Can we start a Fashion Revolution by telling new stories?

Any fashion or costume creative will tell you that design is about telling stories. You are creating a mood, setting a scene, filling it with memorable characters. It’s easy to see this when we look at a catwalk collection or a lead actor in a sumptuous historical costume, but it’s all too easy to forget when it comes to our own wardrobes.

Bridget Harvey's work in Fashioned From Nature, V&A

Fashion exhibitions have become must-see events in recent years, and alongside sell-out retrospectives like Alexander McQueen and Dior at the V&A, other more personal fashion showcases have also proved extremely popular. The V&A exhibition Frida Kahlo: Making Her Self Up stayed open overnight so visitors could enjoy a glimpse of the artist’s unique clothing collection. As well as exhibitions of picture-perfect couture, like the Azzedine Alaia retrospective at the Design Museum, curators are also choosing to emphasise the relevance of everyday items of clothing with special cultural significance, like the Fashion and Textile Museum’s T Shirts: Cult, Culture and Subversion exhibition.

Bridget Harvey, V&A artist in residence

The clothes on display don’t have to be pristine pieces in order to make great museum exhibits. I was fascinated, seeing a selection of Isabella Blow’s enviable clothing collection at Somerset House, and realising on closer inspection that these fabulous examples of couture dressmaking showed distinct signs of wear and tear. Even as a dressmaker who knows how much time and effort goes into making a couture garment, it was hard to be annoyed. Isabella Blow has obviously been someone who loved her outlandish clothes so much that she simply had to wear them, even if they weren’t really appropriate for the occasion. 

Signs of wear and tear on a garment are often seen as a bad thing, a sign that the garment is “ruined”. But when the wedding dress I made for my sister ended up with a muddy hem, someone said “ooh, I love the ombré effect!” and we both thought this was brilliant. The dress tells a story of the day; a walk down a woodland path, a sudden cloudburst, a photo shoot in a meadow full of wildflowers.

Visible mending by Bridget Harvey

We are too hard on our clothes, rejecting them before we have even had the chance to get to know them. Maybe because they are so cheap, we see them as disposable, maybe because many of us don’t know much about the processes that go into making clothes. It seems so strange to me that most people will happily spend money on pre-distressed new clothing, but throw a garment away as soon as their life makes an imprint on it. 

Visible mending by Celia Pym

One of the V&A’s current artists in residence, Bridget Harvey, creates work that explores the art of repair and re-making. Discarded pieces of clothing are transformed with a combination of traditional mending techniques and more thought-provoking embellishment. Textile artist Celia Pym has also turned darning into an art form at the V&A, copying every bit of visible mending she completed on garments brought in by members of the public onto a tracksuit as a record of her work. I saw the tracksuit at the Subversive Stitch exhibition at TJ Boulting, alongside work by James Merry, who embroiders discarded logo sportswear with tiny intricate flowers, as though nature is slowly reclaiming our cast-offs.

Embroidery by James Merry

In the run-up to Fashion Revolution Week, Fashion Revolution have launched their latest zine: Fashion Craft Revolution. I submitted a story about my family’s sewing and crafting history, and although it didn’t make it into the zine it did get an honourable mention in this Fashion Revolution Blog Post. I’ll share my story on my blog separately later, but I’d love my readers to see the other beautiful and moving responses to this topic that are also featured in the post. We are sharing our stories in the hope that we can help everyone to see our clothes as part of the fabric of our lives, something rich in storytelling potential. For the sake of everyone on this planet, our clothes (and the people who make them) deserve more than our current throwaway narrative.