Historically, needlework tended to flourish in female and feminine spaces — namely, the home. To embroider is to embellish: to create a fantasy world, allowing you momentary freedom. It gave women a voice when they had none.

From the sumptuary laws of Medieval and Renaissance Europe, to our present day understanding of ‘power dressing’, dress codes have been created to promote or preserve authority, status and respect. More recently, this ‘code’ has also come to mean a way of “deciphering” our identity and what we communicate through our clothing. The dress codes likely to emerge from our post-COVID, climate-challenged, digital world will be different from anything we have experienced before, even developing their own form of agency as part of a totally new approach to how we value, use and wear clothing. - Essay by Susan Muncey