Catriona McLean

'Suited', created as part of Catriona's studies at Gray's School of Art. Is a collection built around characters who exist outside the boundaries of conventional society. The collection weaves together fashion, textile, and costume design to dress the complex, layered lives of those who reject, or have been rejected by, the mainstream. Drawing on themes of rural life, femininity, masculinity, queerness, and creative freedom, McLean interrogates how far the definition of suiting can be stretched when placed in the hands of self-expression. With a strong grounding in materiality and historic referencing, each piece is rooted in real life, art, and cinema, asking what clothing becomes when it is freed from its role as a tool of standardisation.

Catriona McLean

Catriona McLean's beautiful wearable collection for her graduation show at Aberdeen. 

Nikola Dzigda

'Where I walk' graduate collection by Nikola Dzigda.

" I remember as a teenager that my paternal grandfather once said, " women with skirts can run faster than men with their trousers down" as a sexist joke. Walking and sometimes running in the hills in a skirt is a revalation. An exercise in rare freedom. I urge you to try it. Trousers can bunch and pull on thighs, reining in the limbs and muscles, but a skirt is all space. A skirt is a modest, but commodious, version of a birthday suit. It seems to me that a skirt also holds promise of a different sort of material understanding: the same stretch of land seems altered when you navigate it in a skirt, you notice different things about it. A skirt is a kalidoscope, it brings different things into view. Isn't that what we need? to see the world more fully?" Nikola Dzigda

 

The Material Heart

Currently on display in the small gallery of the London Museum of Fashion and Textiles  (until 13th September 2026) are two private collections of 'Pin Stuck Cushions' made by soldiers for loved ones waiting at home. Known as ‘sweetheart pin cushions,’ the cushions were mostly made for mothers, often as Christmas gifts, by soldiers serving on the front line during their leisure time.

The heart forms were available as kits and decorated with pins, along with military insignia, images of the monarchy, tiny objects, photographs and embroidered designs, some with deeply personal and symbolic meanings. Some Victorian cushions, made in various shapes, were crafted from red uniform cloth. Many would become treasured memorial objects.

The ones exhibited were passionately collected by Simon Costin, the Director of the Museum of British Folklore and the Museum of Witchcraft and Magic and subject specialist Alessandra Curtis a British-Italian folklorist.