Stitching Her Way To Slow Fashion: In Conversation With South-London Teen Seamstress, Flora Macfarlane
- Gioia Birt
- 8 hours ago
- 5 min read
From Primary school to Punk, STRAND follows the thread of the South-East London student seamstress who’s taking slow fashion into her own hands with the help of her sewing machine and seventies-style spirit.
Microtrends, microskirts, mini shirts, mass production, mass destruction, overconsumption, overcompensate, overcomplicate, overdone, overload… are you exhausted yet?
In our current fashion climate, it feels like we’re entrenched in a gale-force storm of trends and information, not to mention the vast ecological disaster resulting from the fast-fashion industry. Globally, the fast fashion industry produces around 92 million tonnes of textile waste per year. But there’s one teen in South East London holding up an umbrella to this textile tempest: My good friend, Flora Macfarlane. Her mantra? ‘Clothes are meant to be worn’. Rather than getting caught up in the throw-away garment gale, she stands firm in her personal style and ethical choices by making her very own clothes by hand. STRAND had the pleasure of sitting down with Flora to discuss how and why she makes her own clothes. What’s more, she unveils what inspires her creatively and why this hobby is so beneficial to both her personal style and the environment.
Sewing your own clothes - what could go wrong? Women have been doing it since prehistoric times, using thread from animal parts to sew fur and leather for simple garments. In this day and age, making your own clothing is certainly not as easy as it sounds. In fact, the process requires lengths of resilience and maybe even a thread of luck. Flora says making her own clothes was ‘always something [she] wanted to do’, but it just kept going wrong, leaving her in ‘floods of tears’, until ‘one miraculous time’ when her sewing machine managed to stay intact as she made her first garment.
In the past five months, Flora’s love for sewing clothes has soared, having tapped into the world of punk icons like Vivienne Westwood. For Flora, Westwood’s individualism, activism, desire to push back on societal norms and do-it-yourself attitude was entirely compelling and attractive.
But before the days of her present-punk passion, Flora recalls her early projects as a pre-primary student who would make dresses out of bedsheets and jewellery from her mum’s old necklaces. One of her bedsheet ballgowns even made it into a pre-primary sports lesson - Flora says in between laughs that ‘I wore it in PE’. Perhaps it is this playful and quietly confident attitude towards her creativity that sustains her garment-making journey now. She speaks very casually and relaxedly about her sewing - for Flora, it’s a hobby and a pastime, an unpressurised and organic process. This is something that certainly could not be said for the rest of the 21st-century fashion industry - trends are cycling quicker than we can compute in an age of hyper-fast fashion.
From sourcing her materials to producing the garments themselves, Flora embraces the ‘slow’ in slow fashion. She takes time not only to venture out to fabric stores in a variety of locations from Peckham to Paris, but also to carefully peruse and enjoy the process of buying her fabrics. She calls it ‘such a fun experience’, going to ‘an old one’ that’s ‘properly run’. There’s something very mindful and present about her approach to even the acquisition of her materials - she exclaims, ‘It’s just so beautiful going down these halls of rolls and rolls of fabric.’ Flora also specifically gives the fabric stores in Monmatre, Paris and ‘Shufflebottoms’ in Cheshire her stamp of approval, adding she is ‘very sensitive to nice material’.
But you don’t necessarily need to go out and buy yards of gingham if you are keen on grafting your own garb. On the more affordable end, Flora tells of old clothes, a dustsheet in her dad’s house and second-hand clothing stores as some sources she’s tapped into in the recent past. She particularly likes using old t-shirts from charity shops to make going-out tops. She cites these as great for wearing to the club, where they may experience unusual wear and tear. She plainly states, ‘I can just get use out of them’, acknowledging that second-hand fabric may have a shorter life span than new fabric, but that re-using it is better than sitting in a landfill. Flora realises that ‘Making your own clothes is kind of a luxury nowadays, you can’t buy good materials for cheap’, and so finds balance in making some garments from charity shop finds and others with good-quality, carefully-chosen fabric from a ‘proper proper’ fabric store.
After tirelessly and lovingly picking materials, Flora makes her way to her sewing machine. Her corner of choice is her room — ‘When sewing something for yourself, you need to keep trying it on… I couldn’t exactly be like, naked in my kitchen trying on the clothes'. What Flora’s dryly comical yet blunt comment on her working space reveals is another benefit to making one’s own clothes — the controlled, iterative and tailor-made abilities afforded by being able to continually try on the piece you’re working on. Flora has even developed something of a clothing maker’s sixth sense - she says, ‘Usually I can tell the second I start working on something, if it’s going to work out or not’ and if it looks like it will work out, ‘I’ll want to finish it that day’. Making clothes is thus not only a practical and ecological step in building a dream wardrobe but also a creative opportunity to get into the ‘flow’ state, something that seems to be on the rapid decline in an age of dopamine-chasing doomscrolling.
Ironically, the actual fabrication of the clothes seems the simplest step yet for Flora. She follows pre-made patterns and YouTube tutorials to guide her garment-making. From these guidelines, she lets her creativity take the wheel and may add tweaks to the designs as she goes along, like embroidery or other detailing. A classic example of where she’s exercised this can be seen in her blue and white stripy trousers. After following a traditional pattern for wide-leg trousers, she added a charming, singular circular pocket on the back. She also adapted the design as she went along, telling me, ‘I didn’t have enough material, so I did the bum horizontal, but it works’. You may be wondering what gorgeous fabric these trousers are made from. Flora’s answer tells all: ‘I was at my dad’s and he had this material… a dustsheet over some boxes and I was like “I really like that, can I make some trousers out of that?”’
Along with these iconic bottoms, Flora tells me about her favourite pieces she’s made. The forerunner was her long red plaid skirt. She says ‘it goes with everything’ and ‘you can wear it in all seasons’. The next is a blue off-the-shoulder top (cover photo), which she says is ‘perfect for the clerb’. Another unique and exciting make of hers is a top that uses bobby pins as fringe - inspired by club-culture icon and fashion-designer Leigh Bowery and his use of bobby pins as fringe on a jacket.
On top of icons like Bowery and Westwood, Flora’s creative spark draws her to exhibitions like the Billy Barry exhibition at the Tate and ‘Outlaws’ in the Fashion and Textile Museum in Bermondsey. These punk and post-punk influences shimmer in threads through her garments, both in her grounded manner of producing them and the electric way she wears and styles them.
From materials to making-to-measure, Flora chooses a mindful yet mellow approach to making clothes. Whether budget or bespoke, she ecologically embodies the influences of the Westwood-punk era, manifesting a timeless triumph in slow fashion.
Photos Courtesy of Flora MacFarlane
Written by Gioia Birt
Edited by Arielle Sam-Alao and Abbey Villasis, Fashion Editors
