In autumn 2011, Melanie Bowles and I launched Born to Be Wild, an experimental textile design workshop at the Victoria and Albert Museum in London, alongside the exhibition Postmodernism: Style and Subversion 1970–1990. Working through our newly established enterprise, The People’s Print, we invited participants to explore the visual language of Postmodernism and collectively create a digitally printed silk swatchbook.
The project brought together nine participants who began as strangers and became collaborators. Through drawing, collage, digital design, discussion and voting, they developed a shared collection of patterns that belonged to the group. The resulting Born to Be Wild Swatchbook was both a beautiful material object and an experiment in collective authorship: a way of transforming the experience of a museum exhibition into something new, personal and enduring.
The People’s Print: Designing Together
Melanie and I founded The People’s Print in 2011 to explore how traditional textile skills and emerging digital technologies might support new forms of participatory design.
Melanie brought considerable expertise in digital textile printing, including her influential book Digital Textile Design, co-authored with Ceri Isaac. My own interests lay in material experimentation, visual culture, teaching and the relationship between making, identity and social experience.
We were both interested in what happened when the design process became more open. Rather than treating participants as consumers of a finished product, we wanted to give them the knowledge, tools and confidence to develop their own designs and contribute to a shared visual identity.
Digital textile printing was particularly exciting because it offered the possibility of producing small quantities of highly individual fabric without the commitments of conventional mass manufacture. Designs could be developed by hand, translated digitally, printed through a specialist bureau and returned to their makers as usable material.
But the technology was only part of our proposition. The more important question was how people might work together to create something that none of them would have made alone.
Born to Be Wild: Postmodernism as a Creative Method
The V&A’s exhibition, curated by Glenn Adamson and Jane Pavitt, explored the extraordinary cultural shifts of the 1970s and 1980s, when artists, architects and designers challenged Modernism’s established conventions.
Postmodernism embraced quotation, contradiction, ornament, historical reference, humour and the mixing of apparently incompatible styles. It was a particularly fertile starting point for our workshops because it encouraged participants to borrow, rearrange and reinvent.
We looked at the exuberant colours and geometries of the Memphis design movement, particularly the work of Nathalie Du Pasquier, alongside the wider visual culture of the period. We also considered British textile collectives such as The Cloth, whose members moved freely between fine art, fashion, graphics and commercial design during the 1980s.
I introduced the cultural and theoretical background, while Melanie developed practical approaches to translating these ideas into printed textiles. Participants experimented with cut paper, drawing, layering, pattern and digital manipulation.
Our working vocabulary included wit, energy, spontaneity, irony and bricolage. The invitation was to be playful, to question established ideas of good taste and to discover unexpected possibilities through combination.
The workshops began at the V&A in October 2011 and continued through further sessions, including work at my Textiles Hub London studio with Alex Flowers and the participating group.
The Swatchbook: Nine People, One Collection
The most ambitious aspect of Born to Be Wild was our decision to create a shared collection rather than nine separate sets of designs.
Participants worked on their own ideas, but also responded to and reworked those of others. Melanie and I devised voting and selection methods that allowed the group to make decisions collectively. Designs moved between individuals, accumulating changes, interpretations and new possibilities.
This required a different understanding of authorship. The value of a design lay not only in its individual origin but in the contributions made throughout the process.
We agreed a model of shared ownership at the outset. Each participant would have access to the group’s digital designs and the possibility of printing and developing them independently in the future.
The selected patterns were digitally printed onto silk satin and assembled into a limited-edition swatchbook. Its pages brought together a wonderfully varied collection of colour, geometry, collage and pattern, yet the designs also possessed a collective character.
Melanie had been interested in the historical tradition of printed textile sample books, including those associated with the Wiener Werkstätte. We wanted to revisit that tradition using contemporary digital methods and a collaborative approach to design.
The resulting book was simultaneously a record of a workshop, a collection of original textiles, a practical design resource and a shared cultural artefact.
What Happens After an Exhibition?
One of the ideas I was exploring at the time was how a museum exhibition might continue to generate meaning after a visitor had left the gallery.
The V&A’s Postmodernism exhibition offered an interpretation of a particular cultural moment. Our workshop invited participants to engage with that interpretation and carry it forward through making.
The resulting swatchbook was not simply a souvenir of the exhibition. It was a new body of work produced in response to it, shaped by the particular people who happened to come together in London in 2011.
Their experiences, tastes and decisions became part of the collection. The book belonged to that group, that place and that moment.
I was interested in the possibility that museum education could become a form of cultural production in its own right. The curatorial narrative did not have to end at the gallery door. It could become the starting point for new artefacts, relationships and creative identities.
This was also an investigation into how groups form. A shared interest in art and design brought strangers together, but the act of making something collectively gave them a more tangible connection.
The swatchbook became a record of that encounter and a resource they could continue to use.
From Swatchbook to Postmodern Play
The project did not end with the printed book.
We developed related digital publications and design exercises, including Postmodern Play, which extended the possibilities of working with Postmodernist imagery and pattern.
These resources allowed designs to move between different forms: from paper collage to digital image, from digital image to printed textile, and from textile to clothing.
Melanie subsequently made a striking blouse using a geometric pattern developed through Postmodern Play. Its overlapping shapes and energetic colours recalled the visual language of Memphis while demonstrating how a playful digital composition could become a wearable object.
I later exhibited the blouse in The Geometrics Volume 1, the exhibition I co-curated with Daisy McMullan at Kingsgate Gallery in London in 2013.
I particularly like this continuation of the project. Something that began with a museum exhibition became a collaborative learning experience, then a digital publication, a garment and finally an exhibited work in another curatorial setting.
Each stage changed the context in which the design was encountered, while preserving something of its original creative history.
Beyond Fast Fashion
Our ambitions for The People’s Print extended beyond the production of attractive patterns.
We were interested in whether participatory design might offer an alternative to some of the habits encouraged by mass consumerism and fast fashion.
If people had a role in designing the things they wore and used, would they feel a stronger attachment to them? Could access to digital tools and print-on-demand production help people make more individual choices? And might shared creative ownership provide a different relationship to fashion from the continual purchase of new products?
We wanted to encourage what we described as emotionally durable design: objects that acquire value through participation, memory and personal investment.
The group’s digital files could be revisited, altered and printed again. Rather than treating a design as a fixed product, we imagined it as a resource that could develop alongside its makers.
There were also possibilities for community enterprise. A group could establish its own visual identity and use that identity to create products, publications or future projects without surrendering its creative agency.
These were ambitious ideas, but they emerged from a very practical and enjoyable process of making together.
Recognition in Mix Magazine
The People’s Print and Born to Be Wild were subsequently featured in Mix, the global colour and trend forecasting magazine.
The article, titled Textiles: The People’s Print, introduced our approach as a combination of traditional and digital processes, participatory design and collective creativity.
It was encouraging to see the work recognised beyond the immediate museum and educational context. The swatchbook offered a tangible demonstration of our methodology, while the publication helped communicate the wider possibilities of co-design.
What interested me most was that the work could be discussed simultaneously as textile design, cultural research, education and an alternative model of production.
Making a Place for Ideas
Looking back, Born to Be Wild represents an important development in my thinking about collective creativity.
The workshop showed how a museum could become the starting point for a new creative community, and how an apparently modest object such as a fabric swatchbook could carry a much larger set of relationships and ideas.
It also anticipated aspects of my later curatorial work at Textiles Hub London, where I became increasingly interested in the conditions that allow artists and makers to exchange knowledge, develop confidence and create work through shared enquiry.
The most rewarding part of Born to Be Wild was not simply the finished collection, although the fabrics were beautiful. It was watching the participants recognise that they could contribute to something larger than their individual efforts, without losing their own creative voices.
The project began with Postmodernism’s enthusiasm for borrowing, remixing and questioning established authority. It ended with a group of people possessing their own collection of designs, the means to develop them and a shared history of making.
That, for me, was the real achievement of The People’s Print: making cultural participation productive, personal and capable of continuing beyond the original event.
Project and Publication Details
Project: Born to Be Wild, The People’s Print, 2011
Venue: Victoria and Albert Museum, London, with additional collaborative sessions at Textiles Hub London
Context: Postmodernism: Style and Subversion 1970–1990, V&A, 2011–2012, curated by Glenn Adamson and Jane Pavitt
Project directors: Dr Emma Neuberg and Melanie Bowles
Participants: Nine workshop participants, with Alex Flowers involved in the collaborative studio sessions
Outcome: Born to Be Wild Swatchbook, 2011 — a limited-edition, collaboratively designed and co-owned collection of digitally printed silk patterns, accompanied by digital resources
Related project: Postmodern Play, digital design publication, 2012
Subsequent exhibition: Melanie Bowles’s Postmodern Play blouse, exhibited by Emma Neuberg in The Geometrics Volume 1, Kingsgate Gallery, London, 2013
Selected press: Mix, “Textiles: The People’s Print”