John Smedley 240th Anniversary: wall
to wearable

Unveiled at London Craft Week 2024, this collaboration celebrates the legacy and longevity that defines John Smedley. Founded in 1784 at Lea Mills in the Derbyshire Dales, John Smedley holds the world's largest knitwear archive: over 10,000 items spanning nearly two and a half centuries of craft. With the joyful task of illustrating the brand's past and present, I revelled in depicting 240 years of innovation and craftsmanship.

The Mural

My brief was to create a fantasy landscape that captured the feel of the Derbyshire Dales. Gently rolling hills and rivers provide the setting for Lea Mills, the home of John Smedley. But first impressions are deceiving, and as you look closer you notice odd patterns, quirky details, and strange landforms.

My first visit to the mill left me with a heartfelt appreciation for the familial legacy interwoven within the fabric of the John Smedley brand. To reflect this, I interweaved recognisable references like merino sheep and sea island cotton plants with more obscure ones that only staff at the factory might recognise. The distant drum rolling down a hill is the one once used by the mill's brass band. The long johns on the line are those John Smedley is credited with having invented. Along with the spinning wheel, these are items I spotted in the archive among those 10,000 pieces that make it the biggest knitwear archive in the world.

This is how I think about heritage commissions. The surface reads as landscape; underneath, it functions as a portrait of the client.

Wall to Wearable

What I find genuinely thrilling about this project is what happened next. The mural did not stay on the wall. Working with the John Smedley team, the composition was deconstructed and translated into a limited-edition silk scarf and a luxury knitwear collection. I think of a large scenic mural as a toolbox of brushwork: distinct marks, colour fields, and character details that can be lifted, rearranged, and remoulded for a different surface entirely.

On a wall, everything is fixed and frontal. On a silk scarf, the landscape becomes a series of snapshots, peering out from pleats, or emerging upside-down from a fold. The artwork acquires movement, and through that movement, a new life. There is something profound about a painted world that curves and folds on the human body. It no longer belongs to the room. It belongs to the person wearing it.

The John Smedley collaboration confirmed something I have long believed: the most compelling fashion and textile partnerships begin not with a brief for a print, but with a conversation about a place, a history, and a world worth inhabiting. Seeing the landscape travel from wall to scarf was one of the more unexpected pleasures of recent years. I am particularly drawn to collaborations in the fashion and textile world, whether the brief leans towards heritage and craft or something more contemporary and unexpected.

If you are a brand with a story to tell that leaps beyond paper, I would love to hear from you.