Life soup, seething, roiling, oozing, in dankness or lukewarmness, is what disgusts. Not because all ends in death, but because there is no fixed point. All is flux and in flux, eternal recurrence.
—William Ian Miller, The Anatomy of Disgust, (106) [1]
Last week, I shifted a fridge and discovered a small lizard (a common house gecko) underneath.
I felt my brain traverse a quick succession of emotions:
Surprise: There is a lizard where I didn’t expect one.
Aww: Cute, I really like lizards. I go toward it with the intention of moving it out of the hot shed.
Disgust: Its tail isn’t where it’s supposed to be. I must have scared it, making it drop its tail as a defense against attack.
Sadness: It’s not moving. It’s dead.
Deeper Disgust: It’s not just dead. It has been dead for a while. It’s mummified.
I wasn’t ready to deal with the corpse at that moment, so I shuffled the fridge back and closed the shed door. Throughout the week, I’ve been pondering this lizard. Its tiny corpse creeps into my thoughts. Was it living in the fridge when I moved it into the shed a year ago? Is that what caused its tail to drop? Was that the same day it died? Could its tail have disconnected after it died? Did it suffer? And what am I going to do with its body? I have so many questions about this small creature and about why I care about its tiny death.
Reflection on dirt involves reflection on the relation of order to disorder, being to non-being, form to formlessness, life to death. —Mary Douglas, Purity & Danger (6) [2]
In Purity and Danger, social anthropologist Mary Douglas discussed the human need to use ritual as a way to purify things that are “out of place.” When something isn’t where we expect it to be, it is often seen as not belonging: other, negative, and dangerous. But there is power in danger. I too am out of place. I’m not entirely comfortable calling myself a biodesigner, yet I am part of the biodesign community through affiliation, collegiality, and teaching. Instead of “bio” or the stuff of life, I design, redesign, and manipulate the stuff of death. I'm less biologist and more thanatologist. Perhaps I’m a “thanotos-designer”?
In my professional life, I’ve dressed the dead bodies of more than 150 people. This is pretty wild for someone who is not a mortician, not a funeral director, not a pathologist, and not associated with a medical profession. However, technically, I am a doctor. My “specialist training” is in fashion design. I completed a doctorate almost a decade ago with a dissertation that encouraged people to dress their own dead [3]. I questioned why we dress the dead and what we leave behind in the grave. For the family of the dead, I designed funeral garments for look and ease of dressing. But I also studied the decomposition of bodies and cloth in soil. I chose raw silks and linens and embroidered and printed weaves and painstakingly sewed them into garments to dress the dead. I saw, smelled, and touched the cloth, bodies, and soil. As time passed, I could no longer distinguish one from the other.
I’m a pracademic in the school of Fashion and Textiles at RMIT University in Melbourne where I have been teaching since 2007. As sites for designing clothes, the catwalk and the cemetery couldn’t be more at odds. But outside of my teaching, where I specialize in material science and conceptual design, I’ve spent the last decade of my creative practice addressing death with tools, methods, and theoretical perspectives typically applied to fashion. I’ve washed the dead. I’ve repaired the dead. I’ve seen inside of skulls and the yellow biohazard bags that are placed inside the thoracic cavity after a postmortem. I’ve been nine feet down in a grave to recover the remains of someone buried decades earlier. I’ve used a needle and thread to reattach body parts so that I can dress them. And I’ve dressed the skeleton of someone who was found five years after they died. In that last case, I used textiles to fashion a body around a skeleton so that the family had something to hold before they said goodbye.
Often I would not meet the dead (or their families) if it were not for the occasion of their death. It is a strange way to “meet” someone, made even more strange that I’m one of the last to ever see and touch their bodies.
It’s been a few days since I found the lizard. I needed some time to think about what to do with its body. As a designer, this is my area of expertise: addressing the dead is what ‘I do.’ As a fashion designer, I think about how I’m going to dress this little creature, and no, not as in make a frock for it, but rather what material I will use for our encounter—to pick it up and to wrap it. As a biodesigner, I design for how things will come apart, be it by integration with earth, air, fire, or water. So, deciding what to do about this lizard occupies more space in my brain than it would for other people. Do I perform:
Conventional burial: Pick it up in a plastic bag, tie a knot, and put it in the bin, never to intermingle with the elements, destined for an afterlife of landfill?
Cremation: Slip a piece of paper under it and throw it in the fireplace?
Aquamation: Pick it up in toilet paper and flush it down the drain?
Natural burial: Wrap it in a tissue, dig a little hole in the garden to bury it?
Body composting: Put on my gardening gloves, pick up its two pieces, and transfer it to the compost bin?
Sky burial: Put it in the bird feeder and offer it to our magpies?
Exposure: Just leave it to dry to a crisp during summer and keep falling apart into smaller and smaller pieces until it’s no longer recognizable and eventually just becomes part of the accumulated dust and dirt in the corners of the shed?
“The three D’s”—dying, death, and disposal—offer a quick summary of the work of academics in end-of-life study. In the professional context, disposal is not a word used, because it conjures notions of waste and rubbish, of dirt and disrespect. But truthfully, it is illegal in most countries not to dispose of human corpses.
This might surprise you—I don’t particularly want to pick up the dead lizard with my bare hands. I’m pretty good around dead things, but I still catch myself having to overcome my own sense of disgust at thinking about my bare skin coming into contact with its dry, hard, mummified body and tail. Truth be told, it would be worse if the corpse were soft and squishy, or if it had been crushed and smeared under the refrigerator, oozy. Skin, the lizard’s skin and mine, defends us from the outside, protects us from contamination, but also keeps our personal viscera inside where it belongs.
When things aren’t where we expect them to be, whether those things are alive or dead, they stir disgust within us. By putting ritual around a corpse, adorning and dressing it, we are able to displace disgust.
While there is evidence of mourning in some animal species, humans are the only species to use ritual in the act of disposing of the dead. For more than 100,000 years we have been dressing the dead, adorning them, and placing objects alongside their corpse. This ritual is uniquely human. It is also one of the earliest suggestions of symbolic thinking, and of culture itself [4]. The dead were left with grave goods for an afterlife. While the dead body would decay like all living things, we, in some ways, found it impossible to imagine being dead—instead we chose transcendence.
Man is literally split in two: he has an awareness of his own splendid uniqueness in that he sticks out of nature with a towering majesty, and yet he goes back into the ground a few feet in order to blindly and dumbly rot and disappear forever. —Ernest Becker, Denial of Death (26) [5]
I always design in a way that embraces decay and dissolution as the final outcome. Transience and ephemerality are processes of fashion as much as they are of death. There is power in the otherness of being a fashion designer for the dead and also for bringing the elements of death and decomposition to the fashion world. I use my practice as an example of sustainable design. I work with the chemistry of materials and with bodies—how they intermingle, untangle, and reduce to the smallest molecules possible. I advocate for my students to push beyond “reuse” and “recycling,” asking them to consider work that can be composted and what can grow from it. Instead of cradle to cradle, think grave to grave. Design for decomposition is design for life that is next to come.
Through ritual, I have sought to give meaning and context to a loved one’s body gradually coming undone. As they slowly transform from body to corpse, they become more likely to elicit disgust. To avoid feeling disgust about someone we’ve loved, we wrap and dispose of the body before we can witness this un-forming.
Disgust, as a physical, evolutionary adaptation, is a protective mechanism; for example, we possess a reflex to spit out food that is spoiled or dangerous substances that could contaminate and kill us. But disgust is also a moral barometer. And morals, which are based on cultural and social norms, change with time and fashion.
In the 21st century, where knowledge and hand sanitizer are readily available, disgust seems outdated and irrational. We understand that our mouths and noses are entry points to our bodies. We wear masks to cover them, and practice good hygiene to keep ourselves healthy. But there is a point in every lifetime where health is no longer achievable. Then, the boundary between life and death becomes a thin, translucent, increasingly permeable membrane.
The dead I dress are not my own. I work in service to those whose lives are going to be re-designed through their death. I address death, I dress it, I redress it, and I undress it.
So tomorrow I’ll dispose of the lizard. While it is out of place in my shed, we have cohabitated, and thus, its death has become mine to address. The action of thinking through its death, dying and disposal, and furthermore dispersion, is the ritual I use to overcome disgust. The process has me consider my own mortality and my temporary place in this world. And then I consider that my service in this temporary place is rife with contradiction. I design for decomposition and what is decomposition besides the undoing of composition, the undoing of design?
[1] Miller, William Ian. The Anatomy of Disgust. Harvard University Press, 1998.
[2] Douglas, Mary. Purity and Danger: an Analysis of Concepts of Pollution and Taboo. Taylor & Francis Group, 2002.
[3] Interlandi, Pia. [A]Dressing Death: Fashioning Garments for the Grave. 2012. RMIT University, PhD dissertation.
[4] Smirnov, Y. (1989). Intentional Human Burial: Middle Paleolithic (Last Glaciation) Beginnings. Journal of World Prehistory, 3 (2), 199-233. Retrieved April 18, 2021.
[5] Becker, Ernest. The Denial of Death. Free Press, 1997.
Dr. Pia Interlandi is a designer and Senior Lecturer at the School of Fashion & Textiles at RMIT University. Her teaching and research explores the materials and materiality of death, disposal, and dispersion. From fashion to forensics, Pia’s creative practice Garments for the Grave has been commissioned nationally and internationally to demonstrate contemporary approaches to touching, dressing, and addressing the dead body. Pia has dressed over 150 people and is called upon for specialist body care and ritual facilitation by professionals in the funeral industry. She combines tacit and explicit knowledge to traverse academic and professional practice. Pia is a founding member of the Order of the Good Death, Natural Death Advocacy Network, Australian Home Funeral Alliance, and the Australian Death Studies Society.
Cite This Essay
Interlandi, Pia. “Designing for Death.” Biodesigned: Issue 7, 19 May, 2021. Accessed [month, day, year].