Lead Curator, Collective Care, London College of Fashion, UAL, 202

As the curator of Collective Care, Dr Leila Nassereldein developed the exhibition form of Dr Mila Burcikova’s Life in Clothes, a practice-led enquiry into how fashion might be reorganised around the cycles of land rather than the accelerated calendar of the market.

Working closely with Burcikova’s extensive body of garments and photographic documentation, Nassereldein edited the selection and constructed a sequence through the project’s micro-seasons. Naturally dyed clothes made from vintage linen were placed in correspondence with images of the plants, weather, garden labour and changing landscape from which their colours and forms emerged. Organised through the logic of the almanac, the installation allowed each garment to be read not as an isolated object, but as the temporary resolution of a wider material process: cultivation, growth, harvesting, dyeing, making, wearing, rest and renewal.

Nassereldein’s curatorial approach translated Burcikova’s long-term garden-studio practice in France into an embodied exhibition environment. The movement between textiles, botanical colour and large-scale photography made seasonal change spatially perceptible, while revealing the garment as a record of relations between body, soil, climate and labour.

Rather than presenting sustainability as a matter of consumer choice or technical substitution, Life in Clothes proposed a different temporality of production – one shaped by limits, reciprocity and periods of non-production. The exhibition asked what fashion might become when making begins with attention to place, and when care is understood not as sentiment, but as a material practice of maintaining the worlds on which creative life depends.