The Wandle Wardrobe: Cormorant Jacket

 My current Wandle Wardrobe focus - making clothes from the fabrics I found dumped by the nature reserve - might seem like a slightly flimsy excuse for dressing up and taking outfit photos. And it is! But I also want these clothes to be a visual aid for the stories that need to be told about our local wildlife: stories of hope, of resilience, of the changes we can make that improve the environment for its human and non-human inhabitants. 

I currently own three guides to the Wandle; published in 1924, 1974 and 1997. The first two tell a depressing story about the river: in 1924 John Morrison Hobson writes: “The little river Wandle appeals to all who love the face of Nature” and lists twenty one species of fish as “denizens of the Wandle.” But by 1974, the Wandle Group are telling a horror story of sewage works and factories discharging their overflows into the river, and write sadly: “it is doubtful whether the Wandle could now support any of the larger species of fish which gave the river its reputation… that the Wandle provided as good angling as anywhere in the country”. A gleam of hope can be found in the 1997 guide, with surveys showing gradual improvements in fish populations, although they were still threatened by intermittent pollution. 

Although 2020 has been a tough year for us all, it doesn’t seem to have been too bad for the fish in the Wandle; they were leaping from the water to catch insects just a few feet from where these photos were taken. The dwindling daylight hours and falling temperatures don’t seem to deter the anglers, dotted along the banks of the Wandle like living statues as the rest of us walk or run or cycle along the trail. But this outfit draws inspiration from another species of fisherfolk: the cormorant. 

The Cormorant Jacket is made from just over one metre of black viscose crepe. I wanted to create something with a dramatic sleeve, to reference the way a cormorant stretches out its wings to dry them after diving. Practicality (I can’t wear long dangling sleeves at work) met necessity (there wasn’t enough fabric to make a longer sleeve), and resulted in this pleasing cape-like shape. I also wanted to evoke something of the cormorant’s sinuous neck in the shaping of the neckline and front fastening. 

I have seen cormorants on every part of the river, from Grove Park and Waddon Ponds to the mouth of the Wandle where it meets the Thames at Wandsworth. If they weren’t finding food, they wouldn’t be visiting, so an inland population of these coastal birds suggests that the fishing must be good for birds as well as humans. 

All beings in an environment rely on one another in complex ways, so when we improve the environment for one species, we encourage other visitors to make their homes there too: Hobson’s 1924 guide makes no mention of cormorants, or egrets (see previous post). The Wandle certainly appeals to nature-lovers again, and it’s never been more important than this year, when our daily walk was, for many of us, our only chance to get out and about for several months. I hope that as we’ve relied on our local green spaces during lockdown, we’ve also started noticing and appreciating our non-human neighbours, and caring about their welfare. We’re only going to be able to reverse the decline in wildlife populations if enough people notice the wildlife is there in the first place.

The Wandle Wardrobe: Egret Dress

 I usually like to write a blog post around Halloween about the historical horrors of the fashion industry (it’s a great excuse to dress up) and then compare the terrible decisions of days gone by with the state of the industry today (the life cycle of a pair of jeans is scarier than most of the monstrous scenarios Hollywood can conjure up). But after everything that’s been happening this year I wanted to create and write something that has an element of hope to it; the idea that although we continue to make dangerous mistakes we also have the capacity to learn from them, correct them, and improve the world around us rather than adding to its degradation.

You may remember from my earlier post about textile waste along the Wandle that I found a huge pile of fabrics just outside Watermeads Nature Reserve, and carried it all home for washing and rehoming. So many of these vintage fabrics captured my imagination that I’m planning a whole capsule collection of clothes. Most will be very practical and wearable, a few will have more of an element of the theatrical to them, telling a story about the history of the river and its current users and inhabitants.

So let me introduce the first of these creations, the Egret Dress. Made from three metres of lightweight synthetic viscose with an abstract floral print in creams and browns, this dress is entirely zero-waste as all the fabric offcuts were used to make the matching jewellery. The train is detachable, so the dress functions as a wearable summer minidress as well as a strong fashion statement.

The Egret is a shy but frequent visitor to my home stretch of the Wandle, wading and fishing in the shallow water but quickly taking flight if it’s spotted. This suspicion of people is well founded; from the mid-19th Century to the 1910s the Egret was hunted mercilessly for its distinctive breeding plumage, which would adorn the hats of well-to-do ladies. It became locally extinct in northwest Europe, but after conservation measures were introduced in the 1950s, populations in southern Europe increased, and the Egret returned to England as a breeding species at the end of the 20th Century, and is now common around the River Thames. 

Like the murderous millinery trade, so much of fashion’s beauty and decadence has an ugly side, but this doesn’t need to be the case any more. We have enough understanding of the damage we’re doing and enough resources at our disposal to stop doing that damage right now. What we need is imagination, and the ability to think differently about what beauty might mean to us. To see the beauty and potential in something unwanted and discarded, and to see the beauty of the natural world as something that is available as inspiration, but isn’t there for us to take and exploit. 

The River Wandle was once an important part of Britain’s textile industry, ideal at first for calico bleaching as its water was so clean. The ebb and flow of industry meant that by the 1960s the Wandle was so polluted it was declared a “dead” river, but now, thanks to river-wide co-operation, it is an excellent wildlife habitat. We need to have the vision and the determination to clean up our act elsewhere. It’s possible to evoke the beauty and glamour of the most excessive of eras without replicating the exploitation and cruelty, and it’s possible (if you happen to walk past Watermeads at just the right time) to turn trash into wearable treasure.