The Fashion and Textile Museum has opened a new exhibition exploring the identities, meanings, and ideas captured in textiles.
"Textiles: The Art of Mankind celebrates the ancient and deep entanglement between textiles, people and our world. Through the beauty of textiles, you will encounter human ingenuity that can be traced from prehistory to our digital age.
Textiles reveal the human desire to engage with texture and colour, record histories, thoughts and feelings, and preserve skills to hand down generations. Across the globe, they carry sacred significance, express our cultural regard for animals, while others symbolise life’s mysteries."
This is my 10th collection for the museum shop, and I wanted to create a colourful feast for the eyes made of jewel-coloured headpieces and cloches. A celebration of the joy of dressing up, the importance of wearing what makes you happy and being unapologetically bold.
The headbands are made from two-tone taffetas in teal, dark green and purple. The cloches are made from cotton velvet in the same luscious colours. There are also some wonderful peacock feather headbands echoing some of the pieces in the exhibition.
To model these pieces, I could only work with my friend, colourful dresser and opera singer, Charlotte. She is the embodiment of self-expression through style, living her art and wearing her passion on her sleeve! This amazing woman is also the founder of Intergenerational Opera. This organisation is a music outreach programme running in East Sussex, bringing together Primary School children and elderly people from the community, including those with Dementia through creative music workshops. The project uses music to develop communication and social interaction, boost confidence and creative expression and improve wellbeing for all participants.
I hope you like the collection and that you can visit the museum and enjoy this fantastic new exhibition.
Open 28 March 2025 – 7 September 2025
