Profile: Louise McArthur – Only Natural Design Competitions

Louise McArthur

Central Saint Martins

With a background in Graphic Design and Art Direction within the fashion industry, my creative roots have always been grounded in storytelling and aesthetics. For the past five years, I’ve launched my own brands within the fashion industry, navigating the relentless rhythm of seasonal collections. Over time, I found myself growing tired of the pressure to keep producing. The constant demand for pace, perfection and price is often at the expense of materials, land and people. This discomfort led me to pause and step back, choosing instead to re-root my practice in something slower, deeper and more connected. I’m currently studying for a Master’s in Regenerative Design at Central Saint Martins, where my work explores the potential for fashion to reconnect us with land, farming and fibre. I now focus only on natural fibres, particularly flax, and how we might rebuild forgotten systems of local production, working with the soil rather than against it. I grow and process flax by hand, design with raw fibre, and explore new pathways for craft and place-based materials. My practice sits at the intersection of farming, storytelling and fashion – asking how what we wear might honour the land it comes from, and those who care for it. Only Natural felt like the right space to share this journey. Not just as a designer, but as someone actively trying to unpick and reweave a more honest relationship between materials, nature and self.

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REDRESSING THE LAND: Flax, wool & the memory of a working landscape.

Category: Apparel

Competitions: Fashion Competition 2025

Redressing the Land is a collaboration between two designers reimagining what fashion could be. Not as trend or commodity, but as care, as kinship, as a living system stitched into soil. This project is born from grief and hope. Grief for landscapes stripped by industrial agriculture, for fibres replaced by fossil fuels, for rural knowledge lost in the churn of fast fashion. And hope. Hope that we can remember what it means to make clothes that belong to place. Clothes with memory and honesty, shaped by soil-stained hands. Together, we’ve worked with flax and wool. Two fibres grown from the land and long neglected by it. We’ve studied their stories, tended them and honoured their ecological roles. Our garments are shaped by shepherds and soil, by mourning and repair, by a deep desire to reconnect people with the fields that once clothed them. This is not another aesthetic nod to “sustainability.” This is not about styling a better version of the same broken system. Our materials are hand-processed, home-grown, raw, imperfect. That is the point. There is beauty in fibre before it is bleached and spun and made invisible. This is not a costume. This is not a concept. This is fibre in service to land. This is design as remembrance, resistance and repair.