The Persistence of Patterns. From Strong Subjectivity to Local and Global Sartorial Exchanges

Located at the intersection of autoethnography and art and design history, this contribution focuses on the creative dimension of labor migration in the Austrian textile industry from the 1970s to the 2000s. Elif Süsler-Rohringer critically reflects on her self-situatedness as a recently migrated artist and textile designer from Turkey to Austria. The recruitment of “guest workers” from Turkey began with an official agreement in 1964 to compensate for the shortage of industrial labor in Austria. Vorarlberg and Vienna were the centers of migration, as these were the regions where the country’s embroidery and textile industry was located. Through archival research, Süsler-Rohringer examines the institutional dimension of the question: How were creativity and skilled work assessed in the context of labor migration? This essay takes the example of patterns — design models for clothes — to narrate the gaps and discontinuities of the archival material. It asks how to employ patterns not just as objects of research but also as a concept and methodology to analyze the material, cultural, and social experience of creative labor migration.