FEELS LIKE HOME - Designing America

‘

Marc Jacobs, Winter 2010 | The Armoury, New York

By the time I finally got around to visiting New York Fashion Week, I thought I’d know what to expect. I’d had several years’ worth of London shows to go by, as well as the smooth elegance and sticky heat of Paris and Milan. It took barely as long as it did for the jet lag to dissolve, though, for it to feel unlike any fashion week I’d ever been to. First off, there was Manhattan itself - a narrow island with a sky sliced up by blocks of steel and glass and stone, and gridded with those long, smooth streets cut into angles of sun and shadow. I’d been before, but never sensed how intensely compact it was; how closely packed, how reduced, how strangely village-like. And that small grid was populated by a chess-board of unfamiliar faces; to much of the world press, New York fashion just doesn’t constitute news - and so much of the usual line-up was missing, replaced by an alternative hierarchy which felt deeply, unfathomably local.

Inside the Lincoln Centre (where entry was un-blag-past-ably barcoded, no margin for confusion or dispute), the queues were full of immaculate women in pairs and small groups, lined up in quiet out-of-towner excitement. They came, by and large, to buy, not to write; and to see not something new, but something nice. And then the shows themselves were so smooth, so sleek, so monotonously harmonious. Tall, tanned girls in lean, flat sheaths. Whites, beiges, greys, metals; a New York dresscode laid down two decades ago by Klein, Karan and Lang, and refined to a fluid, fluent minimum of fabric floating away from skin. 

And I was surprised, too, at how few off-schedule presentations there were; just a handful of alternative venues here and there, according to an individual designer’s capacity to lure an audience away from the Lincoln Centre’s well-marshalled, all-inclusive convenience; but practically nothing of that ragged, don’t-get-your-hopes-up, door-stampeding pile of possibility that makes London in particular so unevenly exciting. It was as though the idea of an alternative vision simply didn’t exist.

‘But you can’t start. Only a baby can start. You and me - why, we’re all that’s been. The anger of a moment, the thousand pictures, that’s us. This land, this red land, is us; and the flood years and the dust years and the drought years are us. We can’t start again. The bitterness we sold to the junk man - he got it all right, but we have it still. And when the owner men told us to go, that’s us; and when the tractor hit the house, that’s us until we’re dead.’

John Steinbeck, The Grapes of Wrath, 1939

‘Then Laura pulled up the picket pins. One by one, she led Ellen, the baby calf and the yearling calf to fresh places in the soft, cool grass. She drove the iron pins deep into the ground. The sun was fully up now, the whole sky was blue, and the whole earth was waves of grass flowing in the wind.’

Laura Ingalls Wilder, Little Town on the Prairie, 1941

But amidst it all, outsiders still managed to crop up in out-of-the-way corners, showing to strays in West Village galleries and waterfront warehouses and cavernous industrial  shells - everything from Ivana Helskinki’s wayward, gloriously quirky hymn to retro Americana, through to young Canadian designer Jeremy Laing’s gentle textures, extracted from California’s half-Biblical landscapes. 

Laing only barely qualitfies as an outsider, but that border crossing gave his collection, with its’ earth-washed hues and crumbled surfaces and loose apron shapes an sense of distance and romance which for the only time that week reminded me that this tiny, intense island city wasn’t the all-encompassing world of newness it seemed - that it came tethered to a vast, quiet continent somewhere over the horizon. 

The idea of American-ness has been around as long (more or less) as America itself (that is, as long as the America that Europeans discovered and then subsequently invented). But it took half of the twentieth century, with its’ shattering wars and the long, bleak depression that spanned in between, for America to recognise and celebrate that identity - and, just as importantly, for the rest of the world to understand and embrace it. 

“Go on,” said Lennie.
George raised the gun and his hand shook, and he dropped his hand to the ground again.
“Go on,” said Lennie.  “How’s it gonna be.  We gonna get a little place.”
“We’ll have a cow,” said George.  “An’ we’ll have maybe a pig an’ chickens…an’ down the flat we’ll have a…little piece alfalfa———-”
“For the rabbits,” Lennie shouted.
“For the rabbits,” George repeated.

John Steinbeck, Of Mice and Men, 1937

‘In the West the land was level, and there were no trees. The grass grew thick and high. There the wild animals wandered and fed as though they were in a pasture that stretched much farther than a man could see, and there were no settlers.’

Laura Ingalls Wilder, Little House on the Prairie, 1935

And it took until the Seventies - the last great era of economic depression - for American designers in general (and Ralph Lauren in particular) to engage with the idea of an indigenous fashion heritage; the decade’s terror of uncertainty and change challenged with reminders of a simpler, more authentic, more grounded world, wrapped up in the colourless simplicity of gingham, lace and sun-washed cotton.

Nostalgia, by definition, is a harking after something already irretrievably lost. So forty years earlier, whilst Laura Ingalls Wilder was writing the stories of a prairie life which would become a national security blanket, a  new generation of pioneers were watching their self-sufficient dreams evaporate into the bleak reality of the Dust Bowl - a temporary Paradise, destroyed by overdevelopment in a matter of decades. 

But there’s always a gap between history and the story we choose to remember. And now a new depression, in a new century, has revived the search for American-ness. Season on season, some of that need for repair asserts itself - even on an island sp utterly constructed around the shiny and the seductively new. And defaulting to no-place-like-home romanticism only reiterates America’s jagged, splintered identity; a nation obsessed with the fairytale of its’ own ideology, and searching for an absolving skin. 

The WIzard of Oz | Victor Fleming, 1939

Written for 1972projects

http://1972projects.blogspot.co.uk/2012/08/feels-like-home-designing-america_13.html

BEFORE - Becoming Anna Piaggi

SOMEWHERE - stories from another country

Nonsuch Palace | Unknown, 1620

Another 100 woulde I have placed at Castlemaine, wich should kepe all of Desmonde and Kerrye, for it answereth them both most convenientlye …

Edmund Spenser, A Veue of the Present State of Irelande, 1596

I grew up outside Castlemaine, a disappointingly castle-less Irish village. Not that I knew it at the time - we took it for granted that the sulking stone tower which bulged out into the crossroads was a magnificent relic (until it was suddenly demolished, and we found out that the ivy had masked something more mundane; a derelict Victorian warehouse.) Just another ordinary thing - like the stop-start lines of white-walled black-roofed houses, and the tiny  police station, and the neat grey school with its’ playground set back from the road.

But there had once been a great castle there, perched somewhere in the middle of the river, defending the crossing between Kerry’s wild, unruly north and the even wilder, more unruly south. And though the castle had mysteriously vanished without trace centuries before, its’ graceful medieval bridge had only been demolished a few years before I was born - replaced by a concrete slab so flatly anonymous that you only knew you were crossing a river by the sudden absence of houses.

It was disappointing, because I grew up in a house where every room was piled with books, and the worlds in those books were full of castles. Not Irish castles, though - neither the roofless keeps with broken walls that pock-marked our holiday drives, nor the not-fooling-anyone whimsy of the Anglo-Irish gentry’s Gothic piles. The castles in the story-books were warm, and rich, and timeless; rambling piles of ancient brick and weather-honeyed stone wrapped up in rolling hills and woodlands, with oriel windows looking out over topiary mazes and moats and intricate knot gardens - things so strange and alien they might as well have been from another planet, not the country next door.

a fine place it hath heretofore been, and a fine prospect about the house. A great walk of an elme and a walnutt set one after another in order. And all the house on the outside filled with figures of stories, and good painting of Rubens’ or Holben’s doing. And one great thing is, that most of the house is covered, I mean the posts, and quarters in the walls; covered with lead, and gilded. I walked into the ruined garden … 

Samuel Pepys, 21st September 1665

Most importantly, the story-book castles (from Lucy M. Boston’s Green Knowe, to Elizabeth Goudge’s Moonacre, to Alison Uttley’s Thackers) had insides, with inventories set out in lavish, loving detail. There were oak-panelled, tapestry-lined halls, and pomander-scented chests filled with ancient clothes and toys, There were treasure-filled attics and sudden, secret tunnels, and winding corridors where a wrong turn could drag you back to another century, and wardrobes where a child playing hide-and-seek could stumble into Narnia.

And this seductive England was all at once imaginary and real; the tourist board brochures we hoarded traded heavily on those same walled gardens and clipped topiary avenues and dreamy, dog-rose covered manor houses. It was a world where the past seemed to flow uninterrupted - as if it had, quite simply, never come into contact or conflict with the present.

The Palace consists of two Courts, of which the first is of stone Castle like, by the Lord Lumlies (of whom ‘twas purchased) the other of Timber a Gotique fabric, but these walls incomparably beautified: I also observed that the appearing timber puncheons entretices &c were all so covered with Scales of Slate, that it seemed carved in the Wood, the Slat fastened on the timber in pretty figures, that has preserved it from rotting like a coate of armour

John Evelyn, 3rd January 1665

But in reality, that past had stopped almost a century before. More contemporary stories, like Alan Garner’s Elidor or Susan Cooper’s The Dark is Rising, recognised this; their parallel worlds were pale ghost-places, accessed via bombed-out ruins or derelict building sites. (And there was never any illusion about which universe was real, and which would triumph after the last page closed and you looked up at your bedroom walls again). An earlier generation, though, had reason for needing that older world to feel close. Alison Uttley, C.S. Lewis and Lucy M. Boston all lost parents as children, and grew up in Edwardian nurseries and boarding schools, feeling both lonely and loved. Boston and Lewis served in France during the First World War (Lewis fought in the Somme, Boston worked as a frontline nurse), whilst Uttley’s husband  - who also fought in the trenches - never recovered, and committed suicide a few years later. Their books (most written just before, or during, or just after the Second War) are filled with children in danger - orphans, invalids, evacuees - who are sent away from irretrievably modern cities to an imagined, impossibly safe, out-of-time England. 

consisting also of another very faire and curious structure or building, of two stories high, the lower story whereof is of a very good and well wrought freestone, and the higher of wood, richly adorned and set forth and garnished with variety of statues, pictures, and other antick forms, of excellent art and workmanship, and of no small cost; all which building lying almost upon a square is covered with blue slate, and encloseth one faire and large court, of 137 foote broad and 116 foote long, all paved with freestone, commonly called the inner court. Memorandum … .On the east and west corners of the inner court building are placed two large and well-built turrets of five stories, each of them containing five rooms, the highest of which rooms, together with the lanthorns of the same, are covered with lead, and battled round with frames of wood covered with lead. 

Parliamentary Survey of Surrey, 1650

Looking back, it feels as much propaganda campaign as it did wish fulfilment: the myth of an unshakeable, endless Albion told to keep the bogeymen away. It’s the same childishly convincing propaganda, in ways, that Henry VIII enlisted when he built Nonsuch, his greatest palace. A castle built long after there was any need for castles (and built while other castles, and convents, and clerics were being burnt throughout the kingdom), it was a magical, turreted confection clad in gilded slate and cocooned amid velvet lawns; the age’s most spectacular architectural toy. 

But fantasy castles tend to be expensive playthings; and after Elizabeth’s death, Nonsuch was palmed off to a long line of stewards, before finally being granted to Charles II’s mistress, Barbara Palmer. Rather than pay for the palace’s upkeep, Palmer had it demolished, consigning all its splendour to myth. She had, after all, plenty of other acquisitions to manage, including the distant Irish plantation (one whose castle was also about to be demolished) which gave her her title; Castlemaine. 

The palace itself is so encompassed with parks full of deer, delicious gardens, groves ornamented with trellis-work, cabinets of verdure, and walks so embrowned by trees, that it seems to be a place pitched on by Pleasure herself to dwell in . . 

Paul Hentzner, 8 Septeber 1598

It’s a remote link - even by my standards - between one of the world’s greatest palaces and a humdrum Irish tower that wasn’t a castle at all. When Edmund Spenser was writing The Faerie Queene - one of the great literary flourishes of Elizabeth’s courtly age, and another cornerstone of the fairytale of England - he was also completing the bloody takeover of Ireland (and seeing his only child perish when his own castle was burned to the ground by native insurgents). In reality, those Irish towers would have been grim borderland posts, with crude straw floors and blackened oak furniture and whitewashed walls. None of Nonsuch’s dazzling richness here. But the two seem inextricably linked: Irish fires and English safety; damp, empty ruins and full, prosperously peaceful manors basking in golden sunshine.

Throughout modern English literature, the idea repeats again and again. Gardencourt, Greythorne Manor, Cair Paravel, Sissinghurst, Knole, Brideshead - the fairytale manor, somewhere outside time, its’ universe a sanctuary from war and violence and irreversible change. And unsurprisingly, these fairytales long ago crossed the boundaries between children’s books and adult literature. So when in Wide Sargasso Sea (the nightmare inside the fairytale of Jane Eyre), Jean-Rhys’ maddened heroine insists that her barricaded existence can’t be happening in the real (that is, the storybook) England, you begin to wonder which version of England is, ultimately, more powerful - and which one will endure.

Her majesty is returned again to Nonsuch, which of all other places she likes best.

Rowland White to Robert Sidney, 8th September 1599

A Traveller in Time | Alison Uttley, illustrated by Phyllis Bray, 1939

Written for 1972projects

http://1972projects.blogspot.co.uk/2012/08/somewhere-another-country.html

SPLIT - Alexandre Plokhov, Robert Geller and Cloak

Alexandre Plokhov and Robert Geller’s final bow | New York, 2004

eBay listing titles are a pretty accurate indicator of worth when it comes to clothing. They get the message across in all-caps, exclamation-mark-loaded, search-friendly bursts of information; BRAND NEW & AUTHENTIC DIOR HOMME HEDI SLIMANE ERA!!!! VINTAGE HELMUT LANG AS NEW NOT THEORY!!! ICONIC TOM FORD FOR GUCCI MEGARARE!!! RAF SIMONS GRAIL ITEM!!! RUNWAY ALEXANDER MCQUEEN LAST LIVING!!! And availability (or, to be precise, the prestige of unattainability) provides the wildest mark-ups. As you’d expect, it’s the big names - Ford, Slimane, Lang, Simons - that dominate the upper price bands. But there’s the odd exception; nostalgic remnants from one-hit-wonders, or from obscure fallen stars like Xavier Delcour and Josephus Thimister. And amongst them, a rare American interloper, sits New York’s Cloak - a short-lived brand, whose clash of Old and New World aesthetics was played out in worn tailoring, sombre layers and tough, tired leathers. Cathy Horyn summed up its’ enduring, insidious appeal best; ‘lovely, and a little nasty.’

Depending on which version of events you choose to go with, Cloak was founded in 1993, or 1999, or 2002; and ended in 2004, or 2007. The year a Russian immigrant called Alexandre Plokhov started a tailoring business in Chicago, the year he moved to New York and rebranded it Cloak, the year he relaunched it with a young graduate called Robert Geller (whom he met while both were working for Marc Jacobs); the year Geller left, and the year Plokhov finally ground to a halt, unable to turn the awards and acclaim into dependable profit. In the years since, both have worked elsewhere; Geller launched Harald, a short-lived womenswear label, whilst Plokhov collaborated with Uniqlo before taking up the baton as head of menswear at Versace in Milan - where he invested the house’s trademark glamour with a slick melancholy it’s still having trouble shaking off. But by 2007 Geller was back in menswear, this time under his own name, and Plokhov followed suit in 2011. And last February, for the first time in almost a decade, the two were both on New York’s runways again - showing their winter collections only a matter of hours and blocks apart. 

Fickle as the fashion world is, divorce - in the professional sense - is something of a rarity; take Dolce & Gabbana (the brand), which has smoothly and seemingly painlessly outlasted Dolce & Gabbana (the couple). And New York has made the double act a speciality like nowhere else; on the roster of past CFDA/Vogue Fashion Fund winners, Cloak’s name sits alongside Proenza Schouler, Costello Tagliapietra and Duckie Brown. So separations such as Plokhov and Geller’s are open to a considerable amount of analysis; few reviews of either designer’s subsequent work have escaped either the explicit ‘ex-Cloak’ tag, or the inferred comparisons. Neither of the two have spoken publicly about the partnership’s dissolution, or about their renewed proximity - leaving ample space to fill with in the blanks with conjecture. And online (particularly in those forums where the brand has had an extended, passionately partisan afterlife) each collection is scrutinised for the tell-tale signs which might reveal an origin myth; which of the two was the ‘real’ genius behind the label - and who was just along for the ride.

It helps that, in comic-strip fashion, the two are so vividly different; Plokhov’s brooding Russian introspection pitted against Geller’s golden-boy, Manhattan-honed charisma. From their time together, Geller seems to have won custody of layering, wide stripes, extravagant headwear, and those exquisite grey-loaded colourways; whilst Plokhov has focused on elimination, with stripped, military tailoring and palettes that alternate sharply from drab to dark. 

Cloak was a palimpsest; a tormented, tangled rollercoaster of overlapping times and places. It absorbed the mesmerising millennial androgyny of Lang and Slimane and Simons, and translated it into American - but a visceral, polyglot Americanness of a kind you could have known only in dreams or old newsreels or hand-me-down folk tales. It’s shows were haunted with shabby, lived-in, age-worn fabrics, and fragments of shapes and details that immigrant tailors might once have assembled in the dust and darkness of Lower East Side workrooms, cutting and re-sewing ancient shapes to fit New World bodies; endlessly adapting patterns, endlessly revising memories, endlessly adjusting the old to the new. On the surface, Geller comes closest to the label’s blurry fin-de-siécle romanticism.But his is a vision without a skeleton; inescapably soft centred. And Plokhov at least has moved on to something bleakly devoid of nostalgia - perhaps recognising the impossibility of ever closing the gap.

Alexandre Plokhov, Winter 2012 | JoJo Asuncion

Written for 1972projects

http://1972projects.blogspot.co.uk/2012/09/split-alexandre-plokhov-robert-geller.html

DRIVE - The city under the Westway

The Westway from Harrow Road | Simon Crubellier, 2006

51.51 N, -0.1724 W. That’s the point at which (for me) London gives up; where it stops being a city in a postcard - a continuous world of streets and trees and railings and granite pavements - and turns into something else. More specifically, it’s the point where the slow-moving, stop-start gorge of Marylebone Road finally breaks free from its’ tethers and takes flight, soaring into the west as the skyline collapses all around.

It’s a declaration of war; traffic versus terra firma. And appropriately, it comes with watchposts; four towers erupting from the vanished warren of old streets that once lazed across the village greens of Paddington and Lilestone. From any angle, they form an apocalyptic quartet; Richard Seifert’s Capital House (a neat bookend to a tidy Victorian city, completed before the Westway project had even gotten off the ground), stares across the Edgware Road at his Hilton Metropole Tower, which opened a decade later and at a 90 degree angle - both long since swallowed up in recladdings and extensions, filling in the gaps between architecture and motorway with vast, dense buffer zones. To the north, J. Innes-Elliot’s Paddington Green Police Station (replacing another police station, a comforting wedge of Victorian brick that disappeared under the shafts of the flyover’s undercarriage) is in a dystopian world of its’ own, bristling with CCTV and with its’ skeleton extruded onto the outside (come on, have a go if you think you’re hard enough); whilst the newest of the four, Charles Pearson’s Burne House, is in yet another reality. Conceived and built when the Westway was already a high-velocity fact, it’s a weirdly self-effacing mass of rounded corners and sheer cladding, recoiling from the roar of the traffic outside - and leaving the ragged flanks of the old Bakerloo Line station exposed, cowering on the edge of a shapeless no-man’s-land.

Four towers, seemingly without entrances; just smooth, impermeable hulks of concrete, and steel, and tile, and glass so opaque it almost seems to have forgotten it IS glass. You have to search hard for chinks in the armour - apologetic back doors and subterranean vehicle ramps, lurking on safer side streets behind the great roadside ramparts. 

And shielded (or hidden?) behind the four towers are four neighbourhoods that once were one, but now seem like estranged border settlements. Southwards, Marylebone lies smugly secure, indisputably on the right side of the tracks in every sense, whilst Paddington - full of too-big Regency houses killing time as shabby hotels - feels resigned to its’ grime-coated backwater existence. Northwards, things are different; Lisson Grove is still as raggedly cocky as it would have been when Shaw commandeered it as Eliza Doolittle’s birthplace; while to the west, the Harrow Road sweeps through open space - a landscape still strangely full of emptiness, half a century after a whole world of curving Victorian streets (streets full of picture palaces and theatres, pubs and churches, tenements and tottering terraces) was swept away. 

When you overlap street maps from across the centuries, there’s little to suggest a weak spot here; no Blitz bombs or plagues or slum-clearing frenzies (although in the oldest charts, before the city stretched anywhere north of Mayfair, it was a blank zone swarming with dragons and monsters). But there was an issue of geometry with this tiny, tangled place that had grown around a country turnpike. The New Road from Kings’ Cross and Euston ran straight, all along the borders of Regent’s Park; and all the grand new districts, from Bloomsbury and Marylebone to St. John’s Wood and Maida Vale, were laid out in broad, orderly grids. And the Edgware Road itself, laid out on the line of the old Roman Watling Street, defined the city’s western limits like a knife. But Lisson Green was where everything came undone - where order and elegance gave way to a knot of narrow lanes lined with drug dens, brothels and immigrant dives, with street names that changed over and over again to mask the stench of scandal. (If you look, you can still see old painted signs, only half-heartedly erased behind the new). And with each new map, there are appearances and disappearances; anarchists’ boltholes and flimsy sectarian churches and tin-walled factories, each one destabilising the area further and further, till it had passed all hope of salvation. 

It had to go. All the Committees said so. First the Tube line sliced Lisson Green in two - and then came the Westway, the start of a great uncompleted ring road, for a Utopian car-city that would never be. Nothing could stand in its’ way; not even Frank Matcham’s spectacular Metropolitan Theatre of Varieties, which took its’ final bow on Good Friday, 2013. It didn’t take long to demolish it; it didn’t take long, actually to demolish anything - it all disappeared so quickly and so eagerly. It’s only when you stand on Lisson Street and glance south, through an obstacle course of retaining walls and railings, that you see the traces of its’ other half - a renamed ghost on the other side of the Circle Line cutting, leading towards the church on Old Marylebone Road. And there’s hardly anything at all left of Burne Street, a block west - just two stubs of blind-end tarmac either side of the flyover, each barely wide enough to house a street sign. Everything else was obliterated. And in the process of straightening out lines and fixing geometries, something got broken - leaving four towers in the middle of an amputated landscape, full of lopsided stubs and unfinished structures, all broken and reeling like casualties of a forgotten war. 

The Metropolitan Theatre of Varieties being demolished | 1963

Written for 1972projects

http://1972projects.blogspot.com/2012/09/drive-city-under-westway.html

NETWORK - Unravelling Pringle of Scotland

Alastair Carr for Pringle of Scotland, Summer 2013 | Morgan O’Donovan

‘I realised that to get a grip of the retail customers, new ideas must be introduced, and from time to time we made some very good special improvements which gradually led us into a very nice trade.’

Robert Pringle, 1942

I saw hardly anything of the Pringle show at London Collections: Men back in June. I had a perfectly good view, but had a sideshow of my own to watch; a flushed man standing, arms folded, directly across the runway, his eyes locked firmly on the back of the stage. The same man who’d been darting about in the stairwell earlier, shuffling guests through to the runway space. And who - by the time Alastair Carr came out to take his final bow for the label - had a face shining with tears. Benoit Duverger was then (but now isn’t) Pringle’s managing director; a role which had sort-of-replaced that of CEO Mary-adair Macaire, who’d replaced Douglas Fang, who’d replaced Kim Winser; just as Carr had succeeded Claire Waight Keller, Stuart Stockdale and Virginia James, and just as - in their ad campaigns - Roo Etheridge and David Benjamin Sherry had taken over from Walter Pfeiffer, Ryan McGinley, Fabien Baron, Steven Meisel, David Sims, Rankin and Jonathan Bookallil. That roll call represents an extraordinary density of overlapping, conflicting visions in the space of just twelve years, for a brand that (when it first relaunched) seemed to have such a clearly defined line ahead of it.

Intarsia - the technique which underpins the classic Pringle argyle - creates its’ pattern from individual pieces of knit, slotted together like a puzzle where the segments touch yet never intersect. It’s an intricate, exacting method, undermined by its’ own sudden dislocations; just as the label’s whole pattern has been altered, season by season, by each new intersection of designer and director and photographer, shifting the geometric relationship between the label’s cornerstones - Scottish authenticity, and casual luxury, and bold graphic clarity, and demure retro wit - and continually rebounding from what’s been tried and failed before. Shifts becoming splits, dislocations yawning into breaks, until the whole pattern is nothing but cracks and holes and discontinuities. It’s ironic, but it feels more and more that the innovative impulse which keeps overbalancing the nostalgia (the same right-place, right-time impulse which catapulted a small-town hosiery firm to global fame in the first place) may finally be Pringle’s undoing.

Virginia James for Pringle of Scotland, Summer 2001 | Jonathan Bookallil

Written for 1972projects

http://1972projects.blogspot.co.uk/2012/09/network-unravelling-pringle.html