I am a final year BA (Hons) Fashion Design: Print student at Central Saint Martins. My third-year placement (2023/2024) was spent at JW Anderson. Vibrancy and playfulness are key characteristics of my work together with an aim to understand and develop more sustainable practices. My work combines print design and garment making to investigate themes of narrative, identity and memory.
My final collection “Home of the Free”, explores the idea of belonging in a place which holds personal significance: my home town of Presteigne. The collection is transportive of a Welsh upbringing and pays homage to small communities, re-imagines childhood lore and uses narrative with sculptural silhouettes. It is about slow living and doing things which give us pleasure, especially collaboratively, and skills which are passed on through family and the community, such as quilt making or creating costumes for the yearly pantomime. The collection aims to capture a memory of childlike wonder.
“Home of the Free” references the song which always concludes the Presteigne panto and is sung by both cast and audience. The collection combines biographical anecdotes and personal reflections as it follows me, dressed as a goblin (my first role!) in strong, vibrant colours and prints on a journey through the town. This character becomes a metonym for many different guises and one through which enables me to tell a personal story of interpreting life in a small rural community with shared experience - translated into textiles and garments that carry expressions, and subversion, of craft techniques.
After my placement at JW Anderson, I worked on huge textile sculptures to hang from the rafters of the Victorian market hall in Abergavenny with Welsh artist Bettina Reeves and Japanese artist Mayumi Tagahaki. I sculpted with willow, wire, cardboard and paper, and was taught new skills of quilting and appliqué. During my time with Bettina and Mayumi, I was tasked with creating sculptures/puppets from simple materials, which I loved working on and found hugely inspiring.
My final collection invokes this sense of scale and drama together with handmade elements - hand sewing, hand quilting and hand embroidery. I have also used exaggerated prints, patterns, proportions, and surface manipulation—often breaking gendered boundaries. The silhouettes transcend traditional gender binaries and the paradigm of masculinity and femininity - oversized, fluid and sculptural.
Central to the collection are screen-printed motifs, reimagining the town, events and community of Presteigne. Vibrant screen prints create pattern-clashing and head-to-toe prints. I hand dyed the fabrics with a palette primarily encompassing red, purple, pink and yellow. Green and blue provide contrast and recall the beautiful countryside and rivers surrounding the town.
The collection is concerned with exploring, expressing, preserving and ultimately subverting traditional hand stitching, applique and quilting traditions - such as giant stitching, oversized embroidered motifs, giant hands and a huge wearable barn. These include techniques and skills I learnt from the community around me, highlighting the importance of shared knowledge and passing on skills.
My favourite process is screen printing as it produces a diverse range of outcomes. I developed my digital print skills in a project for Richard Quinn inspired by food, where I used Adobe Photoshop to manipulate my drawings into repeating prints.
My garments were selected and purchased by Grayson Perry in his Make a Dress for Grayson Perry project which he wore in two Instagram posts (here and here).
Narrative and historical detail play an important part in my work. For the Balenciaga project, I researched what inspired Cristobel Balenciaga within his own work. He was heavily influenced by Spanish culture and art, which in turn was shaped by Arab cultures. I visited the Islamic Gallery at the V&A to draw the decorative elements in carpets and pottery. I then used these drawings to inform print designs to use in my final garment.
Balenciaga was also inspired by Spanish folk cultures so I interpreted this by looking at regional dress and folklore traditions in contemporary Spain and, in particular, the Mascaradas de Invierno festivals. I investigated La Fiesta De Jarramplas, where every year in Piornal, a man dresses up as the Jarramplas and parades through the town in a beautiful fringed garment while the townspeople throw turnips at him. I loved the playfulness of this festival, so I incorporated this narrative into my work by, for example, using a turnip to make prints by both throwing and carving designs into it. I then linked all these themes together using Balenciaga’s work to create a cohesive narrative for my project.
I look at sustainability in my work, for example, with a team I created a collection of garments that would turn into habitats for wildlife, thinking about the life of garments after they had been worn. My final collection has used deadstock and donated fabrics. I run fabric and clothing recycling workshops with the local Wildlife Trust for both adults and children to encourage repurposing by upcycling.
Instagram @messy_cloves
