My research was about what kinds of socks Rietveld people wear and how they wear their socks. Every day in school I see many people roll up their pants and show their colorful, various kinds of socks. That interests me and triggered me to do this research.
Socks have evolved over the centuries from the earliest models which were made from animal skins gathered up and tied around the ankles. Nowadays, socks can be created from a wide variety of materials like as cotton, wool, nylon, acrylic, polyester, etc. Styles or patterns are innumerable, one color, dots, stripes, argyles, complex patterns…
So I started collecting pictures of different kinds of socks in school, and ask the people questions like where they are from, where they got the socks, why they roll up pants to show two socks.
Polka dot is a very common pattern, it gives a lively and playful feeling, also the color combination on this pattern is often contrast, vivid, for example, black and white, red and yellow, pink and white, etc. Many Rietveld people wear socks with Polka dots, and they are from everywhere, while the pattern started to appear on clothing in the late 19th century in United Kingdom.
Another common pattern is stripe. They are so common and worldwide popular that I could not even find a convincing origin of them… You can see them almost everywhere in your daily life, also it is a very normal pattern on socks, I am personally not a fan of stripes but I believe I have at least four pairs of socks that with stripes.
One-colored socks are also quite popular in school, there are basically two ways of wearing them: 1. Dark colors, “hiding” in between pants and shoes, they are there but you don’t really notice them; 2. vivid colors, like pink, skyblue, or even neon colors, sometimes they also wear just white socks while their pants and shoes are black, to create this contrast, to catch your eyeballs.
I noticed that many Scandinavian people in school wear socks with argyle patterns, which is kind of interesting because this pattern is originally from Scotland in th 17th century. In Rietveld, argyles socks are often in combination with aged oldschool sneakers.
I also noticed that some people wear 2 different socks on each foot, when I asked some of them about the reason, they said they simply could not find the other socks.
As for the reason that people roll up their pants and show their socks, the most frequent given answer I got from people was ‘just for the style‘. Some say when the pants are too long, they look lazy and drab, they roll up the pants to keep the energy up. Some people simply love socks, they collect all kinds of socks (one girl I interviewed says she has four big boxes of socks), they are proud of their socks and they want to show them to people.
My idea was to exaggerate the fact that people show their socks, make it a bit extreme. So I made a huge socks that you put on your head.
