Making Faces
ongoing

Making Faces is a collection of pockets, bags and other fashion artefacts that consider people, their expressions, intimacies and desires through the lens of the unassuming pocket.
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Pocket Faces
Cotton
25 x 35 cm

Boob Bag
Wool

since 06.18
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Memories of Dress
06.18

Photo: Rydel Cerezo
Model: Grace Dempsey
MUA: Mikala Monsoon

A Pocket Guide to Using Pockets

01.23

‘A Pocket Guide to Using Pockets’ is a 12-step instruction manual depicting different pocket acts and their stories. The guide includes everyday clothing rituals, pocket transactions, and other repeated dressing habits that together paint a picture of individual characters and shared material cultures. The pocket uniform is a collection of carefully constructed garments with multiple discreet and indiscreet pocket openings. The garments have been produced with Scottish linen, wools, factory rejects and other obsolescences. Each pocket ritual is accompanied with a story from a clothing archive, a space which encompasses hundreds of everyday conversations about clothes. These documented dialogues have been collected by speaking to and observing people, which are then played with and dissected to challenge preconceptions and reveal alternative perspectives of how clothes should be worn.

With special thanks to Molly Davies.

Modular Shirt
10.22

Details of a modular shirt, designed and produced for the UKRI Interdisciplinary Textiles Circularity Centre (TCC) at the Royal College of Art and exhibited at ‘The Regenerative Hub’, the Lab E20 and ‘Future Observatory: Tomorrow’s Wardrobe’ The Design Museum, London. This configurable shirt has been constructed from multiple modular pieces that can be built by the wearer. This shirt now sits within a body of research and sustainable works exploring new experience design for citizen participation in a circular economy.

Denim Faces Illustration
01.26

Denim Faces
04.24

Photo: Daniel Uwaga
Model: Zara Odu

Blue Bag
Painted dry wax cotton
120x90 cm

Big Blue Pocket
Painted dry wax cotton
120x90 cm

12 Stories from the Worn Archive

Worn Workshop
04.20

Co-founded by Abigail Jubb and Morag Seaton, Worn Workshop produces creative projects about people’s relationships with their clothing.

In April 2020, Worn began collecting and sharing the stories of our clothes and concepts from identity to sustainability. This work has since developed through their production of a series of Worn projects as well as commissions for fashion industry, education, community, arts and culture contexts, including: research, workshops, interviews, talks, consultation, publications and storytelling. All of these outcomes contribute to the Worn Archive: an ongoing collection of clothing stories. This, in turn, informs and inspires all of Worn’s future projects, which share insights that can change the way we design, make and wear clothes.

Worn challenges negative fashion cultures through new approaches by celebrating the stories of our clothes, so that more of them will become worn.

Packaging
07.25

Pocket Face
Upcycled Cashmere

Pocket Face
Cotton

Bag, Glove and Cup
Cotton drill
10.22

A Pocket Guide to Using Pockets

01.23

Cotton Faces
07.23

Face Jacket, dry waxed cotton, 2023. Exhibited at the Truman Brewery, London, 13-16 July 2023.
With special thanks to Decode Design for their sponsorship and to Halley Stevensons for their generous donation of materials.

The Archive in Hand
06.25

The Archive in Hand was a collaborative workshop series and publishing project curated by Michaela Clarence and AYFP, exploring the role of textiles in recording, shaping and transmitting knowledge.

Each session was held at the Goldsmiths Textile Collection, SE London, and engaged with archival objects through hands-on, participatory workshops that centred material ways of knowing and learning.

Worn Objects: Past, Present and Future facilitated by Morag Seaton was a workshop that explored the biographies of worn objects through storytelling, drawing and speculative writing. Drawing on the Worn Archive, this workshop invited participants to engage with clothing and textile items from the Goldsmiths Textiles Collection as living witnesses to memory, identity, and change.

WAEN x MORAG
02.25

‘Pockets and the Body' was a workshop created in collaboration with WAEN to reflect, reimagine and recreate the pocket.

Established by Molly Davies, WAEN (Women Are Everywhere Now) facilitates creative workshops for women who feel invisible in today’s gender health gap. The conversations in the lead-up to and during the workshop threaded together themes of health, the body, intimacy, desire, and self-expression—examining them through the lens of the unassuming pocket. Historically absent from women’s clothes, the pocket has a rich and entangled history of power, secrecy and inequality. Throughout the workshop we asked questions like, ‘How do clothes give the body power?’ Before translating these responses, thoughts and feelings to bespoke pocket making.

Special thanks to Molly Davies for this collaboration, The Meeting House for hosting us, Yodomo Textile Reuse Hub for their generous donation of materials, and our participants who we hope to see again soon.

Making Zero Waste
04.24

Making Zero Waste (MZW) is a collaborative project that was launched in 2024 as a cross-cultural exchange between Designers Consociate, Worn, and Zero Waste Design Collective. These organisations, based in Lagos, Glasgow and London respectively, came together to develop a series of in-person workshops in Lagos, Nigeria and Accra, Ghana in April 2024. These workshops were dedicated to advancing the practice of zero waste fashion design within the local African context by offering circular solutions in design and garment making. As a collective, MZW is committed to eliminating waste in the design process by inspiring tailors, upcyclers, brands and designers to re-think their waste strategies and re-imagine waste as an opportunity, as they continue to design products for a better future. The intent was for participants to gain knowledge about the theories, context and construction of zero waste pattern cutting and design. Throughout the workshops, MZW also explored how zero waste design can draw inspiration from the rich tapestry of African fashion and textile traditions and histories, while complimenting today’s contemporary fashion.

MZW began with a few online conversations and developed into a global knowledge exchange, challenging negative fashion cultures and celebrating global experiences of designing, making and wearing clothes.

^{With special thanks to the amazing sponsors and partners of MZW for the opportunity to bring this incredible, game changing workshop to life including: Creative Scotland, Join Roundabout, Designers Consociate, Zero Waste Design Collective, Worn Workshop, The Or Foundation, Lagos X Paris, Decode and the Four Nations Fund. Photography by Daniel Uwaga, and the MZW team.}

Pockets For-
08.21

A pocket is -
a small bag sewn into or on clothing so as to form part of it, used for carrying small articles.

A pocket is for -
hands, hidden and everyday things.

Pockets for- is a project that examines garment pockets, their informalities, hidden contents and the individual ways in which we use them.

Inspired by public pocket submissions and stories, historical dress and abstract wearables, the Pocket Catalogue forms the research and development part (1) of Pockets for-. Each sample is constructed from offcuts.

Funded by Visual Artist and Craft Makers Award, Creative Scotland, 2021.

Inside Pockets
03.22

The Commute: Journeys of a Pocket Scent
07.23

A commute means to travel some distance between one’s home and place of work on a regular basis. An everyday circumstance that so many of us attend daily, yet experience in multifaceted ways. The Commute: Journeys of a Pocket Scent is a public archive and scented installation series that documents the individual and collective experiences of commuting to work.

The Commute collects stories from individuals, and documents the interactions they have with their clothing, spaces, people, sights and smells while on route to work, school, home and other places of connection. The project celebrates the mundane, everyday commute whilst interrogating the socio-cultural and political structures of these daily endeavours, using clothing and scent as tools to explore these journeys.

Collaborative project by Morag Seaton in collaboration with perfumers Samyak Varia and Xinning Zhao, The Royal College of Art, ISIPCA, and IFF (International Flavours and Fragrance) Europe. Sponsored by Halley Stevensons Ltd.

Memories of Dress
06.18

Photo: Rydel Cerezo
Model: Martha Horn
MUA: Mikala Monsoon

Memories of Dress is a collection which draws from Garment Stories, a series of illustrated interviews about our most valued clothes. Each piece of the collection is developed from these conversations and together celebrate stories of identity, comfort and childhood memory.

On the outside, the design aesthetic showcases a series of garments and accessories that appear as abstract wearables, tailored clothes with ingrown bags, softly sculpted details and asymmetrical form. Each piece carefully cut from local fabrics, found materials and other obsolescences, intricately stitched and pieced together. Behind each tangible outcome, however, is an extensive body of research that puts the individual and collective experience of dress at the heart of sustainable practice. Each fashion design embodies a story of personal significance - a garment story, recollected through the hidden contents of our pockets and memories of dress.

Three Leather Pockets
02.23

and

Draw a Pocket
04.22

and

Pocket Drawings
05.22

Three Leather Pockets, with both discreet and indiscreet openings, are pocket artefacts carefully constructed from Abbey England leather and other offcuts from the studio. Each pocket has been interpreted from coloured chalk scribbles on a jacket toile, where a group of people were asked to ‘draw a pocket’. Exhibited at the Royal Leather Studio Exhibition, Battersea Hangar Space, February 2023.

Draw a Pocket, Scottish linen, studio offcuts, painted cotton binding.

Aviation
03.17

Aviation is a 1960s airplane toy from the fictional toy company ‘Tinki Toys’. While the plane doesn’t exist, the posters were created to inform a garment collection for the 1947-2017 Fashion Show at the Art School, Glasgow. Key elements of Aviation’s shapes and colours are applied to pocket details and in overlapping layers of fabric. A collection that embodies 1960s’ youth and their vision of the future.

Pocket Futures
06.22

Pockets are components of clothes, fashion and the everyday that have the power to reveal the intimate habits, characters and stories of people and beyond. The things we hold in them and the actions we make while using them can help put us in touch with our identity, history and even our own sense of mortality.

This project seeks to reveal everyday realities and speculative fictions, using pockets as a tool to imagine new worlds and to navigate difficult places in our current one. This is an interactive project that asks you to participate, reflect, imagine and create alternative pocket futures.

Garment Stories
01.18

Garment Stories is an illustrated book that follows the stories of twenty-five individuals talking about their most valued clothes. Winner of the John Byrne Award for Writing, 2018.