How One Designer Turned Loss and Nostalgia into a Poetic Final Piece
What happens to a memory when no one is left to share it with you? This was the quiet question at the heart of The Last of the English Rose’s, a final piece that merges fashion with poetry, memory, and decay.
The title came while the designer was sketching — Pete Doherty’s song “The Last of the English Roses” playing softly in the background. “It felt right,” they explain. “The idea of the English rose — timeless, soft, a bit forgotten — is at odds with today’s beauty standards. I saw elegance and innocence in it.”
The project began during a foundation course, where limited resources became creative tools. Deadstock lace, sourced from eBay, became the canvas. Through a labor-intensive manipulation process — peeling, rubbing, eroding — the lace began to shed its surface, mimicking the way memories unravel when left unspoken. “It mirrors the dystopia of memory,” the designer says, “how something once vivid can lose detail over time.”
The silhouette is fluid yet haunting, like a relic being swallowed by nature. Beneath the distressed lace lies boning — a structure that holds form as the rest falls away. This interplay of fragility and strength is no accident. “I wanted the piece to feel poetic, softer than my past works. There’s power in vulnerability,”
The designer spent over 30 hours on this piece, discovering new methods as the hours passed. “I was rubbing the paper backing off the lace with my fingertips at first. It was delicate — I didn’t want to tear anything.” Toward the end, they found a faster way to achieve the effect. Still, every inch of the dress carries the fingerprint of its maker — and the weight of a fading past.
They imagine it styled in a world of its own — among the ruins of British manors, or inside a Tim Walker dreamscape. “It’s part of a bigger story,” they say. “Of crumbling heirlooms, of elegance left behind.”
And that’s what makes The Last of the English Rose’s so arresting — it doesn’t just represent memory. It becomes one.
