Video credit: University of the Arts London (UAL) interviews Prof Helen Storey about the 30-year creative archive donation to London College of Fashion (LCF) Archives.
Over recent times, I have been curating my 30-year creative archive donation to London College of Fashion (LCF), University of the Arts London (UAL), which is available and free for anyone to access at the new state-of-the-art LCF Archives. Lost memories have emerged, both quotidian and significant moments, through dress, imagery, experimental fabrics, film and miscellaneous collected objects. This process of rediscovery, of uncovering and curating a creative career and life spanning 30-years, has been an intimate process of self-reflection and readying for collective engagement.
It is an enormous privilege to have found a natural home for this body of work at LCF, UAL. It gives a dedicated place for a mass act of co-creation and slow self-realisation; it comes with a feeling now that it’s true value has been realised in giving it all away. 2000 pieces from key projects are showcased, sharing also the mess behind the beautiful, the supposed ‘mistakes’, the challenges, the dumped and emergent ideas, all intended to share the reality of how works that span disciplines can be born and explored. This archive serves as a witness to all the stories of collaboration, companionship and connection with the many creatives that make the archive as rich as it is and elucidates a candid depiction of the act of making. This is not a work of ‘I’ anything, but the shared imaginations and knowledge of, likely, hundreds of people along the way.
My creative life began through a sharp attunement to my inner world from a young age, where, after a failed early education, I eventually found a place and a way to transform dark emotion into wearable narrative. An early key marker was my first catwalk collection – ‘Rage’, in 1990. Designed and sold during the Gulf war, ‘Rage’ responded to the alarm of that time and expressed a quieter, personal rage that the pressures and pulls of being an artist can bring; love for being both a new mother and full-time designer, vying for and stemming from, the same part of the female soul.
Left - Image credit: Rage dress by Helen Storey. Photo by Ezzidin Alan, 1990.
Right - Image credit: Helen Storey featured in The Daily Telegraph,1992, shared with kind permission.
In the 1995, ‘Edith’s Sister’s’ marked the last of my commercial fashion collections, with 4 own brand stores, 100’s of wholesale clients and over 11 years of trade coming to an end. With much support, we grafted hard, but I left the industry feeling I had never really fulfilled my design potential. As for many young designers still today, keeping a ‘fashion ship’ afloat proved financially and emotionally difficult. However, I was not to know then that that creative urge was about to find a new direction.
After stepping away from fashion, an unfamiliar life began, a tumultuous personal and professional period which led me towards the unexpected. Soon after closing the business, I was approached by Faber to chart my creative life to date. Although premature, for writing one’s autobiography, aged 34, it was a welcome time of reflection and rehabilitation. During this quiet writing time, a proposal landed, sent by my scientist sister, Professor Kate Storey, a developmental biologist at Oxford University. It manifested as a yellow ‘post-it note’ with a single ‘?’ marked on a competition leaflet from Wellcome Trust (a global bio medical charitable foundation). The leaflet invited artists and scientists to come together to elucidate both worlds in new ways. The doors to working with scientists for the first time had arrived, with love from my sister.
Since unifying the seemingly opposite worlds of fashion and science, I have spent time exploring how design can be used to address some of the world’s most significant and complex problems. ‘Primitive Streak’ was my first foray into science, in 1997. Mirroring Kate’s field of research as a developmental embryologist, together we sought to bring the first 1,000 hours of a human life into textile and ‘fashion’ form. The Wellcome Trust were up for the experiment and curious as to how sisters from seemingly opposite disciplines might respond and collaborate. Back then we couldn’t know the resulting exhibition would reach 8 million people around the world and tour for over 15 years.
The creative process wasn’t however, straight forward. As we worked our way through eleven key embryonic stages, we became stuck at finding a way to convey how the human heart develops. Knowing its development starts as two tubes that arise and fuse above the developing brain, before descending, we decided to approach the genius milliner that is Philip Treacy, to create a ‘Heart Hat’ for us. It was the inspiration needed to move past a creative standstill and led me to design the next three dresses - dresses that would, almost dance like, elucidate subsequent key embryonic stages to lead us to that first beat of the human heart.
Left - Image credit: Heart Hat by Phillip Treacy,1997. Photo by Justine.
Right - Image credit: Primitive Streak Collection -The Spine Column Dres – 30-40 days of development, 1996. Photo by Justine.
Emboldened by this work and jumping forward to 2004, I collaborated with polymer chemist and scientist Professor Tony Ryan to create ‘Wonderland’, an exploration into biodegradable materials, ultimately creating the world’s first disappearing dress. At Wonderland’s first experimental exhibition at London College of Fashion in 2008, the clothes were gradually submerged in vessels of water, slowly disintegrating into a gel until they disappeared altogether. Responding to another global problem, air pollution, in 2010, Tony and I collaborated on the ‘Catalytic Clothing’ project, initially creating a highly experimental ‘couture’ textile sculpture, the world’s first air purifying dress, and later, radicalising denim jeans with the same technology.
Left - Image credit: ‘Wonderland’ dissolving jeans and top, 2004. Photography by Nick Knight.
Right - Image credit: Say Goodbye - Dissolving Dress at The Royal Academy, 2008. Photo by kind permission of the Royal Academy, London, Francis Ware, 2010.
Developing a new reputation for grabbing public imagination through combining fashion and science, it was the creation of ‘Dress for Our Time’ that suddenly and unexpectedly took me to the gates of Zaatari Refugee Camp in 2016 - the world’s largest Syrian camp on the Jordan/Syria border. What should have been a temporary home for 80,000 people is now their 14th year of displacement. Currently, it is a place on the edge of massive change, as Syria is finally freed from the Assad regime; a long-awaited complex liberation that may mean refugees can finally return home.
Over 7 years, we worked with the artists and makers in Zaatari, as a part of the response to an unimaginable (by us) life – it has changed my practice for good. A decade later, I am still working with refugee makers, artists and designers there and in the long-neglected camps in Africa. It is work which is shaped as much by refugee talent, wishes and dreams, as by climate change, obstruction, complexity, violence, poverty and seemingly eternal disappointment. Without doubt, refugees teach us something about all our futures.
In response to what we have been able to achieve together over the years, in 2019, UNHCR created a unique role for me as ‘UNHCR Designer in Residence’ and this way of working has since taken me and my longtime collaborator, Deepa Patel, to Dzaleka Refugee Camp, Malawi and Maratane refugee settlement in Mozambique too. We have now been co-creating and co-learning with refugee communities since 2016, seeking reciprocal ways of working across livelihoods and wellbeing.
Left - Image credit: ‘The Love Pockets’ trauma blanket – created out of scammed garments – each pocket contains a question, or message in Swahili, for our students to respond to at London College of Fashion. In Dzaleka Refugee Camp, Malawi, 2024.
Right - Image credit: Helen and Deepa gazing at ‘Old Man Mountain’ on the edge of Maratane Refugee Camp, Mozambique 2022, courtesy of UNHCR Mozambique.
From Dzaleka Refugee Camp and our workshops there, has evolved a group self-named as ‘Dzaleka Arts Lab’. Together we continued to co-develop the future of the group in the challenging life conditions of the camp. Whilst there in November 2024, we saw the realisation of projects since our last trip and held two workshops with multiple local partners to explore how a design education might be delivered over a WhatsApp format, for those who might not otherwise receive a higher education at all.
Life complexity comes in almost immeasurable and multiple formal and informal ways, but it is the politics of the United States (US) that has such an impact on refugees, whether that is for the 2% chance of resettlement, or the consequences of any changes in the significant level of humanitarian aid/funding the country gives. As the gates to the US close, we saw and felt the impact of this for ourselves. It reminds us we can only ever design in the moment and be ready to redesign a moment later - everything becomes both urgent and slow- informed by female instinct and a tenacity to hold on to an unknown future.
Left - Image credit: Kitenge scraps cloth coat, designed by Black Ntaw and worn by Johnson Brume, our young film making collaborator in Dzaleka Refugee Camp, Malawi, 2024.
Right - Image credit: David Betteridge filming and interviewing designer Black Ntaw, outside his studio, with Helen Storey in Dzaleka Refugee Camp, Malawi, 2024.
This work now forms part of an ongoing collaborative project ‘VITAL SIGNS’. A first short film on ‘Dzaleka Style’, has been made by Johnson Brume, a 19-year-old who fled the violence of the Congo with his family and who had been living in Dzaleka Refugee Camp, Malawi, ever since. Mentored by filmmaker David Betteridge, who has been capturing our work in refugee camps for over 9 years now, Johnson's film footage traverses a journey of its own to reach us.
Video credit: ‘Dzaleka Style’ by Johnson Brume, David Betteridge and Helen Storey, 2024.
This way of working is stretching what design can do - I have been drawn to this throughout my career and the resulting collaborations are showcased throughout the archive. From dissolving dresses to air-purifying jeans, to genuine ways of building hope through co-creating with refugee makers; the archive embodies the cross-pollinated work of fashion, art, science and global politics, whilst navigating ongoing environmental and humanitarian crises.
Left - Image credit: Students interacting with the Helen Storey Archive. Photo by Chloe Gilbert, LCF Archives, 2024.
Right - Image Credit: Helen Storey Archive. Photo by Chloe Gilbert, LCF Archives, 2024.
In 2024, it has been uplifting to see the breadth of the archive’s work, being interacted with and used by our London College of Fashion students; themselves unearthing meaning, identity and distinctiveness on their own creative paths. I share my passion for higher education and the crucial role our students play in reshaping fashion, in this Drapers article. It is our students and young people who bear witness to a future which will be theirs to shape and live. I hope that this archive invigorates creative courage in them, by showing them the rich potential of imaginative ideas and creations that emerge from cross-disciplinary ways of working; ones that might serve humanity and the Earth best.
The archive is open to the public and is free to view. To access the archive, both physical and digital, please contact LCF Archives at archives@fashion.arts.ac.uk.
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