Former detainee Nazanin Zaghari-Ratcliffe has launched a fabric collection with London department store Liberty that reflects the remarkable ways that people in detention respond to their experience.
Ms Zaghari-Ratcliffe, who was held for six years in Iran’s Evin Prison before being released, has spoken about how she and other detained women turned to crafts such as embroidery and wood cuts to pass the time. She made clothes for her young daughter while in prison, including one with a Liberty print.
Ms Zaghari-Ratcliffe's story inspired designers at Liberty to create the new collection, working closely with her and art historian Ester Coen. The fabric prints reference art created by people detained during wars and war artists from the Imperial War Museum's collection.
Among the fabric designs is one called Stitch and Community, which layers handwritten notes on stained paper with floral patterns and doodling.
It is inspired by the embroidered bed sheet of Daisy Sage, who was held by the Japanese in an internment camp in Hong Kong for two years during the Second World War. More than 1,000 names, signs and figures appear, sometimes in code, on her sheet, serving as her camp diary.
“Embroidery, sewing, stitching were therapeutic. It created a space in prison for people to forget about where they were,” Ms Radcliffe said in a video about the project shared on social media.
A second print is The Passage of Time, which illustrates the changing seasons as they would be seen by a jailed person looking out from the same window for a long time. It shows a building complex buried behind thick trees and foliage, with alternating crescent, half and full moons. Birds also fly past in changing patterns.
“When someone is confined, they will have access to very limited elements to understand the passage of time,” Ms Zaghari-Ratcliffe said. “The cycle of the moon here is an indication of how on certain seasons you can see the full moon from the crack of a window,” she said.
Birds are a recurring motif in the Imperial War Museum’s archive of artworks produced by detainees and prisoners of war, and Ms Zaghari-Ratcliffe acknowledged them as a “classic symbol of freedom”.
A third design, Obscured Landscape shows moonlike circles with light and shadow lines crossing into each other in a style reminiscent of etching. The simple design has been printed on three colours, two shades of purple and green.
“To me this shows the two different worlds that someone who is in captivity lives in,” she said.
Within them, are additional lines which capture the style of war artist Anthony Gross, who chronicled the British Army’s campaigns in the Middle East and South-east Asia during the Second World War. Some of his most famous works are of the Normandy D-Day landings.
The Liberty department store near Oxford Street is known for its bespoke block print fabrics with ornate floral patterns. It has championed English designers, including those of the Arts and Crafts movement of the 1890s, and continues to showcase emerging talent.
Art historian Ms Coen, who was also involved in the design and initiated the project, is an expert on Italian futurism and the European avant garde – movements that were fuelled by the political build-up to devastating wars in Europe and eventually destroyed by fascist regimes that took over.
Negotiations
Pressure is mounting on the UK government to significantly reform its handling of negotiations related to hostages or detainees.
Two British nationals, Lindsay and Craig Foreman, are currently detained in Iran. Ms Foreman's son, Joe Bennett, has been outspoken about his frustration at the little information he receives from the Iranian and British authorities.
Former prisoner Nasrin Roshan, a British-Iranian who was released from Evin earlier this year, told The National of her mental and physical struggles after her incarceration, and her quest to have the voices of Iranian women political prisoners heard.
The UK's Foreign Commonwealth and Development Office has been repeatedly criticised for its inability to secure a prompt release of UK nationals, with critics drawing on Ms Zaghari-Ratcliffe's case. A new dramatisation of her detention and the British government's failures to have her released was broadcast in November, and her book, A Yard of Sky, will be released in 2026.
The first UK special envoy for hostages is expected to be appointed soon, to negotiate releases and serve as a point of contact between the government and families.
A curated “trail” of artworks created by inmates detained during wars around the world will also be presented at the Imperial War Museum in tandem.
They include a miniature cello, carved by Klara Rakos as a present for her fellow Ravensbrück Concentration Camp inmate, Eva Hamburger, for her 21st birthday. The cello was a reminder of Eva’s life in Budapest and her dream of becoming a cellist, like her mother. After liberation, Eva was unable to fulfil her ambition due to injuries she had sustained during internment.
It also includes a dress made from mosquito netting in a Japanese prisoner of war camp, worn by Gunner Charles Woodhams during one of the musical revues he produced and staged in multiple camps along the infamous Burma-Thailand Railway.
Ms Zaghari-Ratcliffe said that developing the project helped “release” some of the trauma she experienced in Evin. “(It) transformed by my long-carried memories of imprisonment into something tangible and vivid,” she said.
“Watching the gradual development of the resulting designs raised mixed feelings of confrontation and release, a recognition of the pain, resilience, and the subtle beauty that can emerge from even the darkest of experiences.”
