Writing

MC Bushkin kept the clothes he did not want to be seen wearing twice. Looking at his archive with Ewen Spencer, this essay asks how Moschino, Iceberg and the history of UK garage can be preserved alongside the people who gave them meaning.

Clearing a family attic reveals an unexpected record of London Fashion Week, a letter from Louise Wilson and a mother’s view of a career. A personal essay on what fashion keeps, what it loses and who saves the evidence.

Ten years after founding the Westminster Menswear Archive, collecting more clothes no longer seems a sufficient answer. This essay examines the assumptions that allow uniforms, workwear and sportswear to disappear from fashion history.

A membrane designed for mountain conditions became a marker of knowledge, belonging and style. From Berghaus to Savile Row and Palace, this essay follows the cultural life of Gore-Tex beyond its intended use.

Warhol’s camouflage self-portraits open a question about what clothes let us see. Moving between uniforms, hi-vis and Stone Island, this essay asks how recognising a type can obscure the person wearing it.

Oi Polloi made unexpected combinations feel unmistakably Mancunian. Its shop windows, Deck-Out characters and collaborations reveal how a retailer can give familiar clothes a new language of taste, humour and recognition.

A label sewn into a garment set an appointment at Heathrow. Following Hussein Chalayan’s Place/Non-Place collection from manufacture to an auction, this essay explores how clothes hold promises, memories and evidence of the lives around them.

The MA-1 began with a military specification, then acquired new lives through subcultures and fashion. Archival garments and design details reveal a jacket defined by continual revision rather than a single, fixed original.

From Cub Scout proficiency badges to scooter rallies and the Stone Island compass, small pieces of cloth carry large claims. Archival garments reveal how decoration becomes evidence of membership, experience and belonging.

Sunglasses have long shaped who can look without being seen. From cinema and uniforms to smart glasses, this essay follows the changing relationship between fashion, surveillance and the technologies we wear.

Menswear can disappear long before a garment reaches a museum. Looking at McQueen’s Joan and the archives that record it, this essay traces how criticism, photography and collecting shape the fashion history we inherit.

A quilted Left Hand jacket by Massimo Osti turns a military underlayer into an outer garment. Its continuing use by designers shows how an archive can preserve a working method as well as a piece of clothing.

Admiral’s bold England shirt became more than match kit. Original garments and advertising trace how the 1980 design grew into a wider language of polos, sweatshirts and supporter clothing around the 1982 World Cup.

The Everest Parka, Cameraman Jacket and Taped Ventile Aircraft Jacket reveal Nigel Cabourn’s way of working with history. Garments, photographs, specialist makers and expedition stories become knowledge that designers can put back into use.

Burberry’s A Good Sport campaign returns the house check to football through a carefully composed crowd. From casual culture to Craven Cottage, this essay examines how luxury brands frame heritage, class and collective feeling.

Uniforms, workwear, catalogues and archives reveal clothing doing its everyday work: organising bodies, managing risk and keeping institutions functioning.

For thirteen years, I photographed people posing outside the Haçienda Apartments from my window opposite. This ongoing act of observation asks how nostalgia becomes ritual, and how a vanished club continues to shape the present.

From the terraces of Turf Moor to his return to Burnley, Aitor Throup turns experiences of exclusion into drawings, prototypes and systems. An essay on refusal as a method of making.

Being written into a play about McQueen prompts a reflection on theatre, memory and the histories that returned in his shows. A personal account of fashion’s ability to make the past present.

Bill Green’s Soho boutique helped change how men dressed in post-war Britain. Its catalogues, garments and labels trace a path from physique photography to the Mods and Carnaby Street.