T. Mottram

This collection “The Suitcase” is a compilation of multi-looks, uniform in materiality, aesthetics and attachment to formulate a single character, stemming from 1950s and 1970s menswear fashion archetypes. The installation, alongside the finished garments and accompanying furnishings, come together to centralise the character’s relationship with their world, storyline, and themselves. The collection was entitled "The Suitcase", to reflect the influential plot device a suitcase often plays in a character’s experience of travel, displacement, reinvention, identity, and escapism. Parallelling a character’s storyline, the creation of an identity through a complex reconfiguration of memories, this collection was created using only up-cycled and preloved garments. Both a conceptual and practical reconfiguration of past experiences of others and attachments to clothing items, collaged together to create new pieces.