When Nazanin Zaghari-Ratcliffe returned home to London after six years of arbitrary detention in Iran, she brought back with her a small patchwork cushion. Pieced together from scrap material and made with the single sewing machine available in the prison, it was the product of a communal craft circle.
“It’s something very, very precious to me,” she said. So precious, in fact, that she has worked on a new collaboration between London’s Imperial War Museum (IWM) and the fabric department of Liberty, creating three new prints that explore experience as a prisoner.
Zaghari-Ratcliffe arrived at the launch of the project on Wednesday, wearing a dress she had made only the week before. It was cut from fabric called Passage of Time, a green pattern showcasing nature and the repetition of life when incarcerated, and featuring white doves in flight, Tehran’s rooftops, the moon in different phases and the monotony of the seasons passing, all of which Zaghari-Ratcliffe glimpsed through cracks in her prison cell.
“We used to say, when I was in prison, that they can take away the world you live in, but they can’t take away what’s happening in your mind, your imagination and your creativity. Holding on to that was how we survived.”
It makes me so proud,” she says of the project. It is this idea, creativity as a form of resistance, that sits at the heart of the collaboration. Titled Creativity in Conflict and Confinement, it launches this week at the Imperial War Museum London, and explores the role of craft during war, conflict and incarceration through a series of designs created by Liberty’s in-house studio, each developed with Zaghari-Ratcliffe, who serves as the project’s ambassador.
During her imprisonment, Zaghari-Ratcliffe sewed clothes for her young daughter using the only sewing machine in the prison. Liberty fabrics were familiar to her long before the collaboration – she had accumulated them over the years and managed to have some sent to her. She shared some of the materialpieces with her fellow inmates, while learning various craft skills, such as woodwork and knitting, through a prison rehabilitation programme led by a professional seamstress. “As women, making things and creating things was very important to me,” she said. “You might not have absolute freedom in your movement, but no one can control your imagination.”
The project draws on pieces from the IWM’s collections, which uncover the ways people have turned to craftwork as a means of retaining dignity and surviving. In one IWM display, for example, there is a wooden figure made in 1919 by a disabled ex-soldier at the Lord Roberts Memorial Workshops, where men wounded in the first world war were trained in craft as a way back into work and purpose.
Prof Sir Simon Wessely, an IWM associate, says that the link between craft and resilience is longstanding: “In the face of trauma and confinement, creativity helps restore agency, identity and hope. It has always been a way to process pain and reclaim resilience.”
Against this backdrop, Liberty designers worked with Zaghari-Ratcliffe to create the three new fabrics – as well as Passage of Time there is also Obscured Landscape and Stitch and Community – each reflecting different themes that shaped her confinement. Obscured Landscape layers geometric patterns from the Liberty archive over sketches by the British war artist Anthony Gross. Stitch and Community, the most personal of the set, overlays Liberty florals on various private papers from army generals and prisoners in the IWM collection, and evokes the solidarity Zaghari-Ratcliffe felt with her fellow prisoners.
For Liberty, whose store operated during the second world war, the project is also a return to its own history of creativity under pressure.
The new designs have been enlarged and displayed on vast hanging banners across the museum’s entrance and atrium, where they will remain until February 2026. They also appear in a new retail range available in-store and online, as scarves, ties, pillowcases and other accessories, with each fabric available in four colourways. Meanwhile, 225 metres of the fabric will be donated to the charity Fine Cell Work, which supports people in prison through paid craftwork opportunities, helping them to gain dignity to aid their rehabilitation and reintegration into society.
“These fabrics cover so many elements related to incarceration – the passage of time, hope, resilience – but more than anything else, solidarity,” said Zaghari-Ratcliffe. “You’re collectively enduring this pain and you got through it together.”
• Creativity in Conflict and Confinement is a free exhibition, now at the Imperial War Museum, London, until February.
