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Unpacking the Collection is an ongoing project exploring the creative possibilities contained within the garments and objects held in the Lore Archive collection. Through research, making, collaboration, and experimentation, the project works with makers, writers, and creative practitioners to explore individual pieces from different perspectives and uncover new ways of encountering them and the ideas they contain. The project is as much about where these objects might lead creatively as it is about their histories, allowing new ideas, interpretations, and connections to emerge.

Sacred Plants Vol. 5

May 2025

Sacred Plants is an independent publishing series exploring botany through folklore, art, and activism. We collaboratively researched eight garments and objects in the collection made from plant materials. Through field trips to the Kew Gardens Economic Botany Archive and the Pitt Rivers Museum, we expanded both our historical and material knowledge of these pieces.

Below is an excerpt from our research and here is a link to view it in the shop.

Mid 20th Century Romanian Straw Hat

Tall tapered crown and medium wide plantation brim, trimmed in a matching cord. Made from vegetable fibre, composed of sewn peddle straw.

Presumably worn during festivities that involved dancing, paired with heavily embroidered, traditional clothing.

In Romania, a straw hat’s shape reveals personal details about the wearer: an upward brim for youth, downward for elders, and a wide brim for wealthy landowners.

Japanese Fisherman’s Kimono

Made from recycled indigo-dyed cotton cloth in traditional Japanese Sakiori technique. The piece is made from two woven panels connected along the spine and reinforced around the neck, shoulder and front edge.

Known in Japan as ‘aizome’, indigo dye is so integrated into Japanese society that its deepest shade is often referred to as “Japan blue.” Indigo is said to have been introduced to Japan about 1,500 years ago and is therefore the oldest natural known dye.

Unpacking the Collection Writing Workshop

February 2026

During the Alternative Fashion Week programming at Reference Point, we collaborated with madly awake to facilitate a writing workshop exploring storytelling through objects. Through prompts ranging from stream-of-consciousness writing to word collage, the workshop invited participants to meet the objects through fiction, memory, and the senses.

The workshop activated the objects through research, making, writing, and collective exploration. Participants explored their construction, materials, histories, and lived use, following unexpected connections and ideas through writing and discussion. The emphasis was on process and on what could emerge through encountering the objects.

LORE

Story as a female technology;
call it gossip, a glance across the fence,
the landlord’s high hat, walking
under a line of trees that trace a wheat horizon.

From all appearances the Ceiba tree
is a portal to the underworld,
where the ground is, I guess, the sky,
and tufts of fibre make clouds.

This is the providence of story;
garments woven from the water of words,
mouth to mouth; second, third, fourth hand stories,
sewn to the pattern of a name; to wear, adorn, adore.

& what shifts in the light when a story turns to fact;
Does it harden in the soles of shoes?
Does it walk from village to town in a stitch line
of footsteps? Use tires to keep the feet from tiring?
She stops to take a stone from her heel,
chatting a cobbled language along the road.

What is the function of story;
The perfect machinery of time, offers line on line
of borrowed offcuts. The clasp shuts
on the face of (let’s call him); Red Victorian Man.
His smudged portrait, truer than resemblance.

How little we know of story;
Let’s pass them between hands,
disperse the traces of gossip and labour.

What will be left in the wardrobe when tomorrow
comes to shop. Old skins hung in quiet rows.
To make and unmake a life.

For now let’s jump from the boat
and if this life-vest floats, let’s take the salt home
in our mouths, speak to our sons of how the river cried,
before we were carried away.

Bianca Pina

Port Magazine Writers Residency

July 2026

Port Magazine approached us to contribute to their writer residency program. We collaborated by inviting their resident writers to unpack archival pieces through words, resulting in a collection of poetry and short stories.

Rather than treating the archive as a static resource, this partnership allowed residents to treat our collection as a dynamic narrative tool. Through workshops and close material encounters, the writers used our pieces as creative catalysts to bridge the gap between material culture and the written word.

Collecting Memory Volume (01)

Text from publisher, madly awake’s website

Collecting Memory is a publication that explores this relationship between object and memory in an investigation of what it means to archive – and remember – today.

Editor Molly Maltman visits six artists and practitioners traversing fashion, publishing and art to enquire what they recognised as emblems of their memory. Volume (1) contains the memories of Elise By Olsen, director of the International Library of Fashion Research; Yusuf Hassan, founder of BlackMass Publishing; Dal Chodha, writer and Editor-in-chief of Archivist Addendum; John Foley, one half of organic perfumery S/JF Narrative; Sophie Eleanor Turner, artist and founder of Lore Archive; and finally, Celeste Burgoyne, the performance artist and poet whose words are weaved throughout the entirety of Collecting Memory.

Blurring the line between individual and collective memory, truth and fiction, the publication also features a selection of archival black and white film images that were originally obtained from a house clearance. In unearthing this collection of photographs, Maltman attempted to piece together an understanding of the person behind the lens all those years ago.

Preserving the memories of its contributors, including those of the unknown photographer whose collection Maltman discovered, Collecting Memory becomes a repository of sorts but one that isn’t necessarily fixed or final. Like the memories it contains – which in their very nature will be forgotten, remembered and forgotten once again – the publication will evolve. With each engagement, new memories are conceived.

AUTOFOTO

June 2026

Student Sessions

Ongoing

Drawings by Jin Liang from Central Saint Martins

© 2026 Lore Archive