Shelley Fox wants her archive to decay

The designer discusses remortgaging her London flat three times, why she stopped designing in 2002, and what mice nesting in her dresses taught her about letting go.

By Wonne Scrayen

In times of ostentation, with mind-boggling musical chairs occupying feeds, how can you shapeshift your existence as a designer? Holding your ground can prove difficult, especially when trying to carve out a new way of operating.

Central Saint Martins-trained designer Shelley Fox emerged in the ‘90s with mutilated fabrics, the result of endless ventures of burning, melting, and laser-treating. Unseen and unheard of at the time, the British designer soon came to terms with the fact that she came at design from a different angle. Neither inferior nor superior, just different. It wasn’t until she stopped designing and went into teaching that she truly felt heard and seen in her research approach.

For the longest time, she considered her archival body of work a distant memory, done and dusted. In fact, before she herself took an interest in her archive, mice had already claimed it as their humble abode, building a vertical nest in a stored-away dress. But witnessing these creatures, she recognised all these other lives her archive still had to live. And so, one box at a time, she committed to digging through everything she had held on to all those years. Over time, Shelley’s fabrics altered, and so too did the notion of research in fashion. Now, with a recent acquisition by the Met [in New York] of the original Braille top and a skirt from her #5 collection, she’s starting to receive a new level of acclaim. But how did she navigate the years up until this point?

As a designer, you brought what lives on the outskirts into fashion: Morse code, Braille, tourist postcards for sales invites. How did these sources of inspiration come to you?

The idea of the discarded speaks to me. What lives on the periphery, everyday things which are hardly given any provenance. Already as a college student, whenever I got stuck, the library was the first place I’d go. Same with going to the cinema. It never solved the problem itself, but it allowed me to step into another world. When I got out the other end, I could look at my work with different eyes. I’ve always been drawn towards social and documentary photography, which most often tells stories outside of fashion. I was also a regular at the Institute of Contemporary Art, where I’d go to watch [photojournalist] Don McCullin talk about his latest work – this interest in how people outside fashion work has always been with me.

It was also a case of resources, or better, a lack thereof. When I graduated in 1996, things were generally still done analog, but I had no money to commission invitations. My first London studio used to be just off Brick Lane, for which you had to walk through Spitalfields Market. It was a very different place than it is now, still all rough around the edges. The idea behind the postcards was that if we bulk buy them, we would get a good cash deal. Scouring flea markets was a constant in my working process. Going through boxes filled with pictures of people’s families, thinking to myself: “God, I don’t want mine to end up here.” I was also hugely intrigued by cartes de visite, the first visiting cards from the 1800s. I’ve used this, what I like to call ‘found photography’, in multiple ways. As projections in shows or as tokens reminiscent of military references, you know, those coloured ribbons with medals attached, now ribbons with cartes de visite hanging from them. But then I got an order for about 200 items, so I had to go and source 200 19th-century cards. [Laughs]

At a certain point, designing becomes your entire identity; you get paranoid, thinking, “This is how people know me.”

Back in 1998, when I was teaching at a college in Marylebone, during one of my lunchbreaks, I stumbled across the Royal National Institute of Blind People shop. Without any real reason to be in there, I got talking to the staff, enquiring about all these obscure objects, such as an A4 frame with lines across it. When I was told it enabled blind people to line a piece of paper straight, I was wowed. The thought of this basic thing we manage, simply because we can see. I then started to look into Braille and how I could emboss it into clothing. It became the baseline of collection #5. Never for the purpose of solving a problem. More because I liked the concept of this conversation around Braille being used in clothing. This then led on to other things, like Morse code. That started with a visit to Bletchley Park, an estate north of London, which became the principal centre for coding during World War II. Again, this human aspect drew me in.