Emmanuella Mensah- BA (Hons) Fashion
Through My Eyes
I've made it more fluid, personal, and aligned with the Culture & Heritage Award while retaining your key concepts:
My project explores culture and heritage through identity, migration, and lived experience, examining how fashion can preserve memory and cultural narratives. Drawing from my parents’ photo albums from the early 2000s during their time living in the Netherlands as immigrants, the work reflects on cultural assimilation, hybrid identity, and the role of archives in preserving stories that are often overlooked. As a first-generation immigrant, photography became a bridge between cultures, connecting me to experiences of belonging, resilience, and adaptation.
Alongside this personal narrative, the project is informed by historical and contextual research into the overlooked history of Black cowboys and their contribution to Western culture. By bringing these narratives together, the work highlights how underrepresented communities use storytelling, image making, and craftsmanship as forms of cultural preservation.
A central concept within the project is “Survival Craft,” a term I developed to describe the resourceful forms of making that exist within immigrant communities. Inspired by my mother’s work as a freelance designer, the collection celebrates craftsmanship not only as a creative practice, but as a means of survival and resilience.
By combining archival references with contemporary design, the project explores cultural hybridisation and the evolving nature of identity. It proposes a future for fashion that values heritage, craftsmanship, and diverse perspectives, therefore demonstrating how personal histories can inform more inclusive and meaningful fashion narratives.
