Didem Caia

Suitable for Women For as long as I can remember, I wanted to be a man. Not a boy but a man. Growing up I don’t think I really knew what that meant, but there are a collection of moments, a pastiche of images in my mind. Didem in an East-meets-West themed photoshoot for Frankie, 2018 I was born in September in Melbourne, Australia. It was the 90s. My mum estimates that she went into labour at 2:30am on the 29th,Read more

Claire Wellesley-Smith

The Cardigan The cardigan was very basic: black cotton fine knit, long length, buttons, a masculine cut but bought in Top Shop – I wore it for years. Then the pockets developed holes and runs. My line of work, teaching and running long-term textile projects, meant that I often had sharp embroidery scissors on my person, and the blades broke through the knitted threads. Other areas of the cardigan began to unravel. Thin areas on the elbows went to holes,Read more

Anne M Carson

The textile I want to describe is from The Lady and the Unicorn, a series of six 15th Century tapestries considered medieval masterpieces. I found an embroidery version of one of the tapestries in the 1980s; more than 40 years ago. What initially drew me to the embroidery were the rich primary colours: magenta, royal blue, and deep bottle green, as well as the compelling design, featuring a woman on a dais surrounded by animals, and fruiting and flowering trees. It wasRead more

Fiona O’Connor

Where I went to school little girls learned to sew. In 1968 the school inspectorate praised the girls of Belgrove National School in Dublin, ‘for the neatness of their handwriting, and, above all, for their needlework’. We sat for hours, two by two, in rows of wooden desks sewing squares of white calico. Starting from 1st class we learned ‘hemming, seaming, stitching’, according to our needlework syllabus book, which was written for Irish schoolgirls in the mid-eighteen hundreds. ‘1) LayRead more

Clare Archibald

Your favourite piece of clothing?Textiles are so interwoven in my mind with the colour language they offer it is perhaps not surprising that my favourite piece of clothing is one I can’t quite fully articulate with words. It eludes me in the specificity of its greenness, shape, and thread combination, in the feel of it. I no longer have it and realised when writing this that I also no longer have the memory of how I came to lose itRead more

Rowena Mondiwa

The drawstring has long since been lost but the bookbag is still intact and I keep it folded up among my belongings. I often think about how it’s my oldest possession, the one thing that has accompanied me in my life across the world. Now, as an adult, it makes sense that this would be the one possession I have kept from my childhood. I’ve had this bag since I was four years old. Back then I’d just started primaryRead more