Elizabeth & George

Category: Apparel

My tailored jacket focuses on my home village which has a farming background and using a local material, tweed, made from local sheep farms wool, I also received a donation of the Romney Marsh Tweed to help me make my collection. The sheep are a special Romney Marsh breed, making softer tweed than the usual Scottish breeds which I visited to have a location shoot at the farm where the wool was sourced. The specific pattern of tweed is also inspired by the local area and the colour combinations represent the Romney Marsh. I wanted to use this material as it brings attention to a renewable material and to our small area. I drew inspiration from old family photos on the farms and with the sheep, especially my mothers pet sock lamb, George, which she had as a child. As my family photographs often featured younger family members I decided to have a shrunken, out-grown effect of the jacket. Making the shoulders narrower, the sleeves and length shorter but also making the collar and the break point smaller and higher up. This was also a reference to August Sanders' photographs of young school children in the 1930's, the same period of some of my family photos. Sanders' photographs served a starting point for the silhouette and as a guide for the theme of my collection. Referencing a time before synthetic material made my use of materials entirely natural, down to the dying process for other garments in which I used Weld and Saffron to dye materials and cotton threads. The making of my jacket was made to tailoring standards often hand sewing to create the precision needed and pattern matching the entirety of the jacket.