The inspiration for this piece came from a 90 x 90 piece of art I painted for my gallery launch. I wanted to create a wearable piece of art for my exhibition that showed the detail at scale in my silk scarves.
I decided to take the same design and create a silk dress for the event. First I contacted my friend, Felicity Westmacott, who is an incredible bespoke dressmaker. I asked her if it was possible given the timescales. Being a reformed delivery-focused consultant, I always begin with a discovery process and establish what I need to get the job done.
(We are currently working on a capsule clothing line based upon this dress.)
I had already drawn the dress design and had the fabric in mind, so she suggested finding a pattern to save us time. I conducted a lot of research already and had found a 1970’s vintage pattern for us to use. Little did we realise it was reversible (front to back), which aligned with my scarf ethos of wearing things your own way and viewing and sharing different aspects of our story as and when we feel like it.
Felicity also suggested fabric length and cutting on the bias, so we ended up using a lot more fabric than we will use for our capsule collection. I work with the only sustainable Global Organic Textile Standard (GOTS)-certified silk printer in the UK and they are superb. They regularly work with Liberty, Cartier and Hermès — the quality is outstanding and the team are just lovely.
Front of the dress:
In order to create this 1 x 4 metre piece of silk, I repainted my artwork, digitised it, edited it in Photoshop, and created a repeating pattern.
My team in Macclesfield sustainably printed and delivered my silk in 10 days.
During this time, I had fittings with Felicity and she got to work as soon as the beautiful silk arrived. We had one more fitting to pin the hem and cuffs. My completely bespoke silk dress was finished in less than a month.
The fabric tells my story -- a piece of wearable art that shares my approach to my work, my history and my identity, all hand painted and printed into silk. It is the embodiment of my work in textiles.
Giving a talk at People Like Us in my incredible creation