Morag Seaton

Morag Seaton is a Scottish fashion designer and maker working in London. She graduated from the Glasgow School of Art where she received awards for sustainability, the dissertation prize and the John Byrne Award for ‘Garment Stories’. Morag has since worked across fashion production, arts and culture, and garment technology, most recently for the UKRI Textiles Circularity Centre at the Royal College of Art. She co-runs Worn, an organisation that engages people with the emotional and environmental significance of their clothes.

The fundamental components of Morag’s creative practice include abstract tailoring, pockets, fashion systems and speculative design. Each component is carefully researched and stitched together with a distinct visual language. Her individual and collaborative projects are led by conversations, workshops and other public engagement research she facilitates with people about their clothing experiences, understandings and fictional ideas. Usually starting with an everyday or speculative question, Morag’s work seeks to unpack the socio-cultural, environmental and personal significance of the objects we wear.

With special thanks to my sponsors, the Elsener Family (Decode Design) and to Halley Stevensons Ltd. for their generous donation of materials.  

Questions for an Archive

The following projects are investigations of the Archive I have been building: a growing collection of exchanges and responses to the questions I ask people about their relationships to their clothes. From: ‘How do clothes give the body power?’ to ‘If you could find anything in your pocket what would you want to find?’ the responses are carefully collected, dissected and played with through visual design, fashion, scent, performance and more. As a whole, the Archive and associated projects aim to celebrate individual and collective experiences of dress, to push the boundaries of fashion speculation, and share insights that can help change the way we think about clothes.

The work, as a collection, is titled ‘Questions for an Archive’ and refers to not only the questions that I ask people, but the act of questioning the archive itself. The practice of archiving and documenting fashion biographies and artefacts has historically prioritised stories and objects of the elite. ‘Questions for an Archive’ therefore acts as a prompt to challenge preconceived ideas of what information is worth preserving. As even the mundane, ordinary pocket has the potential to become something extraordinary.