Selene States’ practice-based research into the radical history of women wearing—and making— the trousers revolves around a creative practice using home sewing patterns from the interwar period to explore modernist designs for everyday dress. Her work re-making historical patterns serves as a functional exploration of vernacular creativity and everyday craft, stretching the remit of the original avant-garde pattern blueprints to create a contemporary collection that celebrates the legacy of radical women makers and the scope and limits of their international influence and trade in forms and materials.

1. This reconstructed 1920s lounging pajama layers Bauhaus textiles, the history of readymades, and the reproduction and appropriation of forms to critique gendered hierarchies of art and craft, exposing erased female authorship within the design history canon. The scarves “appropriated” to make the “authentic” 1920s pajama pattern were themselves an appropriation by Collier & Campbell for Liberty of London of Bauhaus Weaving Workshop Master Gunta Stölzl’s 1927 masterpiece, Slit Tapestry Red Green—which became one of the British luxury textile house’s best-selling designs of the 1970s. By conflating this history and patterning transformation over time, the work highlights the erasure and dismissal of women’s authorship in fine art contexts and the exclusion of women at the Bauhaus from prestige disciplines like architecture and fine art.

2. The "jazzy" ensemble is imagined as a ‘dance pajama’ worn on the ballroom floors of the Harlem Renaissance. While modern white swing dancers in Britain imitate this vintage aesthetic, their nostalgic performances "whitewash" the dance, erasing African-American origins. The pajama utilizes an African wax print, or "Dutch Hollondais," a textile that serves as an international symbol of Black pride. It explores the jazzy textile’s history of cultural appropriation and code-switching—in how the garment “passes” both as white—a historical Art Deco design—and black—contemporary streetwear jumpsuit—how the syncopated rhythm of geometric abstraction in Art Deco aesthetics was heavily influenced by Jazz music and the “primitive” African artworks plundered during the colonial era. The work also engages with the print’s hybrid origins along colonial routs and the transatlantic slave triangle, tracing its journey from Indonesian batik traditions to machine-made Dutch factories, and finally to West African markets traded by "Nana Benz" women. By weaving these threads together, the garment examines the entanglement of the textile industry with colonial extractivism and transatlantic slave trade.

3. The “Anni Albers” ensemble interprets historical patterns as a “blank canvas” to bridge interwar design and contemporary sustainability. This two-part work—a silk pajama and a “rainbow” woven wrap—uses natural dyeing and zero-waste cutting to untangle Bauhaus narratives. Embodying the principle that form follows function, the pajama adapts the bias cut to emphasize the body’s anatomical geometries. The colour-harmony wrap translates the “fading” history of the Bauhaus’ design legacy during the Nazi period through a zero-waste pattern from Bauhaus Journal Die Neue Linie. Informed by Paul Klee’s colour harmonies and Anni Alber’s method of building colour into textile structure, the collaboration with Wilde Studios translates a painted structural grid as colour score, guiding the dye production and weaving practice. The use of “fugitive” natural dyes is central to this translation of the past; their tendency to fade over time serves as a metaphor for the shifting historical memory and erasure and displacement of foundational ‘degenerate’ artists of the Bauhaus during the Holocaust.