Muy Marcottage fashion is Bricolage Styled!

Bricolage is taking something old and, via context, making it new. It comes from the French verb bricoler meaning “fiddle, tinker.” A person who engages in bricolage is a bricoleur. And a bricoleur has the capacity to take available materials and, using hands and imagination, give them a new identity.

The French anthropologist Claude Lévi-Strauss used the word bricolage to explain a means of acquiring knowledge and, in particular, mythical thought. Because mythology dabbles with existing knowledge to create new meaning.

However, my interest for the term came from reading the biologist, François Jacob, and his idea that evolution is a tinkerer. Because, to evolve, nature adapts what already exists.

And it is the spirit of the bricoleur that we must have in order to transform our trash into a resource. Why make things using virgin materials when there is so much that we throw away that can be used instead. The mind of the bricoleur is not standardized. Not producing in mass, he does not use an assembly-line approach to creating. He creates what he needs with what he has.

Bricolage makes the useless useful. In terms of trash, a bricoleur can transform vice into virtue.

Mended Curb, via Tagliamento, Rome…a curb mended with pre-existing san pietrini thus an example of bricolage

Cynthia Korzekwa © 2010