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I wanted to explore the idea of how a culture can be collected, preserved, and remembered through visual artifacts.
I built a fictional Moroccan postal archive where each stamp acts like a small piece of a much larger story.
The five pieces are connected as one collection, moving through different parts of Moroccan life — from royal ceremony and marketplaces to music, interiors, clothing, and identity.
I wanted the collection to feel like something you could discover, rather than just look at.
So I turned the archive into an interactive magazine, where each piece opens up into its own little story, showing the original Met artwork, my reimagination, and the thinking behind it.
The whole thing is built around the idea of collecting fragments and bringing them together into one archive.
A collection that never existed, but could have.
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I went into The Met's open access archive looking for a textile. I found the pattern I wanted on a suit of armour instead.
Greenwich, 1586. George Clifford was Queen's Champion to Elizabeth I, and his garniture is etched and gilded with her cipher, two E's back to back, repeated across every plate from helmet to sabaton without a break. Not a badge on the chest. A repeat running over an entire body, worn by royal licence, three hundred years before any house put its initials on a bag.
So I took it off the steel and put it back on a body.
RUNNING CIPHER is one woven matrix and eight streetwear pieces cut from it, shot on Yorkshire moorland in winter with the sun never higher than eighteen degrees above the horizon. My first matrix was wrong: I kept the cipher at armour scale and it collapsed into generic damask. Enlarging it four times was what made it read as a garment print instead of wallpaper. That failed version is still sitting on the canvas next to the one that worked.
The casting carries the argument. Clifford's only child, Anne, was written out of the inheritance when her father left the northern estates to his brother. She spent thirty-eight years in court, won in 1643, and rebuilt the castles herself. The mark he borrowed from a queen is now worn by the women who took the land back.
Everything is on the canvas: the Met plates that fed the matrix, every rejected generation, the casting tests, the frames that did not make it.
Original work: https://www.metmuseum.org/art/collection/search/23939
Armor Garniture of George Clifford, Third Earl of Cumberland. Jacob Halder, royal
workshops at Greenwich, 1586. The Metropolitan Museum of Art, 32.130.6a–y. Open Access.
@floraai #FLORAMuseum
this is such a unique concept!
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Happy curating! 🌸
"The Latest Fashions, Expressly Designed and Prepared for Le Moniteur de la Mode"
THE CORE IDEA: "TIME" AS THE VARIABLE
My reimagining doesn't change the idea of the piece, it changes the century. Same two women. Same gestures, same silhouette-language of the bustle dresses translated into 2125 couture.
This project takes Jules David's 1887 fashion plate, a candid, staged moment for Le Moniteur de la Mode, and asks what that same magazine would be staging in the year 2137. The two women keep their exact poses, their exact positions, the fan and parasol raised at the same angles, even the same masthead and caption text but everything they wear and everything around them has been carried forward two and a half centuries: a fitted liquid-lamé gown standing in for Victorian tailoring, a ruby-beaded illusion gown in place of polka-dot silk, a modern folding fan and a transparent bubble umbrella replacing their antique counterparts.
Pulling the frame back reveals the world this future fashion actually lives in a Champ de Mars where the Eiffel Tower can be seen, "the soul of Paris", its ironwork intact but laced with soft bioluminescent light, overlooking a Paris that has evolved rather than been replaced.
And finally, the piece imagines the artwork's own origin: a behind-the-scenes glimpse of a future Jules David, seated at his easel on that same terrace, the canvas still half-finished, painting these two women as they hold their pose for him showing not just the reimagined fashion plate, but the living moment it might have been made from.
Link to original "The Met Art": https://www.metmuseum.org/art/collection/search/919442
I love it Tom!! 🚀
