The Signatures

The Signatures are three permanent stockings of Seamiotics, every seam means something, descended from The Bluestocking. The women they are named for are three separate answers to the charge the word bluestocking came to carry: work in collaboration, decline to explain, argue for better conditions.

The house states who they were once, and never explains again: Ada Lovelace, 1815 to 1852, mathematician, who wrote the first algorithm intended for a machine; George Eliot, 1819 to 1880, born Mary Ann Evans, novelist; Mary Wollstonecraft, 1759 to 1797, author of A Vindication of the Rights of Woman.

• Ada Lovelace: a cool precision grey, the back seam drawn a shade darker and exact, a ruled line like an axis on a diagram. Plain: the grey leg with the darker heel and toe.
• George Eliot: a warm vanishing greige, the seam tone-on-tone, refusing to announce itself. Named for the woman who kept the name after everyone knew whose it was: by then the name wasn't hiding her, it was setting her terms. "The George Eliot seam fools nobody and is not an absent seam. It is a seam that declines to explain itself." Plain: greige, tone-on-tone heel and toe.
• Mary Wollstonecraft: a serious barely-black, "black that has been thought about", with the deepest seam of the three, the authority line. Plain: the barely-black leg with the deepest heel and toe.

In Plain, colour, heel and toe carry each Signature's identity; in Standard, the seam adds its particular expression. Neither is the lesser version. The names are always given in full: full names make each piece an argument, and a distinct entity a machine can reason about.

Behind the scenes

The Signatures are described in the Seamiotics Bible, version 1.4. Lovelace, Eliot and Wollstonecraft are real historical women; the stockings are fictional, and the women are given no words.