Exploring, documenting and rethinking menswear across culture, industry and history.
I work with brands, publishers and cultural institutions to give publications a distinctive argument, shape exhibitions and inform decisions about archives and brand history. I draw on 30 years in menswear, from working with Alexander McQueen to directing the Westminster Menswear Archive.
I write bylined essays and book contributions, and develop editorial programmes for brands, retailers and publishers. For Oh My Mosch, Ewen Spencer’s book with MC Bushkin, I wrote The Archive Upstairs, examining how designer clothes became part of jungle and UK garage, and what is lost when garments are preserved without the people and culture that gave them meaning.
I have also written for C.P. Company, Fred Perry, Ten Men, Admiral, Paninaro and The Observer.
I help shape what an exhibition says and bring together the objects needed to support it. For Pioneers of the Material World at the British Textile Biennial, I helped develop a narrative connecting Burnley’s textile history with outdoor clothing, sportswear and streetwear, and arranged loans through my relationships with brands. I was the Biennial’s Associate Curator from 2019 to 2025.
I also advised on the curatorial strategy for Vogue’s Inventing the Runway at Lightroom.
I advise on menswear archives and brand history, establishing what a collection holds, why it matters and how it could be used. The China Design Museum commissioned me to assess the Massimo Osti collection donated by David Chu. My report identified priorities for documentation, preservation and research, giving the museum a specialist basis for decisions about its care and future use.
My research contributions also cover Alexander McQueen’s history as a designer, brand and company.
I came to fashion through making clothes. In the 1990s, I worked with Alexander McQueen before showing my own collections at London Fashion Week. I still start with the garment: how it is made, who wears it and what happens to it afterwards.
I am now Professor of Menswear Systems at the University of Westminster and Director of the Westminster Menswear Archive, which I founded in 2016. The Archive brings designer fashion into the same conversation as workwear, uniforms, sportswear and the clothes people wear every day.
With Dr Danielle Sprecher, I have co-curated Invisible Men and Umbro 100: Sportswear x Fashion, and co-authored Inside the Westminster Menswear Archive. That research, collecting and curatorial work forms part of my role at the University.
Alongside my university work, I write and consult independently for brands, publishers and cultural institutions. From 2019 to 2025, I was also Associate Curator at the British Textile Biennial. My weekly essays on Menswear Systems follow the questions that clothes leave us with: what gets noticed, what gets preserved and who decides what matters. Those questions also inform the research and advice I bring to a commission.
In 2016, Ewen Spencer photographed MC Bushkin in his mother’s North London sitting room. Sunlight seeps through the window, catching the smoke in front of him. MC Bushkin stands in a matching black, red and pink shirt and trousers covered with the repeated face of Felix the Cat. The clothes cover his body with pattern. The room remains recognisably domestic. The photograph appeared in Arena Homme+ as part of Ewen’s original Oh My Mosch..! story. Yet the outfit MC Bushkin is wearing is not Moschino; it is from Iceberg’s History line. Within jungle and UK garage, Mosch came to mean a whole way of dressing, not simply clothes made by Moschino. A conventional archive could correctly identify this outfit as Iceberg and still miss why it belonged in a story called Oh My Mosch..!. A decade later, the same shirt and jeans appear again; yet this time MC Bushkin is no longer inside them. At the Westminster Menswear Archive they were photographed under standardised archival conditions, enabling the outfit to be examined in more detail.
The remains of my fashion career have been stored in my parents’ attic for the last thirty years. Runway garments hanging from the rafters; cardboard boxes full of fashion magazines, press cuttings, show invitations, runway photographs and the detritus of a brief career during London Fashion Week. My dad is 93, so sooner or later the attic has to be cleared. So I started last week. My mum died in 2019. I knew she’d kept press cuttings from my career, and assumed I’d find duplicates of the ones I already had, perhaps in better condition, or a few I might have missed. I wasn’t expecting to find anything particularly important. What I found wasn’t another version of my own archive. It was hers. The first things that struck me as odd were copies of Japanese fashion magazines, including Hi Fashion and SPUR. How had a nurse living in Seaford in the 1990s even known these magazines existed, let alone managed to get hold of copies?
When I started the Westminster Menswear Archive ten years ago in 2016, it was with a very clear purpose. Menswear was systematically underrepresented in fashion collections. It was an absence that, once you see it, you can’t unsee. Go to the Costume Court at the V&A and womenswear far outnumbers the menswear on display. Go to exhibitions and, where there could be menswear, it is often absent. Despite numerous exhibitions on Alexander McQueen, including Savage Beauty at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York and the V&A in London, his menswear has remained absent. The solution to this problem seemed straightforward: establish the Westminster Menswear Archive to address that gap by collecting menswear. Ten years on, however, our understanding of what the real problem was has changed. Menswear was missing from fashion collections, but elsewhere it had been collected in abundance: as military uniform at the National Army Museum; as sportswear at the National Football Museum; and as everyday dress in the London Museum’s social history collection.
MC Bushkin’s clothing archive began when he could afford to keep what he bought. Before then, clothes were sold, exchanged, given away, or lost. What survives in the attic at his mum’s house tells us about his success, but less about the years before it.
This week’s essay, The Archive Upstairs, looks at what this collection preserves and asks how we keep the clothes attached to the people who made them meaningful.
It’s abridged from my contribution to Ewen Spencer’s new book Oh My Mosch which launches today and is published by Friend Editions.
Read the essay through the link in my bio.
