My grandmother was a tailor

Abstract

In this article I evoke key elements of my Italian grandmother's life—her knitwear workshop, her practice as a tailor, and her sensorial engagements with bodies and dress—and interweave them with reflections from my fieldwork in Milan, Italy. Family stories about my grandmother are steeped in things that have disappeared—objects and materialities, forms of women's work, and familiar places in a changing city. Loss and absence are here a particular form of memory that shapes relations between generations of women. I am particularly interested in the difficulties of researching the lives of women when these center objects, places, senses, and experiences that have been displaced as part of historical and cultural change. To this end, I draw from the work of Italian anthropologist Ernesto de Martino. His attention to losing one's place as a form of presence, and to magic as a strategy for noticing that which disappears, helps me consider the stories of my grandmother alongside the changing roles of small tailors and dressmakers. In this context, “intimate ethnography” is a strategy to attend to gendered and historically precarious work while taking into consideration its performative, material, and embodied aspects.