that we think about a farmer's market is such an inspiring idea. And really taking a lot of that really specialized customization work local, like we've done with food, and by informing customers that their buying choices will impact the industry as a whole. It's an interesting way to look at it.
Susan Ashdown (34:27): Yeah. Then if we can get clothes that fit and function well, then we won't have the necessity to keep buying and buying and buying.
Jackie Morreale (34:39): Right, buying stuff that doesn't really fit and thinking there's something wrong with us and wearing it a couple times, throwing it out or not using it and buying more.
Susan Ashdown (34:49): Big change and a lot of problems with that, but I really strongly feel that ready-to-wear is not working. So, we have got to do something.
Jackie Morreale (34:51): Sounds good to me.
Are there any areas of the world that you can see this being adopted quicker? I'm thinking of the Parisian woman who buys a couple of investment pieces that really fit and are high quality that they can depend on for years to come.
Susan Ashdown (35:07): Yeah, exactly. Also places where the existing traditional clothing has not been discarded. So all the women in India that still wear saris. It's true in a lot of places that, the domestic industry has been destroyed by cheap, badly designed, Western influenced clothing, but there are still places that haven't been.
Jackie Morreale (35:40): Exactly. I know we talked a lot about sustainability, and I agree. It's very important, especially in this industry.
In terms of research, can you share any practical advice for someone looking to publish their research, perhaps for the first time?
Susan Ashdown (35:45): There's so many different kinds of research.
I think reading what research is out there, reading publications that have been published, starting to find out which publications are the ones that you want to aim your work towards.
That can be an issue of cost, because some cost more to publish in than others. It can be an issue of audience, where it's focused. It's important to have at least an idea of where you want to put that before you even get started on the research. You'll do yourself a favor if you do that.
Then, don't be discouraged. Expect revision. You can't do anything all by yourself. Even bad reviewers can give you good advice.
This is, if you should have done something differently and need to redo or re-focus something. Or they're not understanding what you're doing and that means you haven't written in a way that it can be understood.
Never say, oh, that reviewer doesn't know what they're talking about. I'm going to ignore it.
Use it. Use the comments to improve your article. Just build that time in. You're going to be doing revisions and sometimes extensive ones. Know that it will only be to the good of the paper eventually.
Jackie Morreale (36:55): Do you think that it gets easier to publish with time?
Susan Ashdown (37:17): It depends on the field.
I am in such a small field, and the research we were doing was so new. It's all supposed to be double blind, but my reviewers knew what it was mainly for my students, pretty much.
Jackie Morreale (37:32): Well, being a pioneer in all this research for fit of clothing, I would imagine, it's a limited set of peers who are going to review your stuff.
Susan Ashdown (37:36): I think it does just because you learn, you don't have unachievable expectations. You learn what this whole research is all about and what your place in it is. I think it gets easier then. But in terms of the hard work involved, no, it's always hard work. Yeah, it's just how much fun is it?
Jackie Morreale (37:58): It's always hard work. Exactly!
Anything else you'd like to talk about today?
Susan Ashdown (38:05): Again, I have a maker passion that I'm really engaged with right now, along with everything else I do. It's nice because it's a little different and it's where I go to relax more than anything else.
That is that I've started doing stained glass art. I've done stained glass for quite a while, doing traditional kinds of stained glass. But when I came back to it, I realized the part that I liked about it was making shapes. My work kept getting smaller and smaller. This is what I like. This is what I'm going to do. It's nice because I can use glass from other artists. I recycle glass. I don’t very often buy new glass because I'm doing such small pieces.
I call it jewelry for the window and pieces tend to be like three inches or six inches. They're very small. I like organic shapes. I'm always grinding the glass into shapes. I use silver solder, again, because it's jewelry for the window. So, you can wear it, too. The silver solder has no lead, which is nice. Yeah, I just love it.
Jackie Morreale (39:08): You're writing, you're designing window jewelry, you have this pending move and you're teaching, you're going to a new university to teach in a new country. I've learned so much. Thank you! Have a wonderful day and let's do this again soon.
Susan Ashdown (39:23): Thank you. It's been fun. Sounds good. Bye!
(Continued below)
Jackie Morreale (25:27): Wow, so you had gotten married in Ithaca, bought a home together in Ithaca, sold it to go do your PhD in Minnesota, and then came back to Ithaca. At a profit! So it worked out, and hopefully you came back and found an even better house.
Susan Ashdown (25:32): Yes. That's a story in itself. While we were in Minnesota, I decided I'd probably end up at a Midwestern university. Why not? Great universities there. So we had bought a house in Minnesota. Three years later, we're selling the house at a loss and moving back to the country.
Jackie Morreale (26:00): You never know what you're going to get in life, but it sounds like it worked out for the long term in Ithaca.
Susan Ashdown (26:05): I've always been confident that life will give me opportunities if I'm willing to take them and steer me in directions that end up being good for me. If it's not happening, then there's a reason. I've always felt that strongly.
Jackie Morreale (26:15): Yes. What was your favorite topic to teach while at Cornell?
Susan Ashdown: Draping.
Jackie Morreale: Draping. Honestly, I think we all felt that. From the second we walked into the draping class that you taught, I think it was second year. Whenever I see a bolt of muslin, I just kind of get excited. The idea that you can create anything from a flat pattern if you drape it the right way, is amazing.
Susan Ashdown (26:23): I love draping. That's the ‘hands-on’ part for me. Anything that I can touch and create and shape and create makes me I love the process of passing on that knowledge of how to manipulate it and what the value is in creating on a 3D object.
Jackie Morreale (27:01): I remember you taught us that anything haute couture if you were to put it on a hanger it just wouldn't have that hanger appeal and that's when you know that something is draped and someone has thought about it in 3d and has that designers touch to it.
Susan Ashdown (27:06): Yes. You remember all these good things. I like it.
Jackie Morreale (27:20): Absolutely. It's amazing what a good teacher will do. It just sticks in your head and you can never get rid of it. Thank you.
I really enjoyed all your classes and draping was one of my favorites. So, I can see that. When you really love teaching something, your students can feel it. What was your research journey like? Are there any highlights from among your published books or articles? Anything that you want to share?
Susan Ashdown (27:46): The research journey was very interesting. I had thought that I would do functional apparel design, but I got so fascinated with this question of sizing and fit while I was at Minnesota. So, the beginning, for almost 10 years, I was working on sizing research.
Cornell is a major research institution. They have really high expectations for their faculty. It also attracts wonderful students. The great thing was, I had amazing students. We didn't have a PhD program at that point, but great students that did much more advanced work than the normal Master’s student, that's for sure. That really helped me in my research to have those wonderful, wonderful colleagues, basically. But I was working with the tape measure, and you can't really generate much when it takes you 45 minutes with each subject, with each person that you're studying to try and understand the variation in the population and how that interacts with our ready-to-wear fitting system, which is basically what my research was.
When I got that body scanner, which was just a wonderful happenstance, we were only the second apparel program in the country to get a body scanner. This was right at the beginning of that technology. It was an alumna that came and talked to me about something else entirely and called the college up a year later and said, Susan needs a body scanner. How can we make that happen? That changed everything.
For the last almost 20 years of my research, I had that really powerful tool. It was difficult because we were new and we're doing research that no one had done before. That meant that the publications were tricky because academic publishing literally builds in tiny increments on previous work. And there was no previous work. So, we had to validate what we were doing at the same time as we were writing about the project. Sometimes that took four or five iterations of the article to get that through. But we were pretty successful. That was great.
Jackie Morreale (29:38): Over 100 articles later, I would say yes.
Susan Ashdown (29:59): What was really interesting was, maybe four years before I retired, I came to the conclusion that all the work we'd done, although valuable, was mostly valuable in showing how what we were trying to do, make ready to wear work, was not going to happen. Ready to wear can't work. Ready to wear is not a valid way of fitting the population. I know worldwide it's what we're doing, but it's not valid. You can't do it. You leave too many people out of this system. That was interesting. When we made the transition from custom to ready-made clothing, those first 20, 30, 40 years, it was never intended to be ready-to-wear.
It was ready made. Yes, you made a garment in advance. And then the process was to fit it on a person and alter it to fit. In a department store, that meant you went straight to the alterations department. The cost was included in the cost of the garment, and it was shaped to you. At home, that meant that the wife or the aunt or the sister or somebody who knew how to sew, would alter it to fit you. But we lost that.
Suddenly, Ready Made became ready-to-wear and became an impossible system.
Jackie Morreale (31:08): Agree. You can't fit everybody and you also can't customize for everybody. Is there some sort of a middle ground, like a mass customization, or is it in the alterations once you, get that ready-made clothing? What's the solution? Just curious.
Susan Ashdown (31:21): Right. Considering that apparel right now is disastrous, it's totally unsustainable. It's creating horrible environmental and social ills all over the world. Yeah, fashion. Yeah. That's the first step. It's to step back from so much clothing.
Jackie Morreale (31:33): Sustainability wise, because of fast fashion.
Susan Ashdown (31:41): Every one of us has closets stuffed with clothing we don't wear. Yeah, every single person in this country. There might be two or three people who don't do that, but they're rare. Because the system forces you into it. You need something for an event or your life, whatever, and you go and buy something and it's okay.
You wear it for a while and then it gradually morphs to the back of your closet, where you go back to those old favorites, that you wear over and over and over again because they fit you well and because they function well. There are so few pieces in your closet that do that, that you keep wearing those. Unfortunately, we don't often, when those start to wear out, mend them or try and extend their life, which would be a good thing to do. We just don't have the skills or the ability to do that. So that's what we need.
First, we need people to buy fewer clothes.
Second, we need to take the clothes that work and extend their life by providing ways for them to be mended and made ⁓ fresh, made to work.
Third, we need something closer to custom. It quite literally could be the same as a farmers’ market for our food system. Not everyone can go to a farmer's market. I understand that. But a good part of the population can. And a good part of the population can say, I'm not going to eat things out of season. I'm not going to buy strawberries that have been shipped from California because it's unsustainable. I think we can do the same thing with clothing if we support local seamstress and seamstresses and make it work. Can I get on a hobby horse?
Jackie Morreale (33:12): Yes, please do!
Susan Ashdown (33:21): I think I have an answer to how that can work because it's hard to make clothing that fits. No question.
It takes a really skilled person to do that and not every community will have that. I think the way technology can help us is that it can make custom dress forms and the fact that you can make them half scale and work in half scale on a dress form.
Yes, that they can either give to a family member that know how to sew, or a person in a close town to you that knows how to use them. Then that eliminates or reduces drastically the fitting part of that, which is the part that takes such skill and is so hard to do. That's my hobby horse for the moment.
Jackie Morreale (34:03): I'm inspired. I want to get out my singer and think about my half dress form.
Wow, to think about apparel in the way that we think about a farmer's market is such an inspiring idea. And really taking a lot of that really specialized customization work local, like we've done with food, and by informing customers that their buying choices will impact the industry as a whole. It's an interesting way to look at it.
Susan Ashdown (34:27): Yeah. Then if we can get clothes that fit and function well, then we won't have the necessity to keep buying and buying and buying.
Jackie Morreale (34:39): Right, buying stuff that doesn't really fit and thinking there's something wrong with us and wearing it a couple times, throwing it out or not using it and buying more.
Susan Ashdown (34:49): Big change and a lot of problems with that, but I really strongly feel that ready-to-wear is not working. So, we have got to do something.
Jackie Morreale (34:51): Sounds good to me.
Are there any areas of the world that you can see this being adopted quicker? I'm thinking of the Parisian woman who buys a couple of investment pieces that really fit and are high quality that they can depend on for years to come.
Susan Ashdown (35:07): Yeah, exactly. Also places where the existing traditional clothing has not been discarded. So all the women in India that still wear saris. It's true in a lot of places that, the domestic industry has been destroyed by cheap, badly designed, Western influenced clothing, but there are still places that haven't been.
Jackie Morreale (35:40): Exactly. I know we talked a lot about sustainability, and I agree. It's very important, especially in this industry.
In terms of research, can you share any practical advice for someone looking to publish their research, perhaps for the first time?
Susan Ashdown (35:45): There's so many different kinds of research.
I think reading what research is out there, reading publications that have been published, starting to find out which publications are the ones that you want to aim your work towards.
That can be an issue of cost, because some cost more to publish in than others. It can be an issue of audience, where it's focused. It's important to have at least an idea of where you want to put that before you even get started on the research. You'll do yourself a favor if you do that.
Then, don't be discouraged. Expect revision. You can't do anything all by yourself. Even bad reviewers can give you good advice.
This is, if you should have done something differently and need to redo or re-focus something. Or they're not understanding what you're doing and that means you haven't written in a way that it can be understood.
Never say, oh, that reviewer doesn't know what they're talking about. I'm going to ignore it.
Use it. Use the comments to improve your article. Just build that time in. You're going to be doing revisions and sometimes extensive ones. Know that it will only be to the good of the paper eventually.
Jackie Morreale (36:55): Do you think that it gets easier to publish with time?
Susan Ashdown (37:17): It depends on the field.
I am in such a small field, and the research we were doing was so new. It's all supposed to be double blind, but my reviewers knew what it was mainly for my students, pretty much.
Jackie Morreale (37:32): Well, being a pioneer in all this research for fit of clothing, I would imagine, it's a limited set of peers who are going to review your stuff.
Susan Ashdown (37:36): I think it does just because you learn, you don't have unachievable expectations. You learn what this whole research is all about and what your place in it is. I think it gets easier then. But in terms of the hard work involved, no, it's always hard work. Yeah, it's just how much fun is it?
Jackie Morreale (37:58): It's always hard work. Exactly!
Anything else you'd like to talk about today?
Susan Ashdown (38:05): Again, I have a maker passion that I'm really engaged with right now, along with everything else I do. It's nice because it's a little different and it's where I go to relax more than anything else.
That is that I've started doing stained glass art. I've done stained glass for quite a while, doing traditional kinds of stained glass. But when I came back to it, I realized the part that I liked about it was making shapes. My work kept getting smaller and smaller. This is what I like. This is what I'm going to do. It's nice because I can use glass from other artists. I recycle glass. I don’t very often buy new glass because I'm doing such small pieces.
I call it jewelry for the window and pieces tend to be like three inches or six inches. They're very small. I like organic shapes. I'm always grinding the glass into shapes. I use silver solder, again, because it's jewelry for the window. So, you can wear it, too. The silver solder has no lead, which is nice. Yeah, I just love it.
Jackie Morreale (39:08): You're writing, you're designing window jewelry, you have this pending move and you're teaching, you're going to a new university to teach in a new country. I've learned so much. Thank you! Have a wonderful day and let's do this again soon.
Susan Ashdown (39:23): Thank you. It's been fun. Sounds good. Bye!
(Continued below)
Continued Reading, by Susan Ashdown, PhD:
Draping for Apparel Design, 4th Edition
by Helen Joseph-Armstrong (Author), Susan P. Ashdown (Author) |
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