Stella Buckingham
ba (hons) Hand embroidery
Royal School of Needlework
Specialisms: Embroidery / Textiles for Fashion / Fashion Illustration
Location: Kingston, United Kingdom
Stella Buckingham
First Name: Stella
Last Name: Buckingham
Specialisms: Embroidery / Textiles for Fashion / Fashion Illustration
Sectors:
My Location: Kingston, United Kingdom
University / College: Royal School of Needlework
Course / Program Title: ba (hons) Hand embroidery
About
Specialising in intricate hand embroidery embedded with meaning, Stella Buckingham is endeavouring to elevate preconceptions of sustainable materials through couture techniques.
As a graduate of the Royal School of Needlework, Stella values traditional heritage craftsmanship, often using goldwork, raisedwork and tambour embroidery. She adopts these to create thoughtful collections supported by extensive historical and cultural research, reflecting an interest in the wider social impacts of fashion and textiles. This manifests itself in her exploration of unconventional, often overlooked, materials, such as metal packaging, vintage fabrics, and her recent use of wheat straw.
Her practice currently sits at a turning point, exacerbated by an awareness of the need for environmental change in the fashion industry. Inspired by her family's farming roots, the global Fibreshed movement and designers like Alice V Robinson and Phoebe English, she is pursuing a deeper level of sustainability within her work. She is aiming for a practice which reimagines established fashion methods by connecting with material origins and focusing on conscious details. A significant element of her philosophy lies in the continual gathering of knowledge, through both physical materials and conceptual writings. At the core of her ethos is the theory and hope that creative expression and sustainability should not be sacrificed one for the other.
Stella's practice has been influenced by her experience working on straw embroidery for artist Claire de Waard, and behind the scenes at London Fashion Week for Erdem. Her work has also been exhibited at Lock & Co. Hatters, London.
The day passes languidly in the meadow and the golden field. Meandering stems of hops, heavy with flowers, grow amongst the dilapidated barns of brick and corrugated iron. A breeze carries the notes of the skylark. The cows come home. A romanticised, nostalgic evocation of the countryside was the vision for hand embroiderer Stella's fashion collection 'Rural Idyll'. Descended from a long line of farmers, she drew from emotional ties to the lifestyle and her imagination was captured by the link between lacemaking and agriculture in her family. It was this unlikely combination of delicacy and practicality that inspired her theme, which reinterprets the frivolity of 18th Century pastoral fantasy with the grounding of a personal perspective. The result comprises of British wool outerwear, soft, lacy dresses and woven basket bags. Central to the work is a jacket inspired by a farmer's smock, garlanded in stylised hop flowers. A subtle gradient of white lace to straw embroidery flows down the garment through individually wired petals and intertwining stems. Dripping with glass seed beads and pearls, raisedwork and tambour techniques elevate natural and repurposed materials. Included in the embroidery, alongside jute cordage, plied straw thread and raffia, are wheat stalks she collected directly from the field, providing a tangible link to the landscape that influenced her. An ever-developing awareness and pursual of sustainable practices accompanies Stella's work, and this piece begins a partnership of couture fashion embroidery with materials that trace to the land. By pairing the jacket with dresses of delicately degrading field patterns and reimagined lace, a neglected craft, there is an underlying commentary on the loss of the rural idyll. The collection acts as an ode to a forgotten age, perhaps one which never truly existed, the arcadian escape from a modernising world.
Competitions
