Words: Eilidh Duffy

“It’s the least finished word, and it kind of looks like stitching – you can have it go on and on and on and on.” I’m with Minna Bunting on the ground floor of a grand townhouse just off Soho Square on Wednesday morning and she is explaining the idea behind the name of her new label. Light and air stream in from two heavy sash windows, illuminating a zig-zag bunting of ecru, azure, chocolatey black, and terracotta silks. Except, actually, it’s not bunting, but large, languid pieces of draped, modular fabrics, some with sleeves and some without, others just big rectangles with a couple of slits.

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Words: Eilidh Duffy

“The weather’s wrong,” Cecile Tulkens laments over the phone. We were catching up last Tuesday morning, which was, indeed, depressingly cold and wet. I agree with her as I swaddle myself in a hoodie and ginormous scarf. “It’s the Spring-Summer collection, so I’m making all this linen knitwear and cotton outerwear. It’s a ‘Yeah got my jumper on, because that’s all you need!’ kind of thing.”

Shown at twos last Friday evening, the collection, titled ‘A Dream of John Ball’, takes its name from the William Morris short story of the same name, in which the protagonist falls asleep only to be taken back to the peasant’s revolt of 1381 when an estimated 60,000 to 100,000 peasants marched to London and demanded an end to serfdom. It was unsuccessful, and set abolition back another 200 years.

“This young man from Victorian England ends up having a conversation with one of the leaders of the peasant revolt,” Cecile explains. This was John Ball, a priest from Essex who was hanged, drawn, and then quartered for his challenge to the crown. “He is explaining the concept of modern capitalism to Ball, who then is like, ‘Oh, surely nobody’s happy’,” she continues, “and I guess that really resonates in terms of how we all feel now.”

Cecile seems particularly attuned to the atmosphere – and not just the dreich summer weather. ‘A Dream of John Ball’ is a collection that she’s made while thinking about how we all feel right now, particularly how squeezed our generation is, financially and politically.

As if by some strange perverted allegorical twist of fate, the day we spoke, riots broke out in Belfast that turned into racist pogroms during which Loyalist youths attempted to burn non-white people out of their homes, and on the day of the show, four young people who took direct action against Elbit Systems were sentenced as ‘terrorists’ through a grim sleight of hand by the UK government and English justice system.

A cohesive identity in left-wing, anti-imperialist English radicalism is sort of over now. At least that which can be found in the figures of William Morris or the Diggers or the Levellers or indeed John Ball himself. “The lost Anglo-Saxon ‘utopia’ has been made to disappear,” cultural studies legend John Clarke opined on this great podcast about his new book, The Battle for Britain, I was listening to shortly after speaking to Cecile last week. “People [are mobilising] for different versions of what they think Englishness to be.”

So yes, at the moment these romantic figures of English radicalism such as John Ball feel particularly appealing – and particularly now.

“Fashion is so emotional, so process driven, that thinking about something political and how it comes out, it’s not didactic,” she explains. If there is any notion of politics to be found in the collection, though, it’s a sense of liberation. Clothes that, as she explains, carry “a level of romanticism”, a type of vibe that she describes as “grandma’s handbag – a freedom in the textiles, because you’re not actually trying to keep anybody warm.”

Cecile’s version of ‘Englishness’? “I guess it came out a little crusty free rave,” she laughs. The harsh aniline dyes of the madras cotton shorts and blue perforated suede bomber; the bootleg Westwood orb leggings (“she took it from Harris Tweed so I’m just continuing the cycle!”); and those svelte knits in light, airy linens. It all felt particularly hot and free and seemed to want to rupture the surface of things.

The day of the show, the sun finally broke through a near two-week bank of rainclouds, and as it drew to a close, Liam Casey’s soundtrack phased into Dunstan Bruce’s strident tone bashing out his 2024 song F***ING EXPENSIVE whose lyrics lament the price of living in late capitalism. “COCAINE (FUCKING EXPENSIVE), FREEDOM (FUCKING EXPENSIVE), FREE SPEECH (FUCKING EXPENSIVE), IDEAS (FUCKING EXPENSIVE),” he shouts in a distinctive Northern twang.

Someone, in hushed tones, whispered to the person next to them, “Cecile Tulkens, fucking expensive…” It brought the few who could hear it back to the reality of fashion in 2026. Clothes can indeed speak to something inherently subversive, but designers still need to work out how to pay the rent.

Read on for Cecile’s recommended books to get you through this working week and a rare glimpse into how one of the very complex and impressive knitted pieces came to be ✪

Garm of the week

After the show, I wanted to give some insight to the more process based things we get up to in the studio, so here is the process behind the ‘Ikat’ knitted chemise.

‘A Dream of John Ball’ is all about misplaced nostalgia, or longing for a pastoral past that perhaps never actually existed.

For me, scrambling a ‘pastoral scene’, making it like a Jean-Antoine Watteau painting on acid, would discuss this a bit. There’s a romance to it, like being driven in a fast, expensive car down a country lane by your boyfriend.

We took very fine knitted cotton yarn and painted it with dyes.

Then unwound the painted knit, and reknitted into the same shape.

Our textile experiment then needed a vessel – and what better than the Swedish military thermal I got from bog itself!!

Here are the cut pieces.

And here is the finished piece!

Other stuff we liked on and off the internet

The history of Afghan war rugs

I am unfortunately suffering from quite severe studio brain rot, however lovely Rosie sent me this incredible podcast by Blood Work on Afghan War Rugs. The section where grenades and pomegranates blur really speaks to the hard-to-pin-down nature of textiles and their shifting meanings.

Home as alternative universe

Thinking a lot about building, homes, rooms as complete alternative universes. I got this book from Anna about Woodstock’s self-built homes, and also plan to go see Cosmic House and Eltham Palace as soon as possible too.

Listening to people complain about work

I also got a new book called Working Hands which is about what people do all day and how they feel about it. It’s from the 1970s and spans loads of different jobs from steelwork and call centre labourers to sex workers. Nice to read about people complaining.

New favourite song

Instant coffee convert

I’m also now officially converted to instant coffee and would highly recommend it to those anxious and hardworking nighttime people ;) Nescafé gold with milk in the morning then a short espresso style one for a 9pm emergency.

Show credits

Styling: Max Permain
Casting: Piotr Chamier Casting
Hair: Tasos Constantinou
Jewellery: CC Steding
Music: Liam Casey
Studio team: Aeyesha Cundy, Faye Simister, Zoe Noble, Calantha Gerrard, Flint J McDonald, Jeanine Richards, Steph Linn, Carla Barwick & Oonagh Phipp
Special thanks: twos & Josh Cook, Alan Gaynor, Anna Howard, Joe Skilton, Rosie Woodhouse, Alfie Dyson & Sam Thompson

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News from the Bog #9

News from Lengua

News from Ryan Skelton

Intro: Eilidh Duffy
Guide: Will Reuben Howell-Jackson

Rome is a city with many layers. Being almost three millennia old, there are, of course, literal archaeological layers to the place: underground complexes and buried palaces, one of which appears in this guide, as well as ruined walls at almost every turn. At Bog, we are partial to a ruin or two. But we are also interested in getting under the surface of the other kinds of layers, the social and cultural strata; to dig in a bit and get to the heart of things. Rome is a city, however, that is so sprawling, so deep and rich and alive that peeling back the layers – particularly as a non-Italian-speaking outsider – is somewhat of a gargantuan task.

So we’ve called upon our friend Will Reuben Howell-Jackson, who moved to Rome in 2020, to help us. While assisting a friend sourcing costumes for a film, Covid struck, and with no permanent place in London to return to he decided just to stay. After immersing himself in the endlessly deep vintage-buying opportunities the city has to offer, in 2023 he started A-Collection, a vintage shop with monthly drops online (and a few specially-made pieces by Will) that will soon open up a permanent space in London. (Although, if you can’t wait, they’re doing a trunk show at Yorkton Worshops in Hoxton on the 19th and 20th of June.)

“I think living in a place where I have had the time to contemplate my goals instead of constantly fighting to pay rent was what initially kept me in Italy,” he explains. “Then the healing qualities of living in a place where the food is fresh and there’s 200 to 230 days of sun per year made me wonder why I had always insisted on being in London – I wake up looking forward to taking a coffee amongst the people in a place where a coffee is a universal right and doesn’t break the bank!”

As well as buying for the shop, learning Italian and basically becoming Roman, over the years Will has built up a vast and exciting personal wardrobe, and is probably one of the keenest eyes at the Roman markets. Given his talent for finding incredible stuff (every time we hang out I basically want to steal everything he is wearing), here he gives away some of his biggest secrets, including an ecclesiastical tailor with Rome’s best socks, a haberdashery shop selling deadstock cashmere from the 1940s (in its original wrapping, of course), the shop where Miuccia Prada apparently gets all her clothes made, and, of course, some of the best places to eat and drink in one of Europe’s oldest, most fabulous cities. Take me there right now!!!!!

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It’s become summer, and we’re writing this from the hot concrete slabs of Brockwell lido. We’ve also been in Japan again, which was going to be the subject of this blog but we’ve had so many other good ideas this week that we will just to pop it all in a different kind of post at some point soon.

One thing we will mention, though, is a show we got to visit. Straight off the plane, we rushed off to Daitabashi for the opening of CC-Steding and Oscar Foster-Kane’s show at Gallery Kudo. We love their work and known them and their respective practices for a really, really long time, but never encountered them in a more formalised space like this. CC-Steding were sharing some more experimental pieces that include sculptures and found objets crafted into strange shiny magpie-coded objects, and Oscar some more leftfield photographic works.

“We were exploring the relationship between value and availability, with rarity defined by luck, chance, or memory, rather than artificial scarcity or cost,” Nic from CC-Steding explained the premise behind their works. Things that are one-off, special because of our attachments rather than their monetary value – in other words, the textbook definition of ‘priceless’. These objects included a single piece of silver wire with a loop to hold a found wildflower (😭) and a single diamond set within it, a candle holder made from an ingot of melted Sterling Silver scraps from around their studio (a nod to the age-old circulation of precious metals) and an attractive clump of shattered safety glass.

Oscar’s photos, similarly, were an exploration of stuff that’s not quite settled. Often he uses really long exposures (sometimes multiple hours) that capture light over an unusually long period of time, creating strange spots of unnaturally bright or coloured light within the works. The selection of photographs were also taken over a longer period of time, having selected both early and more contemporary works for the show. Oscar mentioned he was focusing on an “irrational logic” in which “sequences don’t fully resolve but unfold through intuition, fragmentation, and loose association.”

Present at the opening was a shiba inu that used to belong to Kim Jones, Shoichi Aoki of STREET and FRUiTS wearing Oakleys and a green plastic fly swatter in the back pocket of his jeans (fangirling!), and the legendary Judy Blame / Nemeth / HOBAC archivist Kudo, who has no relation to the gallery which we found out too late, having already rather embarrassingly thanked him heartily at the end, to which he looked quite bewildered. At first we thought it was due to the language barrier, but no – just our sheer stupidity!

Garm of the week

When doing some research into late 19th- and early 20th-century sportswear a few weeks ago, we discovered an incredible little book published by the first ever fashion museum in the UK, The Gallery for English Costume.

Opened in 1947 in Plat Hall, an 18th-century mansion that was formerly home to the Worsley family, its stores consisted of the private collection of Dr C.W. Cunnington and his wife, Phyllis, who had sold their collection to the Manchester Corporation in 1947. Cunnington was an avid collector of dress, although not a doctor of fashion, but a medical doctor whose “passion for costume was a hobby which he pursued with delight and scholarly insight,” according to his obituary in The Guardian in 1961. When it was sold, the collection consisted of “550 articles of underwear, 650 hats, bonnets and caps, 100 parasols and 90 shawls, as well as 15,000 photographs.”

In a series of seven booklets published in the 1960s by The Gallery for English Costume, of which this sportswear edition is included, garments from Cunnington’s collection are brought to life. What strikes us about these publications is that the garments – in this case women’s sportswear that at the time of publishing in 1963 would have been up to 130 years old – were not shot in the cool, climate-controlled environment of the museum, but around the manor on actual living, breathing, sweating, moving models. It’s a form of documentation that might seem completely absurd to us in the days of accreditation and best practice and guidelines around object handling et cetera. But in the 1960s, it wasn’t necessarily requisite to keep garments in such controlled conditions.

Climate control in museums is a relatively recent thing in relation to, say, the actual objects it is meant to preserve. The first heating systems used to prevent damp in museums date from the late 19th century, but fashion collections weren’t really consolidated into museums until the opening of the Museum of Costume Art in New York the 1930s (which would eventually become the Met) and the founding of The Gallery for English Costume in the 1940s. Clothing had been collected by museums before this point, but these were the first public archives in the US and UK dedicated to fashionable Western dress.

From a quick click around online, we couldn’t discern when the actual guidelines for the care of clothing and textiles in museum collections were drawn up, but these likely evolved in the years after the founding in 1950 of the International institute for the Conservation of Museum Objects, an international organisation that was founded to deal with conservation problems and techniques.

They defined ‘conservation’ as a practice with two distinct prongs: the first, controlling the museum environment to avoid or minimise decay of objects; and the second, guiding how objects were treated to avoid decay altogether. Now clothing that has been accessioned into a museum collection cannot be worn, for fear of “sticky and careless fingers,” and “physical forces such as twisting, shaking, pulling, snagging and rubbing”. This is, at least, the reasoning given by An Illustrated Guide to the Care of Costume and Textile Collections, published by the UK’s Museums & Galleries Commission (MGC) in 2000.

It wasn’t just The Gallery for English Costume that used live models to display their clothing, though. In 1949, Doris Langley Moore, who would go on to found the Fashion Museum Bath in 1963, shot her entire collection of historical woman’s dress on the celebrities and high society ladies of 1940s England for her book, The Woman in Fashion.

And just a few days after discovering the Gallery of English Costume book, we came across another instance where models were used in a rather incredible shoot, this time of new sportswear design based on garments from the archives of the Museum of Costume Art. The exhibition’s rather clunky title is A Designers’ Exhibition of Costumes and Millinery Derived from Museum Documents and was opened at the International Building at the Rockefeller Center on 9th November 1940.

Perhaps the premise – making Western fashion influenced by non-Western traditional dress – is a little icky to the contemporary viewer, but it’s pretty interesting to think that this idea of sportswear was sort of just shorthand for comfy clothing you could move in, and that traditional forms of dress were posited as good examples (at least within womenswear, anyway).

We’re not 10000% sure where these images were published, as the exhibition itself displayed these garments on mannequins. Regardless, we are quite taken by the division between the ‘contemporary’ and ‘archival’ pieces: that one was shot on a model, being ‘alive’, and the other was shot on a mannequin or other type of museological support, being something sort of signalling that it’s reached a point where it’s beyond its former use.

As our friend Claire reminded us in her coverage of the Met museum’s latest exhibition for Harper’s Bazaar, in the 1980s the inimitable Elizabeth Wilson wrote of the garments in a museum being “eerie, uncanny, and, somehow, ‘dead’ without the bodies that once animated them”. When something is accessioned, it is considered beyond its original function. It is an example of its material; any sweat stains, repairs or rips are noted, at least traditionally, as defects. And so this weird sort of sacrifice of the garment has to happen in order for it to be ‘preserved for future generations’ or whatever museums say these days.

Our discovery of these images of models wearing clothing in the possession of a museum is, as some of you might have noticed already, sort of timely. Olivier Saillard’s recent show, The Living Museum of Fashion made a strong argument for the activation of these apparently ‘dead’ garments, and in fact claimed that it is museums themselves that ‘kill’ clothes, by erasing the body from the garment itself (see the work of Ellen Sampson, too). He told Vogue: “Things look very beautiful under glass, like taxidermied animal trophies in a chateau.”

In terms of other stuff that has made us think about the body and the museum: this book on wearing archives was just published (*which we’d really like to read but it’s currently sold out and if anyone reading this has the power to get a copy to us we will give you a bog bag in exchange*). But perhaps the most news-cycle-esque thing is the Met’s new exhibition about ‘fashion art’ or whatever it’s called and all of the mannequins that have been designed to look like ‘real’ bodies based on a small selection of actually existing people.

What’s notable is that the garments displayed on these special mannequins are all relatively contemporary, as museum guidelines for the display of clothing *probably* wouldn’t allow, say, a Rudi Gernreich monokini or, ironically, a Comme des Garçons ‘Body Meets Dress’ piece to be put on a mannequin that is not specifically made for museum garments. This is, as the aforementioned collections care guidelines lay out, in case they get damaged. And ironically oftentimes the museum mannequin is constructed with a smaller form than a normal shop mannequin, and is fitted with pads to fill out the garments without damaging the fabric.

Here’s a couple of fun illustrations demonstrating how:

In short, museums are public institutions, and their collections are, in theory, meant to serve the public. Thus popping on an 18th-century chemise à la reine might damage it, and this being a deliberate act, against the ethical guidelines of good museological practice.

Non-museums, even if they posture as a ‘museum’, don’t have to adhere to any of this. Take the infamous moment when Kim Kardashian wore Marilyn Monroe’s ‘Happy Birthday Mr. President’ dress to the Met Gala in 2022, for instance. Owned by Ripley’s Believe it or Not!, the dress is not part of an actual museum archive, thus can in theory be worn, or even destroyed, by anyone if the company lets them.

Exhibitions outside the realm of the state-funded museum have indulged in letting people wear things that under the auspices of the museum they could not. Yohji Yamamoto’s 2006-2007 retrospective at MoMu, Dream Shop, for example. Yohji has always been very critical of the fashion exhibition and its reification of the static object, and so Dream Shop which was his attempt to fuck with the system by going against all museological sense and leaving things out in the elements as well as allowing people to try on a selection of the garments from his archive – deliberately doing stuff that might destroy them, but also letting them live as their design intended.

In 2015, this premise was continued at The Live Archives (now Aro Archive) with a special exhibition of Yohji’s work you could try on, alongside narration from curator Jeffrey Horsley.

We first encountered Yohji’s hatred of the deathliness of the fashion exhibition when assisting Matthew Linde on his 2017 show The Overworked Body, in which some of the garments (loaned from private collectors or the designers themselves) were worn in a guerilla fashion show set between two galleries partially inspired by Yohji’s Dream Shop.

As if the museum gods wanted to smite us, a pair of 1990s Raf Simons leather trousers ceremoniously ripped up the butt seam when worn on the raised plywood catwalk. This may be a curator’s nightmare, but it was a thrilling moment to see these trousers, rarified as they were in the gallery space, be destroyed by the model’s feverish animation. We can’t quite remember how the archivist who owned the trousers felt about it, but it fundamentally changed how we think of clothes in the gallery – fragile, but dynamic and, despite their conditions, still alive.

Which brings us to the subject of the archive, and what the archive might do that the museum cannot. The archive is usually private, its objects used on the whim of their benefactor. Museums are rigid. ‘Dinosaurs’ as one V&A researcher once described them. And so objects crystallise within them, for better or for worse.

Other stuff we liked on and off the internet

Plane hats

In the early 1900s, women in Chicago and Paris loved aviation so much they wore miniature planes as hats. Yes, you read that right – MINI PLAnES AS HATS.

The mouldy mall

Sort of related to our garm of the week is this mouldy mall (ty Joseph for the tip). A Malaysian mall closed for 50 days, and the damp took over, covering every single leather good in mould <3

Hanae Mori kissaten show

At a big retrospective of Hanae Mori’s work at the National Art Centre Tokyo, we discovered that she used to do fashion shows at her husband’s kissaten (coffee shop) round the corner from her boutique. They had this fab photo to illustrate it. More Hanae Mori content soon………

Seditionaries shoes

Also in Tokyo was a big show of Vivienne Westwood and Malcolm McLaren’s work in Omotesando Hills, a giant concrete shopping mall in the middle of Harajuku. Cool to see old SEX and Seditionaries stuff, sure, but really Vivienne Westwood’s early solo stuff is so much more exciting and weird. Maybe we’re just too used to punk shit that it’s kind of vernacular now and not really saying much…. Anyway, these shoes were our fave thing in there, and you can still get them today!!! Although the older colourways are like five billion times better.

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News from Ryan Skelton

News From the Bog #8: (en)closure special

News From the Bog #5

Words: Ella Sweeney

When it comes to tracing the history of floristry and those who pioneered the craft, very little exists.1 The material history of flower arranging is knotty and hard to untangle; it has been flattened by simplified and reductive narratives about the art and practice of floristry as a feminine leisure pursuit, apparently unworthy of more serious analysis or attention. Yet floral decoration has been practised since the dawn of human civilisation (approx. 12,000 years ago, give or take), and most likely in some form before that. The ancient Egyptians are known to have decorated spaces using cut flowers and crafted vases, and in medieval Europe the devotional Book of Hours was adorned with floral designs in the margins.

Originally published in 1953, Julia S. Berrall’s A History of Flower Arrangement is one of the only comprehensive guides that explores the broader social and cultural contexts in which floristry has developed since AD 1. She begins in China, one of the earliest cultures to formalise floral design, drawing upon Confucian teachings on contemplation, preservation, and symbolism to develop a highly formalised and codified practice of floral design. Then to Japan, where for centuries the practice of Ikebana has been a significant part of culture and custom, and a type of flower arranging that has been studied and documented more seriously than any other. Then to the seclusion of medieval monasteries in Europe, and through the courts of 18th-century France and the Victorian estates of England.

How a culture relates to its flowers can tell us something about the people of said culture. What might the exuberant and electric arrangements of 1980s LA restaurant Spago, hang out of rich kids, poseurs and the young Bret Easton Ellis, tell us about the hedonist and hypercapitalist culture of Reagan’s America? And what could the high street florist, a somewhat dying breed, often managed by working-class men and women, tell us about the history of our high streets, local economies, and wider communities? More recently, why are ever-increasing numbers of shops and cafes, predominantly in West and central London, inflicted by what I call the “modern flower virus”. A floral aesthetic that emphasises sheer spectacle and scale for the sake of social media metric value, led by the likes of Chelsea in Bloom.

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Words: Eilidh Duffy

I catch Ryan Skelton as he’s taking a lunch break from his job at the SOAS library in central London. Pigeons coo and ambulance sirens blare intermittently in the background. We’re on a call, so I ask for a photograph of what he’s wearing. This way I can imagine him speaking from the garments in which he has decided to dress himself on that particular day. This is more important than you might initially think.

I am humoured: he is wearing a Cecile Tulkens dress shirt, wide open, with a peach taffy-coloured corset he found at a car boot sale cinched around his waist, waspie-style, suspenders jangling over the hips. On top of this he wears a gossamer pink dressing gown (the earlier, slightly quilted mid-20th-century style) from a Roman flea market and a coat designed by his brother, John Skelton (who also made his felt shoes and tartan trousers) for whom he often does research and consulting, a term he apparently loathes.

I ask him why he chose to wear this particular ensemble.

“I met with a lover last night and wore the outfit (though with a dress, not the shirt and corset) and en route I caught myself in a window and liked the combination of colours and draping effect while walking. Then today I was thinking: this outfit, especially in the library, is an ode to one of my favourite ever collections from Comme – the ‘beyond taboo’ lingerie-inspired collection for Autumn-Winter 2001.”

See. No one does it quite like Ryan.

We’re only slightly on the phone to talk about outfits, but mainly to discuss his new poetry performance, which will be happening at twos, Regent Studios this coming Sunday 26th April at 4pm. This show – a Sunday sermon he’s calling it – is about what Ryan does best: dressing. More specifically, his love of fine cloth and his penchant for over-ordering clothes made in these textiles to dress in, thus ending up in a large amount of debt.

The poem-performance, titled Oh cloth, dearest…, was conceived while immersing himself in Galliano-era Dior Couture shows over the darker, more dreary months of winter. This is something he does every single day, although the particular designer and timbre of fashion show usually rotates every couple of weeks (he is currently coming to the end of an Atelier Versace season). Fashion shows are a form of TV for Ryan, who, as you will find out from this News segment, is heavily invested in the circulation of fashion show history online. Galliano is particularly fitting for winter: “like pantomime, so ridiculous,” Ryan opines.

>> The Spring-Summer 2003 Dior Couture show that started Ryan’s thinking. A chaotic melange of costume references plundered from all over the world. Complicated, overwhelming, and “gives you so much to talk about”. <<

It’s the very real relationship he has with clothes, rather than the celluloid impressions of them, that will concern Ryan on Sunday. In this performance he will celebrate his cathartic and bacchanalian approach to the consumption of clothing. Rather than lambasting himself for being terrible with money, “the performance is me preaching as to why I buy so much, why I’m always in debt,” he explains. “This piece, it’s about the art of dressing and the seduction of getting dressed, because these clothes, they can transform the mundane.”

This mundanity is something Ryan is particularly allergic to. In Oh cloth, dearest… dressing, as an antidote, becomes “a summoning of what hurts deep in crevices of selfishness to be covered by a hallucinogenic shimmer.” While the sight of bleak contemporary dress on the train is met with utter disdain:

They think that constitutes as attire?

Or construction

desire left quite alone

Bored

Misery guts

Avid readers of bog will be more familiar with Ryan’s photography work (remember this?), in which he often uses self-portraiture as a medium to explore elements of his psyche in a decidedly public fashion. “My art practice is kind of my therapy,” he explains, “anything that’s very personal, I try to make it very abstract.” Clothing (or sometimes lack thereof) is a pivotal object within these photographs, which, as he explains, allow him to experiment with endless reinvention whilst holding on to a core identity. It also diverges from a typical fashion image, so they don’t become “easy to digest and to market”.

“It dawned on me that I’d never really written poetry about fashion and clothing and the psychology of wearing clothes,” he explains. “So, not just fashion, but clothing that has identity.” It’s this absolute dedication to how clothes feel, and what that means, that makes Ryan such a compelling, and convincing, researcher of dress.

Read on for Ryan’s most prized bankruptcy-inducing garment and fashion-related rabbit holes to dive into this weekend ✪

*Oh cloth, dearest… will be performed at twos, Regent Studios on Sunday 26th April at 4pm.

Garm of the week

You know that moment when Carrie looks aghast at Miranda and exclaims: “I spent 40,000 on shoes”? Well, I can somewhat relate because of how much I paid in import duties for this wee little Comme des Garçons Autumn-Winter 1998 ‘Fusion’ number.

As seen on the catwalk in a fashion show without music, as Rei is an assassin and her clothes are just a bit better than that motley crew that is the rest of fashion month in the sweet March to April of 1998.

Why this payment was an essential as the garm is both complex and very simple – it is a little cryptic number to satisfy the mundanity of life. I love, love trying to dress as ambiguous as I can, don’t you? And the 1990s Comme era does help, does it not?

It suggests a uniform that doesn’t really bother me; you are not keeping up with conventional standards of being hot, but at the same time you clearly are very demanding for the highest craftsmanship in prêt-à-porter.

And don’t look obvious.

Or trendy.

It is just very direct.

Very decisive.

Cute dress.

Before I get to work or have to do my domestic duties I have to watch a fashion show while having my coffee. I mean, it’s caffeine in visual form, no?!

I often joke with my flatmates that I am getting changed in my 6th look when I put my moka pot on the gas and quick-as-you-can dash upstairs to get dressed for the day. To try to look as Prada-catwalk-worthy as I can with the petite funds I have and the slim amount of time before the coffee may get burnt. And I will run, I will fall down those steps to get it off the gas. Pedro Almodóvar would grin at me doing so and keep the camera rolling.

God, you wouldn’t believe the amount of collections from the 1990s to 2000s I pray to see on video, and yet for some deeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeply annoying reason (the simple fact that they are not online) I won’t be seeing. Ann Demeulemeester Autumn-Winter 2000, or Balenciaga Autumn Winter 2000, 2001 2002, 2003, 2004 and 2005 – or Spring-Summer 2002, 2003, 2004, 2005 and 2006 in better quality. Or Helmut Lang Autumn-Winter 1999 and Spring-Summer 1998 and 1999 or Comme des Garçons Autumn-Winter 1997 or Yohji Yamamoto Spring-Summer 1998 or Jean Paul Gaultier Haute Couture Autumn-Winter 1997. WHERE ARE THEY?!

There are at least 50 more that I could list. I wish I was saying so in jest.

But yes, the spring erupted with aplomb and vigour when this Comme show got transported to the public domain.

I mean,

Talk about killer.

Talk about I need to see that draping in its full 3D fit.

Talk about no music but the occasional Nokia beeping away as silent mode was not yet invented, clearly.

And the models have loads of outfit changes.

Because that’s the common denominator with the 1990s that I can’t seem to shake off – the you have a minute to get changed so no fussy irritating styling tricks plz just plain old very good designer clothing to grab and go– FIRST LOOKS!

I want clothes like this.

Other stuff we liked on and off the internet

Unpacking the shows on the Fashion Spot

You plebs, you think you know this and that on fashion, well you are so deeply entrenched in being wrong because The Fashion Spot members know what’s what my dear. By mercy when fashion month rolls into town those anonymous critics are on it. The severity!

I first frequented TFS on the Abbey Lee Kershaw thread when I was an A-Level student 14 years ago. As we all know, everyone is on the side-hustle journey of being an oracle of high fashion via the vessel of social media. HOWEVER, the me! me! me! vibe of it all is just not the same as the reddit vibe in which one is not getting paid a dime. I don’t know who these people are but by jove, do I know their opinions.

And those opinions are really special when apathy in fashion criticism is a popular sensibility – the anonymity is needed when one is fine with not getting invited to the party. The no-invitation-to-the-show aspect may pertain as to why those in opposition to TFS just view it as those being salty with no face to match their opinions.

I have thoroughly enjoyed being a lurker on the forums for 14 years and only on the very very few occasions have I spoken above the parapet when I argued why Prada Autumn-Winter 2024 was a good marriage between Raf and Miuccia’s sensibilities (under the username Razzer), but 98% of the time I am just lurking away feeling no need to contribute but to listen away attentively like a monk.

A forum member we all love is PDFSD – time to learn! Go lurk.

The Leopard (1963) at Ciné Lumière, Institut Français

The French Institute in West pulled out all the finest embroidery with a weekday afternoon showing of Visconti’s The Leopard. Gosh, to depart from this mortal coil – yet still be conscious! Such is the spellbinding allure of a Visconti film that simply demands to be seen on the largest screen: the detail, the set design, the palaces, the long vistas of courtship, the severe lack of people in the audience on a Thursday afternoon, the virginal experience of being baptised into the French Institute cinema with such a splendour of filmmaking – take me!

I ate a coconut macaroon before and wore a low heel.

I will be campaigning to see more Visconti at such a fine establishment. Imagine, The Damned!

The House is Black (1962) by Forugh Farrokhzad

To tie this up with a bow I have to share the most powerful thing I have encountered this week.

All due to someone returning the DVD at my work and then… How pertinent, that 21:49 mins delivers multiple layers of thought.

Beautiful.

Words: Jame St Findlay

I first encountered the Bristol-based artist Charlie Davenport (and by virtue, his work) in 2012 when we were both students at Edinburgh College of Art. Charlie was in his final year and I was in my first. I began art school without any real knowledge of art. Art was not an expansive thing to me at the time; it was a painting on a wall or a sculpture on a plinth and existed within a set of parameters established, I assumed, by some kind of governing body. It was mandated and its scope was limited to only a few forms of expression. Art school, of course, tore my worldview apart. I emerged completely changed, my mind rewired in favour of the ephemeral – works that sat on an in-between, not quite here or there. It was through encounters with the work of artists like Charlie that my perception shifted.

I still remember his degree show vividly: three pieces of coloured sugar paper cut into wobbly shapes, with green, red, and blue feathers glued to them. The paper and the feathers were clearly purchased from our on-campus art shop, the work looked as though it had been made in seconds. Initially I thought, “That’s it...?” I was bitterly disappointed, confused – upset even. At the time I questioned how this was enough to merit a ‘final show’. It felt like it could easily be walked past and forgotten about – but it wasn’t, it stuck with me throughout my time at Edinburgh College of Art and remains with me to this day.

Over time, I have realised that it is a kind of transient viewership that is endemic to Charlie’s work. It needs to be seen, but it does not need to last; it exists for a moment and then it ceases to, but in its wake you’re left with a deep, stirring feeling that is sometimes hard to place. Sometimes it makes me melancholic, sometimes it makes me laugh, but it always stays with me. In every work I have encountered over the years, my perception of what art can be has shifted slightly. Charlie is a radical in his approach to making, totally ungoverned by any rulebook, developing a singular practice.

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Words: Bog

Recipes: Bog & Lulu Bullock

Last week, when our friend Lulu told us that there was a special event at Somerset House that involved eating dirt (soil, earth, mud, the literal ground) we knew we had to go. We felt we have a responsibility to report on this, an opportunity of gargantuan proportions for a blog called ‘bog’ to bring this story to you all – and, in turn, for you to be able to visit too (as it’s on until the 26th of April). Usually we wouldn’t report on foodstuffs, it’s not really our bag, but we thought this was too exciting not to report on. Maybe we will do more of this, who knows (working title: Boggles?)

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Is it just us or does it feel like everything is closing down? If not closing, enclosing. Becoming more private, more expensive, more out of reach. Which is very much the theme of today’s bogstack. In a kind of bittersweet way? Maybe not, we’ll let you decide.

For some context: we are writing this in the wake of two bouts of news that make us feel quite winded. Firstly, Glasgow’s arts institutions all seem to be on the precipice of total collapse. Trongate 103, home to Glasgow Print Studio, Transmission, and Project Ability, is very much under threat as Glasgow City Council has ended their tenancy and upped the rent fourfold. (There’s a protest against this rent hike today from 12-2 if you’re in town, and if you’re an artist you can help materially by signing up to be a member of Transmission for £20/year.)

This comes just months after the CCA (Centre of Contemporary Arts) went into liquidation in January, an awful depressing end to the amazing struggle by Art Workers for Palestine Scotland that resulted in the resignation of some evil slimy zio board members and directors. Then just this month Listen Gallery was evicted from its home, another victim of Glasgow’s rent increases (you can help them find a new space by donating here).

At the other end of the cultural spectrum, just a couple of days ago we found out that the last style + culture mag in London that we like is folding. They haven’t announced it yet, so we don’t want to steal their thunder, but just know it’s duhpressing news. It is perhaps an unhappy coincidence that the last magazine we bought was a copy of this soon-to-be-gone magazine from Brixton News, Pritesh Patel’s newsstand at Brixton station which he was forced to close after TfL tripled the rent. By the end of next month, both the magazine and the place where we got it will be gone.

But, really, is this a coincidence? Not really. All these closures feel like victims of the same forces of cultural enclosure within the UK today – the siloeing of certain cultural forms into profit-making enterprises (or their transformation into profit by way of extractivist rents).

Our current rumination is part-inspired by Aude Fellay’s essay we published last week, in which she argues the history of fashion (with a capital ‘F’) is a history of enclosure. Building upon Minh-Ha T. Pham’s framing of “intellectual property as a racial project,” she locates the enclosure of ideas and forms in fashion she places within colonialism-capitalism, which, like the many acts of enclosure (both legal and gestural) that have taken place throughout history, has framed ideas in fashion as ‘private property’, owned by ‘artistic geniuses’ and luxury conglomerates:

Cultural enclosure is not some new idea we’ve just come up with, but we find it’s often used and/or understood in the context of the privatisation of heritage (tourism, museums, et cetera). What we’re trying to get at is that there is a middling place that exists within our collective access to culture, be it through a publicly funded gallery, a magazine, or the very site where you access said printed matter. ‘Commons’ may be too strong a word for this space, but you get the gist. And that is currently being both closed and enclosed.

In other words, it feels like access to stuff is shrinking. Part of this is due to stuff is getting really expensive – this extends to our hobbies too. Like consuming old clothes. Mr. Vintage Fayre a couple of weeks ago was a complete cesspit of price-gouging fuckery, but more than that – it felt like one’s love of old stuff was becoming increasingly enclosed; privatised and gentrified for a tiny elite of marketing dads. This may sound facetious, and we don’t intened it to, but why the actual fuck would someone buy a pair of patched up trousers for £800.00? You are literally being scammed.

Not everything is so awful though, and there is still plenty happening that is not closed or enclosed. Such as the very affordable Brixton Community Cinema screening of Landlessness (2017-2022), The Black and the Green (1983) and The Ban (2025) – at a thriving community centre in Stockwell that happened on Monday night.

It is not particularly surprising to feel that all three have resonances that are deeply relevant today – particularly their touching upon the effect of the OG kind of enclosure that involved the stealing of common land and turning it into private property (of which there’s actually a really good two-part podcast on enclosure with legend historian Peter Linebaugh here and here) and the spreading of this out towards other territories in what we now describe as the colonial project.

As Emma Dabiri pointed out in the q&a after the screening on Monday, we’ve gotta talk more about enclosure guys!! Because all the stuff that’s being taken from us is by capital, not other people. Even the price-gouging fuckery at the menswear fair – can we really be angry at some dudes just cashing in on a trend? There is indeed a strongly-believed narrative that loss is caused by the Other (the migrant, or in our stupid analogy, the menswear seller), rather than our boss, our government, and the big spectral figure we call capital.

Perhaps somewhat appropriately, then, we have two things to share with you that feel like they’re pushing back against this kind of alienation, and supporting people pushing back on the various frontiers of neocolonial enclosure and deep, irreversible loss in Palestine and Lebanon. First, we’d like to share with you a fundraiser for mutual aid groups in both Lebanon and Palestine on Saturday 4th April some friends are co-organising at the Horse Hospital in London, with a roster of donations from many fantastic friends and family (including us fyi). There’s too many to list and we don’t want to start in case it looks like favouritism, but at the end of the newsletter you can hear about a few of the magic things they have (which will all be pay what you can on the day). We also spoke to them about the groups they are raising money for, the realities of the situation in Lebanon, and how you can do your own fundraising. Skip to the end for this. —>

& if you are not in London, but you are in Brussels, the 2DAY store will be on for 4 (!) days between the 9th and 12th of April at Place de la Justice, 27-28 feat. LOADS MORE fabulous people we love: Giovanna Flores, Kersti Jan Werdel, Christaseya, Kostas Murkudis, Series of Aesthetic Manufacturing, Atelier E.B……. the list goes on and on. A percentage of all sales will be split between Singa, a Brussels-based non-profit who create meeting places for the city’s residents and newcomers (asylum seekers, refugees, undocumented people, migrants); and UAWC, an org that works alongside Palestinian, Arab and other international organisations to support and protect the rights of Palestinian farmers.

Garm of the week

Clearly, this week we have been thinking a lot about what we are collectively losing. This also extends to the making of certain things too, and their first point of circulation: the shop. You know we love a shop here at bog, and we’ve just discovered two amazing ones which are unfortunately closing down. Both, however, are wrapping it all up due to old age rather than rent hikes, which is sort of bittersweet. In some way, these businesses are coming to the end of their natural lives, dealing in objects that don’t seem to have a wide-ranging customer base in the late 2020s. Sad, but inevitable when a place becomes a relic of a long-gone form of consumer culture.

Don’t get us wrong, we hate to see an old shop go, but perhaps it’s better to close something down that still has some spirit, than to let someone come across and hollow it out. 🥲

So, now as they enter their final months of operation, we wanted to give you all a chance to visit them before they’re gone:::::::::::

Shirley Leaf and Petal Company + The Flower Makers Museum, Hastings

Within walking distance in Hastings, there is a shipwreck museum (ft. lots of cool objects dredged up from shipwrecks), a fishing museum (ft. a bit of a ship with excellently-dressed life-size wax figures of 1970s-era fishermen) and, as we very recently discovered, a fabric flower makers museum in the basement of a building whose foundations date back to the 14th century. Safe to say, Hastings is one of the best populated place for incredibly good heritage museums – which will sadly be depleting in number quite soon.

The building that the Hastings Flower Makers Museum occupies is being sold by the owner’s daughter, who lives quite far away. The woman who owns the building, Brenda Wilson, bought the whole place in 1981, including the Shirley Leaf and Petal Company that resides within it, from an elderly couple who were eager to retire. The ground floor has been kept as a working shop, selling fabric flowers and greenery for some very decent prices, as well as bolts of 1920s cotton velvet for £20/yard.

The museum has been operational since 1993, when Wilson decided to share the now-115-year history of the company that first opened its doors in Bow, East London. In particular, she felt inclined to document the history of homeworkers: women, children, and disabled people who were often employed to do this kind of fiddly work, many of them from home. It was often extremely toxic, too. “The children, their hair used to turn green with the lead that was in the products and they used to lose their hair at the front,” Wilson explains in an interview for the Museum Mapping project. Alison Matthews David, in her book Fashion Victims, describes the horrors many women in the industry faced due to their exposure to arsenic, and recounts the grisly story of Matilda Scheurer’s death, a 19-year-old flower maker who died of arsenic poisoning, whose skin and eyes were said to have turned bright green. These powders and dyes killed both the workers, and made the wearers violently ill.

Having previously worked for the NEC (National Exhibition Centre) in Birmingham, Wilson was able to run the shop and museum supported by nice big contracts with theatre and TV clients such as the National Theatre and the Munich Opera. Before taking on the company, she’d helped the business score work with Selfridges and Harrods to produce Christmas decorations, and in the late 1990s, was tasked with making the fabric flowers for this John Galliano corset for his SS97 show:

More recently, we were told, they’d sold a very large supply of velvet to the costume designers of Bridgerton.

The interview with Wilson is a very special read, and demonstrates how the shop sits within the community as a historical, social and cultural resource, not just as a shop. As recently as 2018, the company was still employing elderly homeworkers to produce fabric flowers, which, as Wilson explains, gave them something to get involved with. “They love earning a little bit of money because it’s something for them to do, to keep the hands supple,” she says in the q&a.

Flower-making has been a type of work available to women and disabled people since the 19th century, providing income for those who had little recourse to much else, and a way to avoid the evils of the poor house. Still, it seems to have always been paid terribly and was, as we already mentioned, potentially very dangerous. Thomas Holmes, the British philanthropist who set up the Home Workers Aid Commission in 1904, which provided this very precarious workforce with with annual holidays and recreational facilities, wrote of the trade: “Artificial Flower Making is one of the most interesting home industries. It is also one of the worst paid…This work makes a great strain on the wrist, the arm, and the chest.”

& on the process of making the flowers themselves:

The centre of the flower is first made; for upon this whole flower is built. In the creation of the centre the skill of the artist is apparent, for this gives the character of the flower…One by one sufficient petals are added, the calyx is slipped along the wire stem and glued into position…a few deft touches from clever fingers press the petals into the required position, the warm curling tongs are skilfully applied to the edges of the petals, and, hey presto! The flower is finished, and has become “a thing of beauty” if not “a joy for ever.”

We feel a pang of great distress that this place will be gone before long, and considering that flower making is a critically endangered craft, it may be the last time we have access to such objects and their method of production outside the crystallised realm of the state-funded museum. That is, if the contents of the shop even make it to a museum… Which we suppose might not be guaranteed. All the more reason to go while it’s still there.

Mason Menswear, Edgware Road

Word broke last week that a very interesting shop was having a mega closing down sale. Opened in 1974, Mason Menswear is quite possibly the last shop of its kind in the UK – although please correct us if we are wrong because we would love to be wrong. A total men’s outfitter, Italian style, and very much worthy of M. Tony Soprano, Mason specialises in custom-designed and ready-to-wear tailoring in ‘larger’ sizes, much of it designed by Mason and produced in Italy, and footwear each of which is made from genuine exotic leathers (ostrich lizard, etc.)

Mason is now ready to retire, having been in the business for 52 years. At 81, he still feels the need to be in the shop every day to show face. Simon, his lovely, more chatty left hand, is there every day too, and if you get talking (not super hard) he very much loves to show you the stuff. It’s very unlikely the shop has changed much in at least 40 years (maybe ever, but we forgot to ask when the last refurb was) and is cloaked in dusty coral carpeting.

The general vibe is kind of like the dream shop, and Simon knows this too. He seemed amazed that so many ‘young people’ had come through the shop that week, but said he knew that if they just made it a bit more hospitable, put in a few more sofas, offered clients a drink upon arrival, their sales would increase in a heartbeat. But Mr. Mason, he said, was just ready to retire.

As for the clothes: think sexy southern Italian geezer in, like, 1996. Or 1986. There’s a sort of strange timelessness to the pieces. The fabrics are completely wild (Kiko eat your heart out) and many of the garms, as we said, were designed by Mr. Mason and produced in Italy specifically for the shop – so you will not find them anywhere else.

You’d be hard pressed to find a place like this outside of Italy (or maybe, like, Belgium or Switzerland). If you’re in the business for a suit, there are literally three entire walls lined with them; a flashy shirt in a sexy box, probably like 150+ on offer. Their backless exotic leather loafers, however, are maybe the most enticing thing, quickly followed by the belts and the ties.

Simon mentioned they’ll only close when they’ve sold all the stock, and there is A LOT. So you probably have a good few months to get there. And if you’re interested in the shop space, as it is, not to develop into some ugly pret(!), we know that they are renting……… If you’ve ever wanted a dream shop on Edgware Road, or to at least do something (anything!) in a space like this in London, this may be your last chance!!

Other stuff we liked on and off the internet

A beautiful text about Issey Miyake and the mind

We loved this rumination on Akshi Singh’s relationship to the pleats of Issey Miyake. She traces how her attraction to the pleats – where they come from, how they’re made, how they look and how they feel – is embedded deep within her psyche, her desire for the garments caused by a wide, sprawling network of associations she has with the folds. Some of the best writing about clothes we’ve read in a long time.

Cool fūten bags that Miyuki-zoku wore in Ginza in the 1960s

We were reading a great essay by Hiroshi Narumi about postwar subcultures in Japan, and this detail about the Miyuki-zoku (Miyuki street tribe) emerged, whereby they repurposed imported coffee sacks as a fashionable garm called the fūten bag. Their loitering on Miyuki street was seen as threatening, and on 22nd September 1964 it’s been said that 100 of them were arrested in preparation for the Tokyo Olympic Games.

Given that this was when student revolts were murmuring below the surface across Tokyo, v interesting to think about why young people were consistently denied access to public space. If anyone knows anything/anyone who has written about the connection between the left wing protests in the 1960s and 1970s and the emergence of spectacular subcultures in the English language (also/or if there is an English translation to this book) PLEASE tell us because we are desp to know.

Women’s History Museum know what’s up

Because we make all our money in fashion rn, sometimes it can feel like we are going crazy. So when you see some fab girlies going for the jugular, it’s just a joy to see.

These mental paper dolls

A small book we picked up at Perfect Lives with an intro by James Laver we haven’t read yet. The full thing will be in the secret PDF folder for paid subs SOON.

Quick chat with the Lebanon-Palestine Solidarity Market

Tell us what you’re raising money for (in your own words rather than ours)?

The solidarity market is raising funds for mutual aid networks that we have connections to in Lebanon and Palestine. In Palestine, The Sanabel Team food bank provides emergency aid for families in Gaza, delivering meals and daily necessities. The Sanabel Team initiative started in Khan Younis in 2018 to provide support for Palestinians living under the decades-long Israeli blockade through funding education, distributing food and emergency aid, and supporting displaced Palestinians in Egypt. Since Israel’s genocide in Gaza began in 2023 it has been growing its food bank and food distribution to try and meet the escalating needs of besieged Gazans, particularly with ongoing Israeli-created starvation.

Its name, Sanabel, refers to the part of a plant with which love is formed, and is a religious name used in the Quran: ‘like a grain, seven seeds sprouted in every one of the hundred grains’.

Many mutual aid networks have been extended, re-mobilised, or newly set up in Lebanon since the bombing by Israel resumed on 2 March. As of today (26 March), a fifth of the population, 1,000,000 people, have been displaced in Lebanon, with more than 1,000 people killed.

The funds raised at the market will in part be distributed to friends in Beirut who have set up a relief network that is working in tandem with several grassroots initiatives already assisting those suffering through this current mass displacement. This effort is focused on neglected areas around the mountains, Beirut’s north and east, providing heating, food parcels, baby kits, medications and other survival necessities. The funds will also go to a mutual aid network in South Lebanon, providing emergency shelter for displaced communities.

Whilst we are directing our funds to Gaza and Lebanon, we want to add that it is harder to directly support people under siege in Iran in the ways we describe here. International sanctions have made monetary transfers from Europe or the US to Iran difficult - because of legal restrictions and criminalisation. Donating directly to the Iranian Red Crescent Society is one way that’s possible right now.

What is the reality for the friends you’re in contact with on the ground?

In Lebanon, our contacts have emphasised the centrality of self-organisation: unions, cooperatives and neighbourhood committees to strengthen their steadfastness and reclaim genuine political spaces where they can sustain each other. The central Lebanese government has betrayed its people in the South, they survive on solidarity, local and global.

In both Lebanon and occupied Palestine, people feel compelled to record their experiences to call on the international community for support. For this reason, we focus on supporting them so they can focus on resisting the senseless aggression they are facing.

The recent attempts to exploit sectarian divides in Lebanon (for instance, with Israel ordering Shia communities to evacuate to predominantly Christian areas, or else be bombed) have proven futile. The solidarity across the region and resistance of US-Israeli expansionism – which the genocide in Gaza, that the West did nothing to stop over the past two and a half years, set a renewed precedence for – is unwavering.

How can people contribute beyond coming and buying something?

We want to stress that organising a solidarity market or event is doable with a few friends and a little time. We are organising the market together after one of us posted an instagram story expressing the wish to organise another market to raise money for networks in Lebanon and Palestine. At the first one in November 2023, we raised over £3,000. Doing it feels easier than doing nothing.

Across London others are organising raffles, gigs, screenings, supper clubs… Even getting friends together for a meal and each making a small contribution to a food bank makes a meaningful difference. It can be seen as an internationalist way of sharing a meal together.

Fundraising efforts here in London in support of the region have dwindled a bit since 2023. Now we’re at another critical point of escalation – an escalation coming from the unholy US-Israeli alliance, which the British government, as well as governments across the EU are scrambling to support in countless ways – that demands a recommitment to international solidarity work. Fundraising is just one of them.

The most meaningful way to get more involved is with something that is doable for each person. If it is also sustainable to go beyond these moments where there is a rush of action, into times where fewer funds are coming in but the on the ground networks are still working, this is even more meaningful.

You’ve decided to make everything purchasable to anyone no matter their income, using a pay what you can system. Why is that?

We want it to be as manageable and affordable for as many people as possible, meaning that it will be pay what you can – no questions asked. We’ll include guide prices to give an indication of how much each item would sell for elsewhere. Only a few items come with a reserve. This is rooted in the market’s purpose. Being a solidarity market means coming together for a cause across our different means and circumstances. Rather than to help somebody else, somewhere else, this is just one way to try to make a liveable life across struggles.

What are some of the things that we will be able to get on the day?

In terms of fashion, have some specially selected vintage, with brands such as Margiela, Costume National, JW Anderson, Sarah Pacini, et cetera, on top of donations from London-based designers like Martine Rose, Cecile Tulkens, Katya Zelentsova, Jawara Alleyne, LEUDER and more.

One of the more unusual things is a year-long Cafe OTO membership, a way to turn something that you might be thinking about anyway into a meaningful donation. As well as merch and records from Rita P, Still House Plants, 5 gate temple, Kelman Duran & Annie MacKinnon, to name a few.

Although some of the artworks have higher guide prices, the solidarity market is an opportunity to buy a work from somebody you admire, even if you aren’t in a position to collect otherwise. Palestinian artist Izdihar Afyouni is making a series of new works on paper for the market. Mica Levi and Hannah Black have both donated paintings. Sophia Al-Maria has given us a range of things from her studio: original artworks and even some reference materials (including some old Egyptian Film Posters) meaning this is a rare chance to own something by her at any price point.

Aside from those we’ve named, the generosity of the makers, designers, and artists means there will be something for everyone. We’ve received one-off artworks; signed and framed artist editions; fashion, accessories, bags, jewellery and millinery by London designers; archival clothes; revolutionary propaganda; theory books; art books; specially selected second-hand books; poetry books; fiction books; records and merch; posters and bumper stickers; home-made butter; Lebanese meze; lamps; candlesticks; hand-made quilts and rugs; metalwork; really, everything…

We can’t overstate how grateful we are to everybody who has helped make this happen. The Horse Hospital for providing us the venue and support setting it up so quickly, everyone who has asked in their networks for donations, everyone who has helped with collections, offering to pitch in on the day, sharing donation details for our friends in Palestine and Lebanon. Thank you.

Want more?

News from the Bog #4: shopping special

Twos Trends #1

News from Lengua

After funding for the book was pulled last minute, these texts were left adrift – until now. Together, they reflect on fashion’s entanglements with art, labour, authorship and power, and we’re very happy to be able to give them a home. See the first entry, written by Alberta Romano, here.

Words: Aude Fellay

The relationship between art and fashion is as old as the fashion industry itself. Early twentieth century couturiers such as Paul Poiret were notorious art aficionados. Over the past decade, this relationship has arguably evolved to become tighter, if more fraught. For art critic Benjamin Buchloh, reviewing its highest-profile iteration in the work of Anne Imhof (famously, a good friend of Demna during his time at Kering-owned Balenciaga), the relationship is symptomatic both of the “fashion industry’s ever more voracious and desperate forms of compulsive self-affirmation” and of “the increasing despair of current artistic production.”1

In the case of Balenciaga and Imhof, art and fashion come together in their ability to capture and monetise cultural expressions: club culture, subcultures and class cultures are appropriated and stripped of life to reappear in a zombie-like form under brand names. This is arguably one of the points artists Hito Steyerl, Miloš Trakilović, and Giorgi Gago Gagoshidze strove to make in their performance and installation piece MISSION ACCOMPLISHED: BELANCIEGE. Fashion eats up whatever it can get its hands on. But arguably, so does art.

What these artists’ interest in fashion reveals is that fashion, spurred by its nonstop mediatisation, has become a full-blown pop cultural phenomenon.2 Its inclination toward the spectacle naturally befits the current media environment, and the selfie (today’s all-pervasive media form) has made clothing a central aspect of culture at large. Art, then, looks to fashion seemingly for both cultural clout and as a lens into late capitalism. Fashion is both capitalism’s shiniest object and, in the case of Balenciaga, a commentary on global capital, which made the brand under Demna’s tutelage a focal point of artistic collaborations and critical scrutiny.

From an institutional perspective, this renewed interest in fashion comes as sweet revenge. Fashion studies and fashion design have struggled to establish their worth and disciplinary singularity within higher education.3 Legitimacy is less of an issue for the industry as a whole; the trillions of dollars it generates give fashion reason enough to exist. The billionaire owners of fashion conglomerates have sought, however, greater cultural significance through the more elite pursuit of art collecting and museum building. This is symptomatic of a key bind within the relationship: fashion remains a somewhat degraded cultural form yet an extremely profitable one, while art continues to signal a more virtuous conduit for fashion’s “dirty” money.4

Nancy J. Troy’s Couture Culture, A Study in Modern Art and Fashion (2003) is perhaps the first detailed study of art and fashion’s conceptual ties. By drawing parallels between the early logics of high fashion and debates in art at the time, Troy outlines the discursive role of fine art within haute couture’s economic model.5 By self-fashioning as artists, couturiers such as Poiret marketed their originality both to cultivate their aura among an art-savvy elite and to promote the mass production of their designs. Insisting on the “rarity of the producer (that is the rarity of the position he occupies in the field),” as Pierre Bourdieu and Yvette Desault put it in 1975, together with the relative abundance of the product, became fashion’s winning formula.6

From the outset, the fashion industry was indeed a “global export industry.” It relied on the symbiotic relationship between the “craft-based French fashion system and the mass production of the American garment industry”.7 Put differently, couturiers sold ideas, not merely dresses. Their value depended on both their perceived originality and the couturiers’ ability to claim property rights over them. Unsurprisingly then, over the course of the century Parisian couturiers, from Vionnet to Dior, went on to battle copyists by pushing for legal protections over their designs in order to “establish and sustain global hegemony over style.”8

The history of Western high fashion might be understood as one of enclosure – a fencing-off that runs parallel to its democratising thrust. Briefly put, this process involved a discursive component in the adoption of the figure of the artistic genius, a racial license to copy, and a related series of legal and economic tools that came to fruition in the postwar years.9 When the gates of high fashion were eventually ‘flung open’ to greet a mass audience, it was because the leveraging of brand names and design identities (or ‘house codes’) as intellectual property had made ‘democratisation’ a possible and profitable enterprise.

The figure of the designer-as-artist found its culmination in the star designers of the late 1990s and early 2000s, high fashion’s so-called golden age, which owes much to its pillaging of non-western cultures. Designs from the period by the likes of John Galliano are today carefully displayed by museums alongside panels about cultural appropriation. Minh-Ha T. Pham argues that “the informal allocation of the rights to copy and not be copied” underwrites the mining of a non-Western “commons” and its recasting as the “expressive work” and property of a Western author (or brand).10 In fact, the first couturiers displayed few qualms when it came to their own ‘copying’ – or, more accurately, acts of dispossession.11 Colonialism had enshrined this cultural mining as a right, or as Min-Ha T. Pham describes it, as “a property of whiteness.”

The late 1990s also marked a renewed proximity between art and fashion. In 1996, art curators Germano Celant, Luigi Settembrini, and Ingrid Sischy organised the first (and last) fashion biennale in Florence, which saw artists collaborate with fashion designers on small pavilions and installations. Damien Hirst was paired with Miuccia Prada, Comme des Garçons with Oliver Herring, and Helmut Lang with Jenny Holzer.12 In many ways, the star-studded cast epitomised the rise of a ‘creative class’, famously pitched as the saviour of post-industrial economies in the wake of globalisation’s disruptions.13

Looking at New Labour’s reign in the UK, Angela McRobbie has shown how creativity “c[a]me together as a form of governmentality,” depoliticising workers by promoting entrepreneurship over waged labour and expressive freedom over financial security, and thereby further eroding welfare rights and labour organising.14 Giulia Mensitieri’s 2018 investigation into the hidden abodes of high fashion’s dreamworlds, where forms of “self-exploitation” proliferate, brought renewed attention to the subject of labour.15 Similar debates on the “decommodification” of cultural work have taken place in the field of art: Leigh Claire La Berge’s 2019 Wages against Artwork: Decommodified Labor and The Claims of Socially Engaged Art is a notable example.16

Despite converging struggles, the relationship between art and fashion has seemingly evolved into a more ambiguous one, as the various crises capitalism engenders have sharpened and concerns for the environment have grown. On the one hand, art is confirmed as the lesser evil, if not a redemptive choice in the face of fashion’s disastrous ecological impact. On the other hand, certain practitioners have adopted craft and DIY fashion methods to both scrape together a living and mount a critique of capitalism. In fact, some corporate art galleries have been quick to capitalise on this trend by setting up online platforms to sell “artist-designed” products, riding on fashion’s bad reputation while borrowing from its book – and hijacking the modest commercial models’ artists have drawn up to make ends meet.

This renewed and broad interest in craft has also benefited established high fashion houses, which are all too eager to showcase their unique set of craft skills, as well as the designers who astutely play up – or rather, embody17 – the value of craftsmanship and design knowledge. Fashion scholars have questioned the politics of ethical fashion discourses, including the revival of craft. Christina H. Moon notes that “the fetishisation of making” tends to pit the “moral” making of objects in the West against their “immoral” mass production abroad in racially coded terms.18 Craft, narrowed down to its moral heft, is seemingly an insufficient strategy on which to hinge the future of art and fashion.

Of course, as a feminised field of cultural production, fashion has always been readily demonised. The practice itself registers as the problem, and its popularity is explained away as a matter of false consciousness. This has arguably forestalled solidarities, discredited its voice and obscured its lessons. For one thing, what is quite evident from the many documentaries about the making of high fashion such as Loïc Prigent’s Marc Jacobs & Louis Vuitton (2007) or the 2017 documentary about the early Margiela studio We Margiela, is that fashion enlists a distinct form of creativity, one that is more overtly collaborative – and desirable on those grounds.

In the context of the fashion industry, that fact must be carefully managed; it is fitted into a hierarchical structure which seeks, at every turn, to foster competition and enhance exploitability. As a marketing strategy, the mediatisation of fashion’s workers, and in particular its craftspeople, functions as an ‘ethical’ justification for the prices luxury items command, and for the industry more broadly, as it draws both on the moral value of skilled work and the collaborative aura of fashion’s creativity. The art world, for its part, seems less eager to have its anonymous workers be seen.

In her introduction to Be Creative, Angela McRobbie asks how we might “resist this imperative to become creative” in the face of creativity’s entanglement with capitalism’s neoliberal turn.19 Put differently, how does one betray “the creative classes”? Perhaps by joining forces as workers against those who profit from and curtail creativity, confining it to the ‘productive’ spheres of art and fashion, and by paying attention to the ways in which both overflow the dams and pipes laid out to capture them.

Credits

Series editor: Marlie Mul

Editor: Perri McKenzie

Words: Dal Chodha

The British designer and educator Shelley Fox may live in New York but she was made in London. It is here that she trained as a designer. Here she worked for Joe Casely Hayford – and at the Renoir Cinema (today known as Curzon Bloomsbury), the National Portrait Gallery and the Royal Academy. It is here that she lived next to the photographer Paul Wetherell and around the corner from Jane How. It’s here she overheard Talvin Singh and Björk jamming in a studio down the street. It’s here she’d skive off college to hear Don McCullin talk at the ICA or rush to Rough Trade at lunchtime to watch Courtney Love play. It’s here she wore white patent Patrick Cox loafers and a Casely-Hayford suit, and walked into the Kingston branch of Lloyds bank to ask for a loan to cover the fees for her Central Saint Martins MA in 1994.

Fox and I first spoke on 19th November 2011 for the inaugural issue of Archivist – a publishing project co-founded by Jane Howard who had worked with Fox in the early 2000s. At this point in her life, she was sorting through her archive and downsizing ahead of a move to New York to focus on her job as Founding Director of the MFA Fashion Design and Society at Parsons School of Design (which she did between 2008–2021). “There is nothing like moving country to force you to throw stuff away,” she told me. “It really makes you focus on what is important.” I expected we’d spend time talking about the importance of cataloguing and how she would be going about immortalising her own vital contribution to fashion. But what surprised me was her keenness to edit, and bin things. The stuff she was surrounded by seemed to suffocate her. Each piece was a reminder of a great time, a tough season, or another reason she had to remortgage the house she owned with her partner, the artist Ross Tibbles.

More recently Fox has scaled back her teaching and is re-focusing her energies back into her archive. She is at the early stages of working towards a book. Fox is a perennial student: in 1984 she moved from her native Scunthorpe to Grimsby to enrol on a two year foundation course. Following this she arrived in London to study technical pattern cutting at Croydon College of Art before heading to Middlesex to start a BA in fashion. She left unhappy after a year and pursued textile design, specialising in knitwear at Central Saint Martins and graduating in 1993. A year later she headed back into 107-109 Charing Cross Road (then Central Saint Martins) to start her MA under the tutelage of Louise Wilson.

“The nineties” is a time often seen through a foamy lather of retrospection. Since Fox’s day – after she left college and ran her own label between 1996 and 2003 – the structural things, the politics, the amount of money moving around has changed. By the time I arrived in London around 2001, the zest of New Labour was shaping the country’s creative class. In Soho, Yuko Yabiku, Nicola Formichetti, and Eric Portès created the perfect expression of the chaotic poetry of times with The Pineal Eye. Part art gallery, part shop, part cafe/club, it was not anxious about definition and managed to feel both daring and totally approachable. That year, too, 11 “cutting-edge” designers built vast installations for Claire Wilcox’s genre-breaking Radical Fashion show at the V&A. And out of all of the designers Wilcox could have asked to dress her for the private view – it was Fox she called.

My sense now is that the constant fetishisation of London as a place for raw, unfiltered, young talent could do with a refresh. The incredibly cheap rents of Fox’s time are no more, neither is the cost-free education. But that spirit of possibility, collaboration, and “ok let’s try this” seems to be bubbling up again – but why? It’s in the clubby mood of Jake Burt’s eponymous East London shop, the poetic retail interventions of twos and the small-scale idiosyncrasies of process driven knitwear designer Cecile Tulkens. The 20-something-year-old designers at Central Saint Martins where I teach are on schedule to become the next part of the college’s lore this summer. Spilling out into the city with their own micro brands, hand-to-mouth creative existence and wondering if they’d be better off moving to Paris; they’ll leave with the same questions that Fox did in the drizzly March of 1996. Sure, life is tough, but hasn’t it always been?

Dal Chodha: I think London is this kind of amorphous, scrappy, difficult place. For everybody, but particularly young, independent designers. There’s this way of looking back at your generation, the 1990s, that’s idealised and fuelled by fuzzy VHS tape ideals. Everything seemed to be much better. Was it?

Shelley Fox: I love that phrase “fuzzy VHS” because it’s also a bit like looking at black and white photography or watching a film about the Second World War. Because of course, life was in colour. I’ve been in my archive head for a while and it has been really interesting working towards a publication, because I’ve been talking to my partner Ross who experienced the entire thing, my design career, himself. It was also his money, his savings. We remortgaged our house three times. It was also his house where we didn’t have central heating or hot water for 14 months, not just mine. Even though it wasn’t his name on the label, he’s been through it, so any time I might get romantic about the 1990s that quickly gets squashed by Ross going, “Yeah, but do you remember when you were crying in Paris because you couldn’t pay your hotel bill?” That always stops me in my tracks. It was always scrappy, but I think things were possible. I don’t know if you could get something like that off the ground today, especially if you’re someone coming from no money like me.

You eventually received a scholarship from Louise Wilson to do the MA at Central Saint Martins but not until your second year. How much did you get? And how did you manage to pay for that first year? At that time, it was £5,500 to do the entire two-year MA…

I went into Lloyds bank to find out about getting a loan and I started talking numbers instead of fashion and I walked out with a ten grand loan.

Lots of creatives have frustrations about the lack of funding opportunities, and the lack of money in general. How did you have the foresight to know to talk numbers and not fashion?

Between my BA [in textiles at Saint Martins] and my MA I had worked at Joe Casely-Hayford and I’d invested in a jacket from him. So I went in my suit, that sort of mid-1990s look: the suit pared down with flat shoes. I literally went in to say, “Hey, I’m applying for an MA and I need a bank loan,” and then they called me into an office in the back. I didn’t talk numbers in the beginning but I said, “Look, I’ve got a place on the MA at Central Saint Martins, it’s one of the best fashion schools in the world and it’s really hard to get in but I can’t afford to pay the fees.” Because I’d bailed out of a college at Middlesex back in the late 1980s, I could not get my first year free.

Between Middlesex and my BA I was working at the National Portrait Gallery and all sorts of vintage shops. I suddenly became this independent 21-year-old living and working in London, and I loved it. Then I got my act together and thought, “I need to go back to Saint Martins”. So when I was offered a place on the MA I knew I needed help. How I presented it to the bank manager was that I had worked all my way through college: I’d had three part time jobs. And I told them that when I graduated from the BA, I left with my £1,000 overdraft – and that blew him away. He was impressed that I was able to keep my overdraft right down and hold that together.

He worked out how I’d managed money, and that I was in the top of the class, and that I’d got a first out of 35 people. He was doing a risk assessment. He said, “Well, you’ll need £5,500 for the fees, and then you’re going to need some more because you’re going to need materials and this, that and the other.” I walked out there with about £8,000 or £9,000 and I still had my job at the Renoir. When I got to college I’d walk in and out of Louise Wilson’s office every other week because she had this full scholarship from Marks & Spencer and I really needed it. Louise was like, “Argh you’re wearing out my fucking carpet!” She was really funny. She was basically watching how everybody was working and in the end she gave it to me, and a little bit to another girl, Caroline, who was actually from the same steel town as me in the middle of Lincolnshire.

I wonder if it’s possible to operate in the way that you’ve just described; having a part time job, getting a loan…

I wouldn’t know about the part time job situation, but in terms of getting a loan, the fees are so much higher now. I laugh when I think of the £5,500 because when you’ve got no money, five and a half grand is so far away. But I think it’s all context. When I think about students today, their parents are probably younger than me, and if they’ve come from that generation that was able to get themselves on the housing ladder, that changes everything. The reason why I’m saying that Dal, is because we were able to, which gave us some security.

And how did you get to that point?

I went to Saint Martins, I graduated, and I was offered a job in the Italian city of Rimini at Fuzzi who did all the knitwear for Gaultier and Hugo Boss. After a week there I knew I wasn’t going to stay. Liberty, the department store, was already interested; they called me into the office to say they wanted to put my collection into production. I didn’t really know what that meant, so I had to go back to college and talk to all the technicians to find out what I needed to do. “How do I do costing? How do I do grading?” My best friend at the time was working at Westwood, so I tapped into their factories, even for my shoes!

Then what really changed it for me was when I showed the third collection in an old back room at Liberty and Judy Blame tracked me down. He was such a sweetheart. He was going through the collection, and we were trying to make sales, and I got a phone call from my then boss at The American College where I had been doing some part time teaching. He said, “Shelley, I don’t know if you’ve got any contacts that would be interested in taking on the Chair of Fashion. It’s two days a week, it’s 20 hours. Two long, 10 hour days, but it will be considered full time.” My head went BOOM! YES! Me! I’ll do it. I knew that the bank would see me as a regular person and not a fashion designer with no money in the bank or viable business. Suddenly I was teaching two long days a week, 8am-6pm. I got a payslip, and that meant that Ross and I could put our payslips together, which in the old days of 1996-97, meant that we could apply for a mortgage.

At the time nobody was buying. We bought because we couldn’t afford to rent properly. I had a tiny studio around Brick Lane, but I was living for free with my mum’s friend. She had this huge house in Leyton with 10 cats. Ross and I had two whole rooms to ourselves, and we would pay the bills but she didn’t charge us rent. That was our deal. Ross worked full time, then I got this job. We put our pay slips together, went to see the bank, and they gave us sixty grand. Off we went hunting around Bethnal Green, Stepney Green, Shoreditch – slightly out of our reach. Then Ross bought the Hackney Gazette and went straight through properties. We started looking in Hackney and then we found a flat for 59 grand. And we bought it in 1997. We didn’t do anything to it for eight years, we couldn’t, because all the money was being thrown into shows by this point. We remortgaged that house three times! Around the time I was about to close the label, around 2003, I was in Paris and I was like, “It’s not working. I’m not remortgaging the house again. What’s the point?”

If you think about what you’ve just said, and you imagine that you’re sitting in the MA studio here at Saint Martins, what’s your perspective on how that might be understood by any of those designers today?

I don’t know if they could understand it. I mean how much is the MA now?

It’s between £36,000-40,000, I think.

If I was coming from the same family, it wouldn’t be possible for me today. I don’t know what I would do. I’ve spoken to a lot of friends of mine that have all come from very working-class backgrounds and even if they were comfortable, that level of money is off the charts now. It’s not only that, but also the rent. You know, I lived in Hackney when rent cost £75 a week.

I think what you’re saying feels so abstract. What might be easier to discuss is what you think the similarities in those young people working today might share with your own experience. People who want the career that you built which, in a nutshell, was a product of politics, and the size of fashion too. Sometimes I think what you’ve just said can alienate a whole generation of people working today because they’re just like, I can’t fucking do that.

Exactly, you’re right. I haven’t got any advice for them in that way. I was born in the late 1960s, I grew up in the 1970s, which I consider really grim until I look at videos of Bowie or something. The time was exciting for a few people but the sixties was not all swinging. Bits of the past are edited down to represent a whole period. But for most people, it was grim. So when the 1990s came along politics were changing, the Labour Party got into power in 1997 and there was a whole seismic shift. It was all Brit Pop, Brit Art, Brit Fashion. There was this huge marketing campaign around the country, about the country, about its creativity – and I was around for that. But you’re right, it’s important to unpack this because otherwise young creative people might hear these stories and wonder what’s the point of even trying.

I was 15 in 1997 so I am about five to eight years too young to have had the experience you did. It’s an important thing to state in this conversation that there are lots of things beyond our control, the economics of the time, the politics et cetera. Maybe one of the reasons so many young designers are anxious about being in a city like London is because they feel like when they fail, that it’s their fault alone.

Totally.

Did you feel like that when you closed your label in 2003? You talked about remortgaging your flat, but did you take that on as a personal failure? And looking back, do you still believe that to be true?

Actually, when I look back now it wasn’t because of any lack of ideas or hard work. I couldn’t have worked any more hours in the day. Also, to be honest, yes, I won one prize – the Jerwood Fashion Prize – but that has always been a fallacy. It was marketed as being worth £125,000 but I only saw a £20,000 cheque. I got some money for some shows, but after that dried up the British Fashion Council at the time felt that you’d had your prize so you couldn’t get any more money, even though there were other designers that consistently got help year after year. Now I can stand back from it and realise that a lot of it comes down to who the stylist is, what favours can be pulled, what editors are on your side. I always felt like an outsider anyway, and maybe that’s ok.

When Eilidh asked us to have this conversation, about London, I was immediately interested in the sort of perverse nature of bracketing off a single city or place because, actually, I don’t think any fashion cities have their identities anymore. The clichés of London fashion, you know, that it’s diverse, energetic. It’s young, it’s devil-may-care, it’s breaking the rules, it’s anti-commercial. But is it really? These are the things people have said about London for decades, but the world and the context is totally different now. When you were working, did London have a clear identity as a fashion capital?

Amongst my peers, no-one cared about Milan or New York. They cared about Paris because it was everybody else; the Belgians, Japanese, and then eventually the British. This was just before they were also taking over those big houses – and that was a big change. But I did live in my East End bubble. Vogue was West London, you may as well still be in the 1980s!

London has often been framed as this ‘anti-commercial’ place when it comes to fashion, which of course is not the reality for anyone making clothes today. They want them to sell.

In my time, I don’t know if it was anti-commercial, but it was more about the ideas first. Making money was not why you got into fashion. I think that’s also why we all started buying our houses – because we needed security. You needed a roof over your head, and then you could relax. There used to be this centre around Hanbury Street that was called the East London Business Centre, and they were amazing. You could go in any time and they would help you. I had several meetings with them to help me put together my application for the Jerwood Prize. Other designers were complaining that there was no support, but you had to sniff it out. It was there.

I also think there’s something we should say here: that the fashion industry in which you came up doesn’t exist anymore. The skeleton of it does, but it’s morphed into something else. It’s a tree with more branches. I think too many people just assume that fashion might mean that you show twice a year and Paris is the main place to go, then Milan is known for the glossy, New York for the Uptown ladies, and London’s kind of rebellious. Now you’ve got Seoul, Berlin, Copenhagen. The industry is totally different. When we talk about the industry there should be some specificity. With young designers, maybe it’s about encouraging them to be ok with having a really beautiful knitwear brand where you’re using the finest wools and cashmeres and you’ve got the best shops in the world – maybe not hundreds of them, but you’re turning over enough to be warm and fed. It does take a certain kind of designer to be ok with that because I think the aspiration, the machine, suggests that you should all want to be Matthieu Blazy at Chanel or Jonathan Anderson at Dior. This is where things get very topsy turvy because it’s not one track anymore, and is increasingly accepted as being more complex and diverse. Did it feel one track in your day?

Yeah, I think so.

Towards Galliano, McQueen? Dior, Paris?

Towards running your own label and showing twice a year, which now looks like a luxury. I had one assistant and mainly interns, who I fed. I would literally drive to Tesco’s in the morning, fill up the car with food, hand it over and then get on with the day. I did what I could – I wasn’t even paying myself. It was that track: I was trying to get certain stores because if you did, that helped the machine understand your work in a certain way. So if you were in Penelope in Brescia [Italy], everyone was watching. She always came in first with her red hair, red eyebrows and white cowboy boots and bought all the labels that you wanted to sit next to. So it was about positioning yourself. Sometimes you would take orders from people and then you wished you hadn’t. I remember signing with a Japanese agent and it all went wrong. Because your name is on the label, you took it all so personally. If you didn’t get that piece of press, or your stuff went out and it didn’t get shot again, it was hard. The press was a whole other thing. You know, when I got that job at the college to buy the house, the other thing that I did is get a PR. That’s when it all took off. That’s all changed, right? Do designers have PRs anymore?

They do, but I think a lot more is placed on the designer’s shoulders now. That’s another change that we have to acknowledge, which is that now you have to be a million more things. Beyond the pressure of knowing how to make a good outfit and beautiful clothes, you’ve also got to do the spiel. Designers often have to become a product themselves. I think during your period people saw your work before they saw you. That’s completely the other way round now. Just to get back to something else about London at your time, did that New Labour period feel rich? Did London have money?

Yes, very much. I think the 1980s felt very different; I moved to London in 1986 from the north of England. I felt like an imposter, and I also weirdly downplayed my accent. I could be very, ‘not northern’ if I chose to be. Then at Saint Martins on the MA it felt very different. Louise just wanted rough and ready. She just wanted people to be themselves. She didn’t care about accents and stuff like that. I think maybe because there wasn’t a lot of money in colleges at that time, I mean, if there was a wealthy student, you didn’t really know about it. Education was free so no-one complained about not having any money. If you didn’t turn up, your grant would be stopped by your local authorities so everyone just committed. You turn up and you get paid or you don’t. I was obsessed with being at college. I didn’t want to go home. I would turn up when I was ill. Even if I was feeling like shit, because I just had to.

What do you think ‘London fashion’ as a term, as an adjective, means today? From the other side of the pond, what are your observations?

Individual. Creative. Risk-taking. Maybe I’m framing it through my own, older lens but every so often, when I’m talking about New York or Parsons, Ross will remind me that everyone in London or at Central Saint Martins is having the same conversations. I’ll tell you what happens, Dal, when I’m teaching first year, foundational colleges, and I’m doing my introduction of myself and my work, the minute you mention Central Saint Martins. It’s “wow!” It’s the holy grail. It’s otherworldly. It’s like, “Ahhhh, you went to Central Saint Martins!” It is still their perception.

‘London Fashion’ does seem to be heavily related to our art schools and our education. When I think of Paris and Milan I don’t immediately think of their schools, I think about their companies. I think London always comes with Central Saint Martins, Royal College of Art, Westminster, Kingston. The names of our schools are up there with the names of other luxury brands. Maybe that’s the difference. Both of us work in education, so I’m interested to know what your thought is on the art school method of teaching, and how that has shaped what London fashion was perceived as in the 1990s, and maybe still is today?

Do you know what I loved about being at Saint Martins? When I was there you couldn’t tell the difference between the painting students and the fashion students. I loved that. It was all a bit mad. The fashion students really dressed down and were probably scruffier than some of the art students. I think there is that connection – where Westminster used to be Harrow School of Art, Middlesex University used to be Hornsey School of Arts, Saint Martin’s School of Art, Kingston School of Art. I mean, they’re all art schools. I think that training, going back to the 1960s, the music, fashion photography, image making, the way of fashion coming out of the youth movement has kind of never left it. As I said before, not everything in the sixties was swinging but there was this movement where music and clothes were so interconnected. I think in America that exists as well, but in a different way. You wouldn’t position that in New York Fashion Week. It’s just its own thing in America.

I think one of the things that is exciting here is that we have people like Jake Burt and Stefan Cooke who have their shop Jake’s in the East End. They have this energy that feels very independent in the face of some of the challenges that are both economic and political. Then you’ve got other designers, like Cecile Tulkens and Ellen Poppy who seem to be working on a more micro-level. I wonder if those kinds of things have always existed or if they have been coming back again. Maybe fashion for a while got so loud that we forgot to see those other methods of working?

Maybe you can’t always know this as a young person but it’s about how you can sustain your life. What makes you happy? I think your point about quietness and how underestimated it is, is important. I really love Michaela Stark, because her underwear is actually beautiful. It’s so well made. She really has a vision about what she wants and she’s got this thing that she can then collaborate on with other people on when she needs to. But it’s about not letting it get out of control. My problem was that my collections got too big for someone of my size, money-wise, that they didn’t make sense anymore.

But why did they get big?

You add new things, you keep expanding the fabrications out, you confuse the shit out the buyers, and then they buy nothing. I analysed it one day. I went right back, and I was like, “Oh God, the collection that made sense was the AW98 Braille collection because it was in three shades of grey”. It was very small, and there were a certain number of dresses. It made sense. I was never good at jackets – never. Don’t do tailoring Shelley, you’re not good at it! You’re really good at making fabrics. You’re good at skirts and dresses and other odd things. It frustrates the shit out of me when I see my students graduating and they’re in really good positions, and I’m like, “That’s your thing,” and then they’ll go off and do some dresses or something that aren’t great! I know they feel the pressure and they think they need to build out but you don’t. You need to get what you are doing right.

Here in the northern hemisphere we can finally feel spring in the air. Every year we forget that just a little bit of warmth (10°C+), some sun peeking out from behind the clouds and the scent of phytohormones in the air gives you a feeling that can really only be likened to coming up off a pill. And now it’s back. Thank the lord. Everyone survive the winter ok?

In other news, apparently it’s been (london) fashion week. We usually miss most things, which is not necessarily on purpose but more because we’ve never really been tapped in, avoiding any fashion week responsibilities like the plague (ok so a little bit on purpose). What we do love, though, are all the interesting satellite things that happen around it these days. And we did manage to seek out a couple of these.

We piggybacked on an appointment to Townwear. Which means we must admit to you all that we are now eating our words about it being AI and the brand is very real and incredibly good. Not AI. None involved, apparently. The man behind it, Greg Chester, is heavily involved with One of a Kind, that ancient vintage shop on Portobello market that used to have all those Chanel bags in the window (haven’t been in a while, maybe they still do?) with his brother(?), James (who is behind Another Kind).

We remember they were very early players in the scans of stuff and archival fashion/art imagery on Instagram game, and probably have an encyclopaedic bank of references tucked away. Hence the imagery for Townwear being so unbelievably slick. Hearsay says that Greg has teamed up with a woman called Xinyuan Zhang and got some financing to start a label. He’s been working on it for three years, and they were showing it for the first time this season, beginning to drip feed it out. They said they weren’t even going to do a showroom, but they’d had so much interest they thought: ‘fuck it’.

The clothes themselves are very real. Almost everything is double faced, and the idea has been to make everything as beautiful on the inside as the outside. A tuft of organza inside a structured silk shirt; ultra-fine merino wool doubled over on itself; lyocell-nylon duster coats whose finish had a peachy soft fuzz. Greg mentioned he’d started designing the collection from the pieces he loves to throw on if he’s in a rush to get out the house. It certainly had that: the ease, but also the lavishness of those pieces you feel make you look really good and are likely to garner a few ‘where did you get thats’. Highlight of the visit, though, were the crumbling Adel Rootstein mannequins partially dressed in the odd piece. Kinda terrifying? But terribly fab.

Garm of the week

Then, this week, we thought we’d deep dive slightly on the November Books exhibition-slash-event at Tenderbooks. This consisted of a very tantalising window display of issues 1-30 (1985–1990) of STREET mag (which we’ve been thinking about writing about for a sec because we are major fans) plus sheets from a 1980s trend forecasting binder. Apparently the acquisition of nice big long runs of STREET is more common than you think, and lovely Paul from November sold his last run to the creative director of Cèline. Whether that was Miss Phoebe, Hedi, or Michael Rider, we didn’t manage to establish as we were interrupted, but we think it’s probably Phoebe or Michael just judging by their general vibe.

We really love STREET, and we turn to it whenever we feel like we’re a little underinspired in terms of dress. STREET was started in 1985 by Japanese photographer Shoichi Aoki, the guy who would go on to launch FRUiTS which obviously became a whole phenomenon for documenting the street style in Harajuku in the 1990s and 2000s. STREET from the 1980s and 1990s is hilariously underrated in our humble opinion, and if you can’t afford to buy the early run from November, you can get yourself a few PDFs direct from Shoichi Aoki himself via this link here.

The trend forecasting binder was, really, the pièce de résistance, featuring shoes from Paris and Tokyo snapped by some sneaky photographer’s lens. Paul told us he’s had it in the shop for a long time, but hasn’t felt able to sell it yet, so he’s taking it home after the show. A quick look at library holdings and google showed us that these are not things that tend to be preserved very often (at least not in publicly-accessible archives, maybe company archives would be a better bet), reminding us just how important all these dealers are in preserving stuff from the past that is treated as ephemeral. Alas, we dream of a world where commerce is unnecessary and we can all just collect and collate for a giant library of things.

Other stuff we liked on and off the internet

LA Timpa at Cell

Last night LA Timpa’s show opened at Cell Project Space. Sorry we didn’t make it! But we will be going ASAP. Lots of beautiful discarded, ancient analogue technologies creating mystical sounds and a video about a fictional spy rebuilding a relationship with his daughter. Sounds cool af.

Julie Velut’s zine for Mind :)

We did manage to get to Julie Velut’s gorgeous zine launch at twos. They were raising money for Mind, the British mental health charity, and from what we’ve heard it was quite successful.

Galerina IRL forever

Our friends @ Galerina opened a permanent space!! They used to do shows in one of their bedrooms in council flat, then graduated to temporary moments in other galleries, but now they’ve set up shop in Clerkenwell with a group show ft. DeSe Escobar, Andrea Fourchy, Stuart McKenzie, Alan Michael, Sophie Reinhold, Coumba Samba and Vivienne Tétaz. Fun fact we found out when googling the gallery to check the address: galerina is also the name of fungi that have tiny brown mushrooms. Cute!

Dr. Noki’s painting <3

We interviewed Dr. Noki, the iconic textile artist who came up in the Shoreditch scene in the 1990s + 2000s for a piece we are writing, and the whole time we were talking we saw this fab canvas in the background. After the chat he sent a photo of it (as per our request). It’s called ‘Wrapped and Weaved into Society’. J’ad!

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Words: Róisín Hurley Hirschkop

@secondskinarchive joined Instagram in April of 2020 and their page contains a total of 297 posts at the time of writing. Their first post is made up of three photos, dated the 5th of June 2020. It depicts a flat lay photograph of a brown skirt on a white background, with the second photo showing the back of the garment, and the third the interior tag. The caption reads ‘Junya Watanabe x Comme des Garçons 2005 windstopper gortex structured skirt with toggle back. Size M. [NFS]’.1

Although the account now posts predominantly 1990s and 2000s runway scans and photographs of models’ bodies with their faces cropped out, many of the photos from around the time of the account’s founding are made up of ‘flat lays’ of clothing produced by designers now commonly associated with what is colloquially known as ‘archive’ fashion: Prada, Miu Miu, Rick Owens, Comme des Garçons and Junya Watanabe, alongside occasional ‘cult’ or lesser-known labels such as Gomme, Nozomi Ishiguro, Three as Four and A.F. Vandevorst. According to information provided by Instagram, this is the only username the account has used, making it one of the earlier accounts to use the term ‘archive’ in its title.

This use of the flat lay photograph extends to many other accounts selling secondhand clothing with and without the word ‘archive’ in their name. Its visual rhetoric – objects arranged neatly onto a neutral background and shot from above in indirect light – is an inescapable presence on social media if one’s algorithm is trained on a diet of secondhand clothing accounts. Many of these, and where the trend seems to originate from, are secondhand clothing sellers whose focus is on flogging ‘archival’ designerwear.

See @velvetknife.archive, for example, as well as @archive.club, which intersperses flat lays with mannequin shots and runway content. On the other end of the spectrum, vintage menswear sellers such as @sumshitifound or @anataresarchives have adopted this technique to display their ‘thrashed’ wares, foregrounding patina and trace – the softened cotton, the frayed cuff; evidence of previous lives – offering a more somatic encounter with the clothing they sell.

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What a start to January! We’re already so tired lol! Maybe because we’ve been overdoing it a bit, burning the candle at all of the ends, et cetera. Which is not a very January thing to do, but needs must boglets.

We do, however, think you’ll find that it’s been worth it, we have a bumper News edition to share with you today. Including a very special guest Garm of the Week from the incredible clothing dealer Harriet Vogeler, and a mini interview with Rat Section about their amazing music video which came out last week (scroll to the end if ur too impatient to wait).

We were in Paris for a sec and truly thought that we’d be so inspired that we’d blog about it in the spirit of the mid-century monthly – think, like, a 1950s ‘Paris correspondent’ kinda vibe. We ended up not doing that because we actually spent the whole time catching up with friends, and missed almost all the fashion. Which is how it should be, non?

We did, however, manage to visit a few non-fashion shows which were mostly quite good, with one notable exception that was maybe the worst exhibition we’ve ever been to. And, we assure you, we’ve been to many bad ones!!! We were actually going to write about it in this edition (sorry the dek is kinda misleading) but we think it deserves its own post, so in honour of this truly shit exhibition, we will be sending out our inaugural ‘Bad Exhibition Review’ very soon…… Keep your eyes peeled……………….

As for stuff to do in the next couple of weeks, we’re thin on the ground for stuff to suggest because we’ve been so fkn busy, but gonna be making a stop through at the Perfect Lives takeover of House of Music at the Serpentine tomorrow. We also wish we could make it to the opening of Solomon Garçon’s exhibition at the Kunstveiren Dusseldorf with Taylor Thoroski, Paride Maria Calvia and Precious Renee Tucker (what a lineup omfg); and a Rick Owens furniture exhibition in London is on for a millisecond more. Plus all the cool shit at Condo (like the Women’s History Museum show @ Soft Opening!) Oh, and we will soon be paying a visit to this amazing looking exhibition about ‘war craft’ aka trench art before and after the trenches of wwi.

It’s funny, though, cos you’d think with all these think pieces and podcasts and exhibitions happening about ‘the human side of conflict’ and military dress entering civilian fashion and how everything is the military *all the time* bla bla yada yada there would be a bit more of a move to push for actual demilitarisation amongst the curators and podcasters who are analysing all this. But, we’ve been observing that there are too few commentators in this space who are actively antiwar…. Apart from this small reading group we are deeply sad to have missed (ty for the tip rosie). Interesting, huh? Food for thought.

Garm of the Week

Speaking of militarised fashion, we have a *really* good garm for you this week from Harriet Vogeler, a clothing dealer we’ve been obsessed with for a while. We must keep how we met a secret, but we’ve been voyeuristically keeping an eye on all the cool stuff she posts on IG for over a year, which eventually culminated in finding out about this week’s garm! Our longtime dream of a bog collab has finally come true <3

In a 1969 edition of American Fabrics and Fashions, designer John Carr Doughty presents a line of garments as a speculative fashion forecast for the year 2000, made using a new technique that links paillettes into knitwear. Hole-punched plates of wood laminate, leather, mirror, metal, titanium and carbon fibre plastic, are all part of the catalogue of materials in development at his knitting mill.

The article reimagines knitwear as a flexible protective system, designed for deflecting violence, with scale arrangements that borrow and aestheticise both medieval and military design concepts for defensive gear; hard plates inserted into, and shells worn over, clothing that could be removed, replaced and repositioned.

Doughty’s knitted armour seems to trade on the structural threats associated with Cold War tensions and post-war unrest, and markets it as a piece of engineered hardware made to protect bodies under hostile conditions. As much as this helps to affirm the garments usefulness, the sensible appearance also adding a layer of technical legitimacy, it calls attention to the practicality of tiled knitwear; how the mechanics of it might affect and restrict movement – plates overlapping and locking – and the feel and weight of wearing metal.

Perhaps for this reason, other applications of this plating technology are decisively high fashion, with evening dresses (similar to those of Paco Rabanne, who famously based his initial metallic designs on the protective structure of a butchers apron) that take the same paillettes into a space-age, pop-futurist, utopia. These corresponding pieces recast the knitwear from tactical-utility to fantasy-fashion, demonstrating the work of the magazine caption in contextualising these garments and how, in turn, it would be possible to reproduce the same armoured looks to a very different effect.

It is in this way, for example, the toughness of armour connects with the glossy mirror-ball finish and mutates into something campy and queer-coded – read: homo-futurism, proto-fetish – that the garment’s appropriative potential deepens. The differences in how this garment is worn, for and against Doughty’s objectives, sets out the complexities and appeal of an object that at once refers back to the past, articulates the present moment, and anticipates the future.

— Harrier Vogeler

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Other stuff we liked on and off the internet

Lenin + Sia via the Cuban Embassy

Cuba’s probably gonna be invaded in like a week but their shitposting is rly keeping our spirits up. Any time we feel a little bit sad we watch this. Because it’s, like, even though everything is continuing to go to shit, THIS is the spirit we need to keep going. Thank u to the intern at the Cuban embassy who made this <3

Stealing

We’ve been obsessed with ‘things I racked’ for a while. They just post about stuff they’ve ‘stolen’ which feels both incredibly poignant, as well as wonderfully spirited. Also for legal purposes we, do not condone shoplifting either (yes, we know you are watching mr. p*l*ntir and you won’t get us that easy!) but we do think we should get more invested in normalising shoplifting clothes. Purely for style’s sake, of course.

Rat Section’s Video for daj mi

We hate to admit it but we actually think a lot of music videos are really boring. But Rat Section always has a really simple, clever, funny idea that makes us feel excited. Their latest video for ‘daj mi’ is so fab, and we loved the video so much, we thought we should ask the Rats some questions about it.

Why did you film yourself walking?

The song is about walking but it’s also a love song since ‘walking with someone’ in Polish means to be going out with someone. We were in Japan at the time and we were really into their colourful, patterned flooring on the trains so we decided to make use of that.

I recognise some of those floors. Can you tell me where you shot all of them?

A lot of them were shot in Japan, on the streets, trains and train stations. There are some shots from London too and from the plane.

I think the floor is such an underrated part of our visual and architectural experience. Do you?

We agree! More focus should be placed on floors and ceilings. It can actually be stressful to consciously look at the floor sometimes. You try to talk to some people and they’re always finding money on the floor. Floors in Japan felt much more fun to look at, but maybe it’s a familiarity thing. One of the shots is from Oval station and we wonder how many people disregard or don’t see the floor design there as it is part of their everyday. Maybe some people travel from Japan and find London floors really interesting. There’s a possibility you pay attention to floors if you are in new places but if it’s part of your daily life you maybe are just on your phone or looking out for dog shit.

Your music videos are always so good at capturing these really everyday experiences, and turning them into vignettes of heightened experience. What do you think it is about these oft-mundane, unnoticed parts of daily life in the city that you’re interested in?

We never really thought about it too much but it’s true. The music videos we have put out are all set in public and in a city context but it just made sense with the songs. The video for ‘Chuggus’ was made by our friend Carola Derting who staged a lot of performances depicting simple struggles in public and we love them.

Where do you get your shoes from?

Mostly online although one of us has bought a couple of pairs of shoes in a christian bookshop on the Old Kent Road sold with the promise that they would last an eternity.

Bog Communism

Admittedly, we have not yet subscribed to the breakdown so we can read this article about data centres being built on bogs in Ireland, so we’re leaving here for posterity. X

Words: twos corp.

We have long held that the concept of time travel is at its most generative when studied in its actually occurring form: the disappearance and reemergence of modes across history. In this spirit, our inaugural trend forecast for bog prophecies a historical return, the reemergence of a band of characters rarely found in these parts today: the travelling salesman, the hawker, the peddler.

Queueing for arepas on an arid august day at Burgess Park’s Carnaval del Pueblo last year, we were approached by a smiling woman brandishing a bag of Panama hats. Susana explained that she and her husband Doug import them from artisans in her home country of Ecuador, and gave us a card to get in touch if we wanted to learn more.

A month later, leaving the Hermit’s Cave in Camberwell before a night at nearby Spanners, we met Chef Zion on the street, selling homemade fresh juices and punch from his soundsystem-cooler on wheels. We bought a £5 bottle of ice-cold ruby rum punch, which we shared together on our way to the club.

In a cityscape overrun with supermarket and cafe chains, fast fashion outlets, empty storefronts, and bookies, these two experiences set a few weeks apart began our train of thinking for this piece. How might this city begin to feel if more people took their products directly into the street? And how might more imaginative or transgressive modes of distribution and exchange transfigure our relations with one another?

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Hope you are all having a stellar holiday season. We have been holed up in the original bog (aka Scotland) scheming. Scheming many things, both boggy and non-boggy, but primarily creating a new scheme that will allow us to stay on top of this blog a little more.

Introducing: new cadence. For the foreseeable, we bring you something every two weeks which is guaranteed original quality production. One of these is a News segment, the other is something exciting and unexpected and original, either from us or a contributor. We’ve already started commissioning (tysm to the paying subs who make this possible!) and we’re really excited to share all this with you in the coming weeks.

Before we get on with it, though, we wanted to share with you the big bog 2026 progressive-regressive matrix predictor. I.e., our version of the in and out list:

Garm of the week

Very small microtrend alert: merch with printed matter on it is in. Publishing on clothing is a thing. Ok, so maybe it’s not a huge trend (or particularly new, as far as these things go) but we did notice two projects launch in December that repurposed publishing made by women about work, which was then turned into interesting forms of merch. So of course we had to investigate.

First up was the Perfect Lives’ project with Katie Shannon, in which they printed scans of 1980s and 1990s calling cards found at a house clearance a year or so ago. 100% of the profits went to Spectra’s Alex Project, a counselling, advocacy and support group created by sex workers for sex workers in London.

The second was Hanka van der Voet’s new publication, designed by Beau Bertens, All Work is Women’s Work. You might know them as the pair behind the publication Press & Fold, a totally iconic journal that we have been huge fans of since Issue 0 was released back in 2018 (and who haven’t released an issue in nearly four years, but we wait with bated breath for its return.)

The project is an investigation into The Seamstresses’ Union, an all-female labour union for (you guessed it) garment workers, specifically those based in the Netherlands in the early 20th century; ‘one of the first all-female labour unions’ who used ‘print media to challenge patriarchal and capitalist systems,’ says the blurb. The project is, in fact, a printed, physical publication, but as a cool bit of merch they screen printed some covers of the union’s journal De Naaistersbode (‘The Seamstresses' Courier’) as black or white puff print on crisp, white second-hand shirts and tees, a project executed with XEROXED aka Alia Mascia, Hanka’s former supervisee, whose practise is centred around putting archival printed matter on to T-shirts (she even got the seal of approval from Vincenzo Sparagna, iconic founder of Italian satirical comic Frigidaire!)

Ok, so stuff that’s meant to be (or has previously been) printed on to paper has been getting printed on to cloth for a long time. Way further back into the past than Galliano, actually. We saw this recently at the design museum, designed by bikini inventor Louis Réard and released into the world in July 1946:

Yet there’s something about the little spike in women’s publishing appearing on clothes that we find specifically intriguing. Thus we decided to speak to them both. Sadly, Katie was too busy with hogmanay and new year’s day responsibilities (she is a fabulous musician and event organiser on top of her visual art practise) to answer any questions from us but she’s previously described other T-shirts and wearable things she’s made as an “accessible format”. Hanka, too, sees this form of garment-making as just a different form of publishing, describing the practise of XEROXED as “investigating the political agency of clothing through the act of ‘publishing-wearing’.”

“I have always been interested in (political) text on garments,” Hanka continues, “I think it has to do with the fact that our bodies have always been a political battleground that printed garments work so well for us.” Informed by Hélène Cixous’ theory of l’écriture féminine (‘the feminine writing’) which foregrounds “an insurgent, embodied writing that writes the body back into history,” Hanka feels that the garments act as vessels in which we might literally “write the body, to break the silence imposed on the feminine.”

This is a response to the seamstresses own role in writing into history their own stories, “transforming whispered grievances into political text”. Thus the shirts and tees are, she explains, “moving memorials,” which can reclaim “the material, cloth, that was the site of their exploitation as a medium for their remembrance”.

Other stuff we liked on and off the internet

Sacrificium’s mannequins

We loved reading this paean to the weirdo mannequins of Simon Doonan, Lynn Hershman Leeson and a fabulous-sounding now long gone vintage shop in London. Particularly exciting are the animatronic mannequins developed and deployed in the US in the 1980s (terrifying), and a display in which ‘mannequins were covered in Heinz spaghetti which was left to rot for a really long time’. Reminds us that we have, for a long time, been rather desperate to access the archives of this mannequin museum in Germany.

Beetle Queen Conquers Tokyo

In need of a new hobby for 2026? Or simply feeling a bit fragile after the turning of the year? This precious documentary by Jessica Oreck about bug collecting in Japan is exactly what you need. Watch this tonight. You’ll never look back.

These bags

Love these. Need one. If anyone can hook us up let us know?

Everything looks the same because….?

Our friends over at 1 Granary asked art historian Ane Cornelia Pade for a rather brief but interesting analysis of why everything looks and feels the same across so much of the world rn.

This week has, however, felt overshadowed in the UK by the fact that eight prisoners currently held on remand for direct action against Israeli war machine manufacturing are still on hunger strike, that their demands haven’t been met, and the Justice Secretary David Lammy refuses to even meet with their lawyers. One of them, Qesser Zuhrah, was denied medical care at two points this week while experiencing extreme chest pains that could lead to cardiac arrest. The Face, actually, published a really great piece on them and the UK’s authoritarian crackdown on direct action that you can read here.

In other news, though, if overshadowed by a nagging feeling of dread, we wanted to let you know that there was a late shipment of stuff for the fair last weekend that will be available from twos today….. Including lots of warm stuff (scarves, wrist warmers, some very fluffy hats) and these absolute bangers —>

From the Archive

This story appeared in our second issue, The Issue of Dust, released in the middle of the Covid-19 pandemic. Faith, and trying to hold onto it, feels as though it has been a big theme of this week. When revisiting old issues of Bog to try and work out what to republish from the archive, Ella’s piece on the fairy faith and the fetishisation of folklore by aestheticising internet cultures stood out to us. While the peak of the folklore-as-fashion trend has played itself out, when we revisited this, about five or six years since it was first published, we realised that the world she was describing had only intensified. The photographs by Reid Calvert, taken while on the road in the US, felt then, as they do now, like a portal; a way through to something, whilst simultaneously the remains of something that we’ve lost, but can’t quite put our finger on. We got a lot from reading this again, and hope you do too. *

Words: Ella Sweeney

Photos: Reid Calvert

One day, during a period of extensive research into Irish folklore, the poet William Butler Yeats met a certain Mrs. Connolly who had the most incredible repertoire of fairy stories he had ever heard. Yeats sat listening to her stories, proverbs and lore well into the evening but as the night drew on, Yeats had to leave. As Mrs. Connolly stood at the door, Yeats turned back to ask her tentatively “Do you believe in fairies?” Mrs. Connolly threw back her head and laughed. “Oh, not at all Mr. Yeats, not at all.” Yeats turned away and slouched off down the path. As he did, Mrs. Connolly called after him, “But they’re there, Mr. Yeats, they really are there.” She was well aware that fairies don’t need us to believe in them to be there, just as things don’t need to be seen to exist.

If I caught a glimpse of a fairy what would l see? Near my hometown in Lancashire, I would probably see an angry shapeshifting Brag (hobgoblin) dressed in a ragged red hat and green clothing. He might quickly transform into a horse or donkey ready to buck any brave rider off. In the Scottish Highlands I might meet a Caoidheag (banshee), a weeping woman wrapped in the white cloth of mountain mist, warning of a coming death. In some areas of Ireland, I may be seduced and kidnapped by a Gean-cánach (love-talker), a humanoid fairy wandering the fields in his finest dress. But I hope that if I do ever meet one, I will see a fairy as described in Robert Herrick’s Description Of The King And Queene Of Fayries:

First a cobweb shirt, more thin
Than ever spider since could spin [….]
A rich waistcoat they did bring,
Made of the Trout-fly’s gilded wing […]
The outside of his doublet was
Made of the four-leaved, true-loved grass,
Changed into so fine a gloss,
With the oil of crispy moss […]
On every seam there was a lace
Drawn by the unctuous snail’s slow pace […]
About his neck a wreath of pearl,
Dropped from the eyes of some poor girl.1

Everything that I know about fairy history comes from Oscar Wilde’s mother, Lady Francesca Speranza Wilde, and her book Ancient Legends, Mystic Charms and Superstitions of Ireland written in 1887. It is a book written with respect for the fairy faith and honours the invisible, taking seriously what is truly hard to see. According to Lady Wilde, all Irish legends, including the fairy, point to the East for their origins, not the North. “From the beautiful Eden-land at the head of the Persian Gulf, where creeds and culture rose to life, the first migrations emanated,” including flocks of fairies from Iran to Ireland. According to Lady Wilde the Feadh-Ree (fairy) comes from the word Peri, a race of mythical Persian beings who flew about the Gulf.2

But this is as far as I can go in attempting to place the origin of the fairy. There are many things in the world that resist historicisation – fairies are one of them. Often history (the kind in textbooks) attempts to conquer; it tries to calm the dead and the forgotten that still haunt the present, separating ‘us’ from ‘them’. History demands facts and rationality, neither of which fairies can provide. It accepts a popular perception of the past, but only under its own terms. Fairies do not abide by these terms because they withstand the very idea of fact. There is no concrete evidence of the fairy. No photo, no footprint: just stories.

Today, the fairy faith has been relegated to a thing of the past. Fairies no longer exist, or maybe they never did. Since the Scientific Revolution in Europe, through the Renaissance, up past the Enlightenment, well into the Industrial Revolution and into today, rationality and modernity have cemented themselves as the triumphant winners in a battle between what we can and cannot prove to be real. Myth and magic are no longer a part of modern everyday life, they persist only as anachronistic parts of culture: inspiration for bedtime stories and Disney films. What was once used as a sinister warning for children – the folk or fairy tale – has been watered down, their stories declawed and rolled out for mass entertainment.

Modernity, with the help of the Church and state, shored up cultural power in the hands of the few and took root alongside the colonial project. Science and technology have been used as oppressive forces both on the working class in Europe and as an excuse to colonise; to claim and destroy cultures, people and land all in the name of ‘progress’. The British Government have, for many hundreds of years, claimed they are helping indigenous populations throughout the world by introducing industrialisation and resource extraction. This kind of mindset is not yet a memory, we can see it in the UK and US fixation with military occupation, where they claim they are doing so to implement democracy.3

Words like barbarian or savage have been used to define ‘them’, the archaic other, against ‘us’, those of rational Western thought. Modernity has positioned itself against the past and established a global hierarchy, distinguishing Western Euro-America as the most advanced in a timeline which values ‘progress’. In an advanced, scientific world, there is no use for magic, spirits or fairies. Our environment is no longer an accepted receptacle of mystical power and nature has become transformed into a universal system that has to be understood.

In The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism, the sociologist Max Weber concludes that modernity has disenchanted the ‘West’ and science has defeated magic, religion, spirits and gods once and for all.4 Yet, religion and the God of Western Christianity have not simply disappeared, they have found their ‘proper’ place: faith is confined to the private sphere and God is confined to some faraway transcendent kingdom. A gaping hole has been left behind. Modernity has attempted to fill this gap with a distinctly modern faith. A faith in ‘progress’ to aid us in making sense of and finding meaning in dominant modern institutions: consumerism and freedom of the market along with bureaucratic machines and large media corporations. “Consumerism”, writes the German mystic Dorothee Soelle, “is the new religion”.5

But this notion of disenchantment, the stripping away of myth and magic, implies that those who have undergone this process are the only ones who have direct access to what is truly real. In the end, the notion of disenchantment enacts exactly what it decries as it relies on an understanding of the non-Western and non-modern subject as someone who is unable to recognise what is real; who fundamentally cannot grasp reality. If someone’s world is open and porous to gods, magic and spirits, they are confused.

But I prefer not to follow this tale of disenchantment. I don’t think we have to re-enchant ourselves in order to see, believe or trust that there is some truth to myths or tales. The fairies have always been there, vibrating under the surface, drifting through the cracks left behind by science, providing an explanation for things which are otherwise unexplainable. The traditional fairy faith may be on its way out, but remnants of its magic still linger.

During the Victorian period, fairies underwent a transformation. Instead of being portrayed in their traditional form – a race of terrifying beings who should never be crossed – they became a softened and aestheticised myth. If modernity cannot destroy the non-rational other, it will eventually fetishise it, and so the popular image of the fairy was co-opted. The popular image that we have today comes from literary and aesthetic fancies of eighteenth century poets and painters.

In Formations of the Secular: Christianity, Islam, Modernity, the anthropologist Talal Asad argues that much of the imagery and literature of nineteenth-century romanticism constituted a coming to terms with the modern secular world, of being enclosed within it and seeing no escape.6 The images of a pre-modern past or non-modern other acquired, only in retrospect, the attractive quality of otherworldly enchantment. Visions of tiny-winged people – good, delicate, sparkly and beautiful – inhabit our modernised fairy tales.

But there is a peculiar contemporary resurgence in fairies. Aesthetic internet cultures such as cottagecore and fairycore have emerged straight out of a nineteenth-century fairytale book – they connote a return to the land, to a simple rural life filled with white cotton tablecloths, lace doilies and voluptuous spotted toadstools. Brothers Grimm with a sexual, Lolita twist. Then there is goblincore, a dirtier, grimier version of the above, where the hoarding of rocks, trinkets and dead bugs is revered as the pinnacle of cool.

Running parallel to all of this is something which can perhaps illuminate the aesthetic decisions made by these groups. Interest in folk culture seems to be becoming quite the trend. In particular, there’s been a noticeable spike in the popularity of Celtic traditions, including an emphasis on remembering and reviving the traditional fairy faith and documenting modern fairy encounters. Websites and podcasts such as Blúiríní Béaloidis and Cailleach’s Herbarium are full of traditional fairy stories and modern fairy encounters. But you won’t find anything resembling Tinkerbell here, these fairies are those of tales past: sinister and threatening characters who are up to no good.

It is worth remembering that the 1916 Easter Rising in Ireland occurred against the backdrop of the Gaelic Revival in Britain and Ireland, which began in the 19th century and went hand-in-hand with the fetishisation of the fairy. It was itself a resistance to modernisation, looking back to imagine another possible future. The movement grew from a cultural interest in the Celtic people, portraying Scottish, Irish and Welsh people inaccurately as noble savages, trapped in a past not unlike the one the cottagecore Instagrammer dreams of.

Any revitalised interest in fairies is an act of reclamation. But any act of cultural reclaiming sees the thing changed, morphed by both its historical and contemporary contexts. To borrow from the philosopher Isabelle Stengers writing on the resurgence of Neo-pagan witchcraft, modern perspective can be defined by a collective pride in the ability to interpret the supernatural in terms of its social, cultural and political contrasts: in being able to rationalise the unknown. But this “knowing better” means forgetting that many of us are heirs to brutal acts committed in the name of reason.7

So it is interesting that an aesthetic and cultural resurgence surrounding the fairy comes now, at a time of political and social tension. The modern industrial project is revealing itself to have been a disaster, capitalism does not work for the common good and science is unable to answer all of our questions. People, yet again, are resisting the tale of modern progress. From the Indigenous Environmental Network and Unitierra or Universidad la Tierra (University of the Earth) in Oaxaca Mexico and even to the Creation Care of Evangelical and Christian communities, people are recovering the land, spirits, beings and gods that modernity relegated to the sidelines. There they are finding what was once common belief and what remnants of this still linger.

Starhawk, a Neo-pagan witch, writer and activist, writes that to utter the word magic is already an act of magic: the word itself puts us to the test – how seriously will we take this word?8 The same could be said about fairies. We may never see or be compromised by one, but confronted with the current reclaiming of fairy lore and aesthetics, perhaps we could learn something from this test. Won’t capitalism have won out forever if we are ready to submit ourselves to a disenchanted world, to close our eyes, sober our senses, have to see to believe?9 Maybe, then, the true trick of the fairies is their fabricated nature, their inability to be pinned down to any one aesthetic or experience; the undecidability that they confront us with.

What form the fairy comes in might change, but they will remain in our cultural psyche. Fairies are nifty, they can’t be bound to the pages of history. The search for any evidence of them always ends up in some odd wasteland of rationality. However, amongst every pile of waste, there is dust – maybe even fairy dust. As the historian Carolyn Steedman describes, dust is opposite to waste, it whirls around and around collecting and hoarding as it goes.10 It is circularity, an impossibility of things ever truly being destroyed. Like dust, fairy history always ends where it started: in the cracks. Nothing just disappears, some things are just hard to see.

*we may or may not have made a few edits from the original – for grammar’s sake, mostly

So sorry we’ve been a bit irregular. But you can rest easy now knowing that we will be back to our usual scheduling from now on: bright an early on Friday mornings. (Well, mostly. We might take a teeny break on the 26th to work on some very important exciting things, but for the most part, we are back to Friday publishing. Don’t hold this against us, please!!!! We are only human!!)

Fashion / time has been a big theme of the week, coincidentally, but we are not here to talk about the cute af panel that our editor was on at the Barbican this week – which, if you think about it, was very much to do with fashion and the passing of time…. (ty for coming :’) But a whole new exciting project for you to sink your teeth into in the coming months.

First of all, though, we wanna promo our very exciting event this weekend, the annual winter fair we do with twos, CC-Steding, Cecile Tulkens, Supporting Material and Tom Dean. Expect cosy gift things for friends, family and, of course, yourself. As well as a twos exclusive bog bags made of silk that kinda looks like wrapping paper??? You’ll have to pop in to see it 😎

We will also be doing a solidarity tombola, with all funds from ticket sales going to the Filton 24 support fund, which supports those imprisoned with costs for material things (phone credit, books, etc.) as well as funding their media campaign (all the more important considering the media blackout on the current hunger strikes); and the Sameer Project, which provides on-the-ground support to people in Gaza by providing free meals, investment in infrastructure rebuilding and rubble clearance. If you can’t make it to buy a ticket, you can donate to them using the links we have provided. *Just to note, the Sameer Project has a couple of different branches depending on location and purpose, and all are equally as important as the other, so you might need to do a bit of clicking around to find the right link.

Prizes we currently have confirmed for the tombola will be from all of us, as well as Jess Maybury, Rights for Weeds, Perfect Lives, Stefan Cooke, Donlon Books, Tasos Hair, Chicken Foot Soup (Goya Gumbani and Dom P), Deathmask, Jawara Alleyne, Independantes de Coeur, Lore Archive and Yuki Bar. GUARANTEE you’ll want like 90% of it (depending on your vibe of course, but the quality is remarkably high).

As well as this weekend’s festivities, we wanna shout out Mainline’s sample sale with Effe that’s on for just one more day today, and our friend Amurmur’s launch night happening at the Horse Hospital next Thursday the 18th December.

Also, a new lesbian pub The Baroness is having its inaugural night in South Bermondsey on Saturday night!! We managed to speak to Sel as she was rushing around putting the finishing touches on the pub plans, who’s the brains behind the bar. Keep scrolling to find out what’s in store, and who’s pulling pints this weekend…………..

But now, we’re excited to be bringing you a new-ish project, called Fashion Time initiated by our friend Marlie Mul between September 2021 and May 2022 during her professorship on the Work.Master MFA programme, HEAD Genève. She asked her cohort of fine art students to respond to what the making of ‘fashion’ is, both as spectacle and within its material form.

The results were delightfully free: a giant pair of papier-mâché shoes, slogan tees bearing the name of their maker stitched together into dresses, clothes that are barely clothes, that have become sites for sploshing paint, ripping, stitching and pinning. The results, these sculptural interpretations of ‘fashion’, were shown to (and tried on by) members of the public in a one-day exhibition-slash-fashion-show at artist-run gallery MALA in Lisbon in May 2022.

After the project had wrapped, Marlie was asked by HEAD to edit a book celebrating the project, which was meant to be published, like, a year ago or more…. After months of work, of commissioning and writing and editing and designing, the funding from HEAD was pulled, leaving the work produced for the book, Fashion Time, with nowhere to go.

So, over the next little while we will be hosting Fashion Time, by publishing the three texts commissioned by Marlie for the book over the course of the next few months. The first in this series is from Alberta Romano, Lisbon-based curator and writer who visited the exhibition at MALA, titled ‘Learning from (Fashion) Time’.

The text outlines the various ideas behind the project, as well as bringing to the fore Lisbon’s own deep-seated countercultural fashion history through the Manobras de Maio, guerrilla fashion shows that took over Lisbon’s streets intermittently over the 1980s and 1990s.

Learning from (Fashion) Time

Words: Alberta Romano

Immersed as we are in a deluge of images and fresh news, it often slips my mind that amidst the labyrinthine depths of the internet, one can still stumble upon rare archival images and videos adorned with the dusty patina of time.

It is this very dust, perhaps, that has preserved these records so immaculately and lends them a potency that surpasses the mundane inundation of daily visuals. Such was my revelation while conducting research on Manobras de Maio.

The scene unfolded on the afternoon of 17 May 1986 in Lisbon, where an impromptu catwalk had been erected in the square facing the Chafariz on Rua do Século.

Adorned in avant-garde clothes crafted by young designers, students, and aspiring stylists – some hailing from the theatre or music scene – models wore their creations proudly. Additionally, each stylist selected their own music to accompany their group of models on the runway, resulting in a seamless procession of groups following a pre-established order.

The name Manobras de Maio was coined by the journalist Manuel Tavares, who ingeniously likened the handcrafted nature of these garments to a Portuguese play on words: histo aqui é muita mão-de-obra’. Mão-de-obra – Manobra. (‘the work here involves a lot of manual-labor. Manual-work – Manobra’).

These fashion shows recurred sporadically until the 2000s, inciting a creative fervour that, as described by Mariana Cachulo (founder of Manobras de Maio with João Romão and Rita Lopes Alves) fostered a vibrant convergence of artists, creatives and intellectuals – spurring them to innovation, literally forcing them to have ideas. It was this blend of spontaneous yet compelled collaboration, coupled with the distinctly artisanal essence of the fashion creations, that conjured the enchantment which is still clearly readable through the archive photos, newspaper clippings from the time and amateur footage on YouTube.

A palpable energy echoed the awe in the eyes of the viewers and their barely contained excitement toward this whirlwind of creativity. Of course, it was the 80s, the years during which Lisbon regained its freedom of expression after years and years of dictatorship and isolation from the rest of the European political dynamics.

As a foreigner living in Portugal for some years now, discovering the energy encapsulated in this event has been a pleasantly surprising experience. Interdisciplinary collaboration among creatives from different sectors is something rare in general, but it seems to be a nearly forgotten concept in a city like Lisbon, drained by tourism and sadly deprived of the vibrant spirit of initiative and proactivity typical of many other European capitals. And it’s precisely in a kind of desire for retribution towards a city with incredible untapped potential that I seemed to glimpse the power of Fashion Time.

Fashion Time was a project initiated in 2022 by visual artist Marlie Mul. In the context of the Work.Master MFA programme at HEAD Genève which she led at the time, Mul set up this project as a way to connect the students’ curiosity for fashion with its performative potential. The project was informed by her experience in collaboration and art education, as well as her interest in the potential of fashion as a medium.

Throughout the school year Mul developed various scenarios and outfits with the students towards a one-night-only event, which was to take place in Lisbon at MALA, a not-for-profit space that promotes contemporary art in the city. MALA organises exhibitions and events accessible to a wide public beyond the art scene.

Founded by Henrique Loja and Sofia Montanha, MALA started in 2020 as a nomadic exhibition space called Supermala, which intersected DIY fashion and contemporary art production. In 2021 Loja and Montanha inaugurated the art space in its permanent location at Rua Dom João de Castro to promote and support Portuguese and international artists at the beginning of their careers.

Often, when attending openings organised by MALA, one experiences a refreshing atmosphere rarely found elsewhere in the city. It’s not uncommon to encounter a diverse mix of people in the audience, from elderly traditional fado singers to young artists and designers. These uncommon bonds usually takes place within the spaces of the gallery, but with Fashion Time they went far beyond the perimeter walls of MALA.

It was a typical late April afternoon in Lisbon. The sun was still high and temperatures were starting to rise: enticing everyone to uncover a bit more or at least to show off that jacket that hadn’t been worn for a while. This was basically the ideal climate for what the creators of Fashion Time would invite people to do: wear the clothes that until then had seemed to form the exhibition display.

The bright colours of the clothes, the oddity of the accessories visible through the window, and the distinctly multicultural atmosphere that permeated that day in that narrow Ajuda street – all this had managed to melt even the usually impenetrable shyness of the average Portuguese inhabitant. As people gathered courage and began to put on the first accessories (hats to be worn in groups of three, oversized boots and decidedly too-large handbags), some headed towards the hanging clothes, looking at them with the same curious caution one uses in shops they enter for the first time.

“The first thing I noticed was the racks being high above my head,” recounted the artist Guilherme Curado. “This reminded me of the feeling I used to get when I would go into my parents’ closet and search for something fun to dress up in, then take a little walk around the house.” Once the majority of people were clothed in their chosen outfits, the music grew louder and those who wanted could take part in an impromptu parade along the small street facing the gallery.

The Ajuda neighborhood where MALA is located is purely residential. Developed around the Palácio Nacional da Ajuda, it is made up of narrow and steep streets, populated mainly by small businesses such as bars, butchers, food shops and trattorias. The whole catwalk was framed by the decadent aesthetics of two overpass arches at the far end of the street. In an instant that small street in Ajuda was transformed into an open-air walkway.

A teddy bear-top, a shower curtain dress, an ambiguous dress made of fabric leaves, flaming pants and articulated dresses stating out loud – NOUS AVONS BESOIN DE CABINES D’ESSAYAGE, QUI VA FAIRE LES FRINGUES? were just some of the clothes that fluttered amid the shouts of encouragement from those who, until a few hours before, had been busy sewing them. Fashion Time evoked the spirit of its most famous predecessor Las Manobras de Maio in the hand-making of the clothes and accessories, but importantly also through the incredible energy unleashed by the event.

“The liberating feeling of walking down a public street in Lisbon is still vivid after two years,” recollected the artist Beatriz Neves Fernandes, when I called to ask about her memories of that day. “I wasn’t aware I was going to perform until I arrived and the suddenness made it more exciting. I’m reminiscing over MALA’s neighbours astonishment as they looked out of the window and we were flooding the street with glamour.”

“It didn’t feel like we were in Lisbon that afternoon, the atmosphere was lively and cheerful. In some ways it reminded me more of London,” recalled the young designer Giulia Bortilno. The event not only demonstrated its success through the turnout and enthusiasm of the public on the day: it continues to do so as it gives us the opportunity to reflect on the valuable lessons to be gleaned from such multidisciplinary approaches that engage the community.

For some reason, our century loves to roll the word ‘interdisciplinary’ off the tongue as much as it enjoys demonising the concept; especially when it comes to evaluating the professionalism of someone who performs more than one job or has diverse passions. Although it is widely proven both in the educational and professional fields that the confluence of stimuli from different knowledge areas contributes to a significant development of the creative impulse of every individual, this always seems like a taboo when professional fields get too intertwined.

A desire to create new images and connections is strongly present in the project of Marlie Mul, who states in the manifesto accompanying Fashion Time: “Maybe calling what we will do in this project FASHION is just an incentive to be hyper-creeaaative and inspired to make things”. The stimulus, the invitation, the obligation to make something new seems to be the impulse that drives these interdisciplinary and participatory practices – albeit so different from each other in time and nature.

Maybe the lessons from an event like Fashion Time extend beyond mere learning (like the title of this essay states) towards the importance of remembering. Remembering that a playful approach, without clear boundaries in terms of themes or audience, is a productive one and for this reason, it should be protected and encouraged in order to stimulate a public consciousness based on exchange rather than resignation.

Credits

Series editor: Marlie Mul

Editor: Perri McKenzie

Q&A with Sel (aka The Baroness)

Why are you opening a new pub for lesbians?

There is not a single specifically lesbian pub in London! There are amazing lesbian-run venues like The Old Nun’s Head, but we want to see a lesbian-specific space like the many gay male pubs in London.

What’s the vibe? Chic? Moody? Pub-like?

Pub-like! Down to earth, good craic, welcoming, merry. A liiiiiitttle chic but only by nature. 💋

Tell me about the location? Why is it there?

In an unspecified car park in south east london. 1: it’s the only place that’d have us 2. i feel safe in the bosom of the surrey canal road triangle (ormside, MOT and avalon) 3. we would not be able to do this without Mike Levitt 4. SE london needs a lesbian spot!

Who do you hope becomes a regular?

People with warm hearts.

Who would be your dream celeb client?

I would just love Kendall Jenner to finally come out, come to the pub, love it and leave a £10k tip.

What’s the dress code for the opening night?

Dress to impress The Baroness!

Most exciting thing on the menu?

Fake snow machine!

Most importantly: who’s behind the bar?

The ultimate cast: Rosie Woodhouse, Sophia Al-Maria, L’Oyin, Hesse K and of course Maxou <3

Keep up with The Baroness here. X

Hi hi! Us again. Sorry we’re late! But here we are, delivering (writing from 9500m in the air). Today we accidentally have a themed edition for you: shopping. More specifically, shopping in Japan.*

Before we get to the consumables, though, we wanted to just remind our readers that there are 30 individuals on remand in British prisons right now, being held under dire conditions for their political beliefs and alleged association with Palestine Action, the direct action group designated a terrorist organisation earlier this year. We are now in the third week of trials of the first six individuals, which we have been following on Real Media who are reporting from Woolwich Crown Court every single day of the trial.

Intersecting with the beginning of this trial is a hunger strike by another six political prisoners in British prisons, Amu Gib, Qesser Zuhrah, Heba Muraisi, Jon Cink, T Hoxha and Kamran Ahmed, of a size not seen since the Irish hunger strikes in 1981. As of writing, two of the strikers have been hospitalised. This Friday 5th December, between 6PM and 8PM at the National Education Union in London, Bernadette Devlin McAliskey, Tommy McKearney (former republican hunger striker) and Gary Donnelley will be speaking on a panel about the political hunger strikes now, from the perspective of those who witnessed the events of 1981. See you there.

That same evening, Evan Kinori is bringing his shop-cum-exhibition event thing to London (previous iterations have been held in New York and San Francisco) which opens at Stuart Shave Modern Art (Helmet Row). We will be running there after the aforementioned discussion. Looks like loads of cool stuff will be available, as well as a collab with friend of the bog Oliver Church. As if you weren’t getting enough wholesome menswear this week, that same evening Rob Newman is hosting an event in London with Heresy Research.

Speaking of menswear…. There’s apparently a new brand on the block that’s been capturing everyone’s close attention. You may or may not have got a sponsored ad from London-based ‘brand’ Townwear. We’ve heard on the grapevine that no-one knows who they are and they won’t reply to messages, but they seem to have a very refined aesthetic direction and deep, nerdy knowledge about textiles.

Sorry to disappoint you all, but we are p sure that the images on their instagram have been generated by AI. Think about it, it’s all a bit too perfectly draped and folded… Print mockups too perfectly aged… So, is it a test for us textile heads?? A clever and affordable market research project?? We want answers, Mx. Townwear! If you want to prove us wrong, dm us! o_o

We’ve also been putting together a list of wintery markets in London (sorry to our intl submissions, we love you but it made more sense to keep it tight) for you all to find uber cool, unique, perfect presents for your friends and fam this December. Think: exciting things made by designers specifically for gifting. Vintage or antique bits that you can’t find anywhere else. See this at the end of the blog……..

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