Final Major Project

“Sewn into Scandal”

Sewn Into Scandal is a conceptual costume collection developed as my final major project, set within Mother Clap’s Molly House and inspired by eighteenth-century queer subculture. The project explores how gender, identity, and self-presentation intersect through historical dress, particularly within spaces of secrecy, resistance, and community.

The collection draws on historical figures examined in my dissertation, most notably Princess Seraphina and John Cooper, the gentleman’s valet. Historically, these identities belonged to the same individual. For this project, I separated them into two characters to examine the tension between public and private selves, and how identity is constructed, concealed, or asserted through clothing.

Princess Seraphina’s looks embrace theatricality, visibility, and defiance, while Cooper’s tailoring reflects control, restraint, and technical precision. Together, the two wardrobes form a dialogue between performance and practicality, drawing clear parallels with contemporary queer experience.  The costumes combine period research with deliberate stylistic disruption, incorporating strong colour, exaggerated silhouette, and references to Vivienne Westwood’s approach to historical dress as a site of rebellion rather than reverence. Construction choices were intentional, balancing historical technique with expressive distortion.

This project brought together my interests in tailoring, queer history, and character-led costume design. It marked the point where my practice became fully defined, and where the foundations of Dandy & Rebel began to take shape ~ not as costume, but as a way of applying historical structure and tailoring knowledge to modern bodies that are often excluded from both fashion and tradition.