To wit: at one point, a model appeared in a swatch-stuffed miniskirt, clutching her chest like Kate Moss on the late designer’s spring/summer 1994 catwalk. This pouting nymphet was just one of Hill’s junkyard characters – an eerily voiceless cast that began life as gestural sketches, and included buccaneers in patchwork pantaloons, sirens draped in toggle-embroidered tulle columns, and anxious anthropomorphs wearing scribbled-on paper bags – inspired by surrealist Claude Cahun’s 1930s book Cancelled Confessions. “There’s a quote I think about a lot – about not sitting in a place of imbalance, but asking how you move forward when the world feels like it’s pulling you down,” Hill says. “It’s that moment where you’re ready to speak, to stand up and express something – and then suddenly, you’re stopped. You freeze.” Buttons served as subtle metaphors. “It’s a symbol of someone trying to present themselves more confidently,” she explains. “But then being shut down or held back.”
And yet perhaps the most impressive thing about this collection – and Hill’s practice in general – is that everything was made from upcycled materials. “I never see something as ‘trash’ because everything has promise,” she told me back in April. “You’ll have no idea where a garment has come from, or how many lives the fabric has already lived, but you believe it’s new when I show it to you.” Hers is a magpie eye, trained in childhood, where she lived among various bric-a-brac her set-designer mum brought home from work. Today, her Hackney studio is just as unruly: walls plastered with sketches, two giant buckets of vintage fabric constantly emptied and replenished. “I’m not trying to convince the industry – or anyone – that my way is better,” she said at the time. “I just want to show there’s another way to see clothing. A different perspective. My perspective.” Soon enough, she’ll be a lodestone of her own.
