Punk smocking is textile manipulation through extemporary stitching that covers damage while reshaping and enhancing almost any garment. The name combines the 1970s counterculture movement with the geometrical dimensional technique seen on shepherds’ smocks from the eighteenth century, aesthetic dress in the late-nineteenth and early-twentieth, and little girls’ party dresses to this day.
As with many styles and modes of visible mending, punk smocking also draws inspiration from Bengali/Bangladeshi kantha, and from bold and extreme art stitchers, including Maggie Gill, Judith Scott, Arthur Bispo do Rosario, and Dunya Hirschter Koprolčec. An important influence on this technique, which alters form as much as it embellishes surface, is stitchwork from the Nui Project at Shobu Gakuen, Kagoshima, Japan, where neurodivergent residents embroider freely and intensively, taking a year or more to complete a piece. Indeed, as participants in this workshop will discover, the contentment fostered by this addictive, unplanned fusion of self, cloth, needle and thread is a profound form of menditation.
Under Kate’s guidance, students will learn various techniques of punk smocking, leaving with the tools to continue their journey in radical wardrobe intervention.
Date
Sunday, September 13th, 2026
Time
2:00-5:00 pm ET
Location
Tatter Textile Library: 505 Carroll Street, #2B, Brooklyn, NY 11215
Cost
$100
Class Materials
All materials will be provided.
Our Teacher
Cultural and dress historian Kate Sekules researches and teaches mending as both an academic field and practical skill. A former journalist, she brings mending to diverse audiences through lectures, courses, symposium papers, clinics, events, media appearances, and exhibitions. Sekules holds a doctorate in material culture with a dissertation titled A History and Theory of Mending (Bard Graduate Center), and an MA in costume studies (NYU), and is Assistant Professor of Fashion History at Pratt Institute and of “Mending Fashion” at Parsons School of Design (BA) and BGC (MA). Her publications include MEND! A Refashioning Manual and Manifesto (Penguin, 2020).