Stitching Freedom: Incarceration and Embroidery with Isabella Rosner.

Isabella is Curator of the Royal School of Needlework, Research Associate at Whitney Antiques, Host of ‘Sew What?’ Podcast and author of the zine ‘Stitching Freedom: Embroidery & Incarceration’.

After stumbling upon her work on the long histories of individuals using the art of embroidery during hardship. Using this craft, often considered docile, domestic and privileged to construct their ambitions, release their anguish and protest their imprisonments.

It’s a stunning body of work, capturing the deeply human craft that is part of the history of the clothes on our backs. For this issue, on Fashion and Conflict, we had to speak to her.

Why do you think stitching has so often been what people turn to in these difficult times - is it just the practicality of what is around them, or is there something about this craft that makes it at once grounding and freeing?

I think it’s a real mix of the practical and the emotional. Embroidery is ultra accessible, as it only needs a needle, thread, and piece of fabric and threads and pieces of fabric can come from basically anywhere, but I think it’s more than that. You’re right, it is both grounding and freeing.

It can be anything from super structured to completely freestyle, and there is so much scope for creativity. No two people who embroider reach the same aesthetic conclusions, for the most part -- every embroidery is individual and you can see that maker’s ‘hand’.

There’s also peace to be found in the repetitious movement of a needle in and out of cloth, progress in the visible growth of stitches on a canvas, and joy in bright, vibrant threads. I think there’s also the comfort of softness in both the threads and the fabric ground. I tend to think there are as many reasons why people have turned to embroidery in difficult times as there are people who have done that.

Do you have a favourite story from your zine?

It’s so hard to pick my favourites, but I think if I HAD to choose it would be Annie Parker and A.T. Casdagli.

I love Annie Parker because stitching in prison is pretty rare, stitching with one’s hair is pretty rare, and doing both is an exceptional combo. I find her life story heartbreaking, and the fact that her embroidery survives as a testament to her experience and as a part of her body that remains when nothing else does adds so much depth and weight to her story.

I love A.T. Casdagli because he turned the typical idea of a cross stitch sampler completely on its head in such a fun, subversive, humorous way. I love that he embroidered for the rest of his life. I have developed a relationship with his daughter, who is his greatest advocate, and it’s such an honour to know her and know her father’s story.

I have an ever-growing list of stories I want to write about if there was to ever to be a volume two of Stitching Freedom. There’s so much to say!

Because you have done so much work on embroidery created under constraint, do you have any thoughts about enforced clothing (like uniforms) and how these can affect their wearers identity?

I like seeing how people bend rules of dress when dealing with enforced clothing, and whether the authorities around them notice or care. The relationship between rules and discipline when it comes to this sort of thing are so varied and individual. I wore uniforms throughout some of my schooling in the US and it was interesting to see which teachers cared and what they cared about.

I think about this with people like Ray Materson.

Did the prison guards notice that he was unravelling socks and cutting up underpants, and did they care (probably not, as why would they?)? Did they start to care when all of a sudden people in the prison were rocking Ray Materson’s hand stitched sports logos? At what point, if any, were they like ‘Hey! No!’?

I think the scope for sartorial freedom under enforcement depends on a lot of factors and it means that individuals can have their identities affected, but can also affect their own identities in a whole slew of ways.

When did you begin to study embroidery and incarceration, was there some kind of thread (no pun intended) from other research you had been doing, or did you just stumble across it out of the blue?

People ask me this all the time and I embarrassingly can’t remember because it happened during the first Covid lockdown and so many of my memories from that time are incomplete or blurry.

I had learned about Agnes Richter and Arthur Bispo do Rosario in a class in my final year of university, on the history of collecting, and I was really drawn to their stories.

I think it was that during that lockdown I was thinking about feeling trapped and out of control and my mind went to people who embroider during times of chaos and in hugely limited circumstances. I started looking up things like ‘embroidery prison’ and ‘embroidery incarceration’ and a whole new world opened up to me.

If you had 5 minutes to convince someone that crafts like embroidery and sewing matter, what would you say to them?

Oh gosh, that’s a big ask. This is going to be an illogical and far too cursory ramble, but here we go.

I would start by saying that part of embroidery and sewing’s power lies in its universality, that across history it’s been the work of all genders, races, classes, religions, socioeconomic statuses, etc.

Yes, the nice old white ladies most people think of when they think of embroidery are an important part of embroidery’s history but they are far from the only people who have embroidered or sewn.

If you want to find individuals not often found in the written archive because of their gender, race, or class, look to embroidery and you can find their stories. People have clung to embroidery in all sorts of circumstances so if you want to understand the huge range of human experience across space and time, studying embroidery is a good way of doing that.

Could you can name one modern system, technique or resource that you think is amazing, and one that you think is an absolute failure?

I think online second-hand resources for clothing, like Vinted, are amazing. I spend all my life on there and basically never buy new, full priced items anymore (with the exception of things like underwear and socks). It is great to see how apps like that are helping make textile reuse and exchange more commonplace again.

This is probably the least hot take I could say but fast fashion, basically everything from H&M to Shein, is a disgrace. Not only is it hugely wasteful and actively contributing to the climate crisis, it is so, so far away from how humans have engaged with textiles for basically all of history.

In the past, textiles were extremely expensive because of the amount of labour involved in their production, and that expense meant that they were used and reused until they literally fell apart and then even when that happened they were still used.

Humans have historically cared deeply about and for their textiles and were expected to give them as long lives as possible.

Now we live in a world where textiles are treated as extremely disposable. I find it pretty distressing. I understand that fast fashion has made fashionable clothing accessible to all, which has not always historically been the case, but at what cost!!

Finally, is there anything you learnt from these historical figures about finding your own freedom, maybe a craft that you dedicate time to or a certain freedom that you relish in enjoying?

These stories have given me an appreciation of my own freedom, of course, but it’s also given me an appreciation of two sides of the same coin: how privileged I am to be able to get almost any embroidery supplies I want for my own practice without having to go to extreme lengths to get it, and how smart and creative people can get when the need to create outweighs access to materials.

A lot of these pieces of incarceration stitching have made me feel less precious about all of my own embroidery needing to be perfect. If Mary, Queen of Scots didn’t need to have all of her cross stitches facing the same way, then neither do I.

You may not consider something so ‘simple’ as embroidery as having it’s own history, its own stories and it’s own complexities. But Isabella’s research gently unpicks the complicated threads that bind people, fabric, and what makes us human.

Resilience, rebellion, reclamation, even escapism can all be traced through what we have worn, stitched and decorated.

Pick up a copy of ‘Stitching Freedom’ to read a collection of stitching stories discovered by Isabella, (google the title and her name and it’ll come up) or head onto spotify and listen to ‘Sew What?’ to hear more conversations around embroidery, sewing and the beautiful tangibility of human history.