An Interview with Artist Claire Barrow on Why She’s No Longer a Fashion Designer
The fashion industry spotlight found Claire Barrow in the final years of her BA in fashion at the University of Westminster in London. It was the start of the 2010s, the beginning of an era in which fashion became very online. Rihanna’s stylist at the time, Mel Ottenberg, spotted Barrow’s work on Tumblr and snagged a customized leather jacket, which can be seen in promo photos for Talk That Talk. Stylists for editorials in Vogue and Dazed sought pieces from the Yorkshire-born talent before she graduated. Despite her London Fashion Week debut with Fashion East, courtesy of Lulu Kennedy, Barrow was hesitant to let the industry’s attention define her creative practice: “Ultimately, I feel that the six-month seasonal fashion system just wasn’t working for me and I needed to get out of it fully to submit to my creative potential. For a while, I thought that because I loved style and clothes, my medium should be purely fashion collections,” she explains. “But I’ve realized that not everything can be said with clothing.”
More recently, Barrow has managed to channel the popularity of her fashion week debut into sustaining a practice that sits closer to visual art, with paintings and sculptures released according to her own rhythm. Sometimes her intuition leads her to create screen-printed garments—her iconic hoodies, for example—sometimes to the digital sphere, like her rogue 3D-mystery website. Sometimes she makes artwork with Bladee, of Drain Gang. Most recently, she finds her expression in the sculptures and paintings in fabric, clay, pigment, and sand, like her recently exhibited solo show, Victim of Cosmetics, hosted in an abandoned office building in London.
