 Hello, good afternoon. I'm Gina Pearce, I'm a London Metropolitan University, and I'm very grateful to have the opportunity to talk to you today. I'm going to talk about a project that introduced in a London six-form students to museum artefacts by showing them how professional fashion and textile designers were inspired by archived material. I will be taking a journey, hence the title, from museum to mannequin. A little bit of the background, the fabric of the city exhibition was held last year at the Cass School of Art, Architecture and Design at London Metropolitan University. It was the main event of a project that I organised, I curated and I participated in. Our university, our city campus is on the edge of the city of London, near Spicklefields, and in 2015 the Huguenose of Spicklefield Society held a festival which I saw as an opportunity to celebrate the Spicklefield silks. These are fabrics that were woven by the Huguenose, mainly in the 18th century. I invited local fashion and textile designers to respond to these Spicklefield silks and showed the results of this collaboration in the exhibition, the fabric of the city. Today I will be showing some of the outcomes from the exhibition and I will be discussing some of the themes that arose. Interpretation of archived material through transitional objects, meaning the new fashion outcomes by the designers which acted as transitional objects that students could relate to and enables a new audience to engage. In this case the new audience are the inner London six form students and new term that I've learnt today perhaps non-users, perhaps usually non-users of archives and museum material. These were invited to a fashion summer school at the university and I will be talking about other themes such as time spent in the archive as an immersive experience and perhaps giving a different experience that is more relevant to a teenage student that is a different approach from a scholarly approach to archived materials. Another theme I will be touching on is the haptic qualities and how the haptic or being able to handle the artefacts contributes to this immersive experience and what happens when that haptic experience is denied. These are some of the exhibits from the show, the fabric of the city. My background is as a textile designer rather than as an academic researcher although I am in the very early stages of that. My approach to this project was that of a practitioner and really excited to be able to explore the archive and these amazing silks, colours, techniques. So my own response for the exhibition was a rug design seen at the top left hand corner and the inspiration for this is something that I will be talking about. But I'll be mainly focusing on the fashion outcomes because these were the most relevant for the fashion summer school. So the aims for the project were threefold. Firstly to demonstrate how archive textiles can connect to contemporary design by inspiring innovation and originality and without the use of images as historical reproduction. Secondly to show the working practices of designers to a wider audience and to gain a greater understanding of the processes involved in designing and making. And finally to highlight the location, the East End of London, as one of the key components of the success of creative business in the city. So the Spicklefield silks give us an insight into an immigrant group fleeing religious persecution in France who settled and flourished in the UK from between the 16th and the 18th century. And they brought with them technical skills and continental designs and they became the height of fashion and much in demand in London. So I invited fashion and textile designers with links to the area around Spicklefields to be inspired by these silks and they were all very enthusiastic about this opportunity to be part of this project. It led them outside of their usual working sphere and I had just one refusal from a high profile but nameless designer. So my aim in my research methodology is one that I asked of the participants not to simply reproduce or replicate the fabrics but to bring their own working methodology to the archive. So not to create prints that use the same imagery but to generate something new. We very much wanted to show students this process and how archives could be used in new and exciting ways. And very fortunately this potential of the cultural and social impact was rewarded with an Arts Council grant. So the introduction to the project began with a visit to the Museum of London Archives with curator Beatrice Bellin taking us through a chronological journey of the silk pieces and the garments. In the archive we could take photographs and we could make sketches but only Beatrice was able to handle the silks. The inability to be able to feel the fabrics was frustrating as touch is particularly relevant to the discipline of textiles which are a haptic experience as much as a visual. The handle describes the weight, drape and density of the cloth as much as a way of determining the composition, the construction or to understand any embellishment. The words touch and feeling have the double meaning to be emotionally affected and to make physical contact. According to researcher Susan Stewart, quote, Of all the senses touch is most linked to emotion and feeling to be touched or moved by words or things. It is handling objects that triggers a desire to empathise and an ability to imagine the past. With our sense of touch denied, our visual and verbal senses and communication increased in importance. We shared our knowledge of techniques and experience that could add depth to the historical information provided by Beatrice. Between you and me you wouldn't want designers handling archive pieces. We'd be trying them on and dancing around before you could stop us. A distinguishing feature of the silks is the frequent use of gold and silver metallic threads with several different yarn constructions in a single garment. The expense of these and the many different coloured threads would amount to more than that of the payment to the weaver who might have spent up to two weeks on a single dress fabric. To maximise the use of the costly yarns, a weaving technique known as a type of damask is used, where the thread would be woven only into the sections where it would be visible, rather than the full width of the fabric. As a result, the fabrics take on a very different appearance on the reverse side to their fronts, changing from florals to surprisingly contemporary looking semi-abstracted images. These have really appealed to us and were an important aspect that allowed us to begin to see how we might reinterpret the designs, and you might recognise this is where I took my inspiration for my rug. I love this loosening of the stylised motifs. This stress again demonstrates the difference between the outside and the inside of the fabric. The traditional florals become abstracted smudges. Through seeing some of the complete garments, we could begin to envisage the world of those who would have worn the silks. This stress had no known provenance, and although originally would have belonged to a person of wealth, could have subsequently been passed on to many owners. We noticed that it showed signs of wear and dirt, particularly along the hem and the cuffs, and we tried to immerse ourselves into the 18th century world, as we speculated on the age of the dirt and the wear of the dress, the parties she'd been to, and how we could incorporate that into our design responses. An important aim for the fabric of the city was to expose to public view the designer at work and the process of designing. This is Rebecca Hoy's screen printing in her studio. The act of designing, or working in design, is recognised as having many unquantifiable characteristics, frequently being described as mysterious or intuitive. The mathematician, architect and digital artist Lionel March quote, distinguished design's mode of reasoning from those of logic and science. March argued that the two conventionally understood forms of reasoning, deductive and inductive, only apply logically to analytical and evaluative types of activity, but the type of activity that is most particularly associated with design is that of synthesis, for which there is no commonly acknowledged form of reasoning. Observation of the designer in action can give an insight into the design and making process. To support further understanding of the making, the university photographer was commissioned to take a series of photographs to record the designers developing and working on their final outcomes in the studio. These photographs were displayed in the exhibition, along with handling samples. This helped in the process of linking the artefacts to the outcomes, visibly demonstrating the making process, and was much appreciated by visitors to the exhibition. The fashion summer school held at the university was for inner London six-form students to give them an insight into both fashion education and the fashion industry. The concept of using museum artefacts was introduced to the students by telling the story of the Fanshawe dress on permanent display at the Museum of London. The fabric for this magnificent gown was woven in Spittlefields in 1753 for Anne Fanshawe, the daughter of the Lord Mayor of London, to wear at his inaugural ball. The motifs woven into the fabric show symbols of the Lord Mayor's brewing business, barley hops and bales, and anchors representing the distribution of his trade. The idea of using motifs as symbols in fashion was discussed with the students. We asked them what does the example of the Fanshawe dress show us, and how can studying the archive give us ideas that we can use today? We discussed the practitioners who participated in the Fabric of the City exhibition. The contemporary outcomes that were produced might challenge our preconceived ideas of how museum pieces are used for inspiration. But this is the reason that they can be the link, all the transitional object that helps the student to understand how to use the archive and to find a way into the archive. So this is Jane Bola. She responded to the silver and gold threads introducing metallic inks hand-painted and printed into her mixed media constructed fashion garments. Using plastics and rivets, these dresses are hand-built rather than stitched, and as can be seen in this image where Jane is assembling onto the mannequin to create the dress, Jane's innovative approach to materials and concern with upcycling is appealing to the students. They can see that fashion does not need to involve traditional pattern cutting. When they're told that Jane started out recycling plastic shower curtains, they can start to visualise the endless possibilities of using unusual materials. House of Harlott produced latex fetishwear. They also produced a line of lingerie for mass online seller ASOS, as well as designer clothing for Mark Jacobs. Their interpretation of the 17th century dress silhouette in latex demonstrates that in Congress juxtaposition of shape and material reinvigorating a historical reference. Students can think how they themselves might feel wearing a dress with panniers that require a sideways entrance through a doorway and a waist restricted with corsetry to provide the appropriate shape. Possibly not many fathers will be commissioning this for their daughters. However, operating from the heart of Spicklefields, they embody the skilled craft workers surviving in the city with their studio processes completely hidden from view. Cute Circuit responded to the archive by exhibiting a dress made from silk and LED lights that is the ready to wear version of a bespoke dress made for singer Katie Perry for the Met Gala in New York. Possibly an event that could rival the Lord Mayor's Ball for glamour and prestige. The Katie Perry dress contained over 3,000 LED lights and the connection between this and the Fanshawe dress could be clearly made by the students. Flora McLean is a millionaire necessaries designer working in acrylics with a cult following both here and internationally. The inspiration for the hat she produced came from a motif on a dress fabric woven in 1735 displaying fruits and exotic flowers. With very little adaptation, the strange strawberry-like shape which I think you can see there has been transposed onto the hat and even the colour has changed little. Chartres Green is still being very relevant today. Despite the age of the source of the inspiration, this hat fits into a contemporary collection. Rintaro Nishimura is a fashion and product designer who again works in a range of materials including plastic. This photograph of him at work in his studio is 3D printing the garment into individual components. They are based on a floral motif from one of the archived dresses and assembled on the mannequin. The final result shimmers in the light. Possibly much as the silk which inspired it would have shimmered in candlelight. Karen Coughlin's Gin Drinking Gloves use embroidered motifs to symbolise a juniper plant combined with a falling baby from William Hogarth's Gin Lane contemporaneous to the time of the silk weaving. The students were intrigued by an example of the perils of drinking from over 200 years ago, now adorning a contemporary designer glove. The students at the summer school were encouraged to express their own personal voice using symbols and associations to develop original and imaginative pieces. They could see how the designers had used the original archive and could now discover how to make their own connections to archive material. A very brief questionnaire after revealed that the course had encouraged the students to visit a museum for ideas in the future and that they would like to know more about the archive pieces. One reply stated, it showed us how joining two contrasting ideas can produce something with personality and meaning. So to summarise, the journey from museum to mannequin shows a thread that links from 18th century fabrics to new fashion garments that can inspire the next generation. The combination of future-facing methods of production with 18th century imagery creates an exciting juxtaposition which stimulates the designers to innovate and can bring new insights to their own work. The students can use these as transitional tools that provide the link to new methods that they can use in their future work. Using this approach to the artefacts allows them to fully engage with the materiality of an experience that may not be understood through academic study alone. In his book Making, the anthropologist Tim Ingold suggests that how we know the world is not through data collection. It is through being in the world which cannot be extracted from studying or from a position of being on the outside. His description of anthropology can equally apply to the archive. It is documentary but it is also transformational. It is surely incumbent on us to give to the future as we have received from the past. Thank you.