Bold claim: Imagination and creativity endure even behind bars, and that resilience can outlast confinement. But here’s where it gets controversial: does art really empower those who are detained, or is it just a temporary escape that masks deeper systemic harms? Nazanin Zaghari-Ratcliffe’s story stretches beyond personal survival into a broader debate about craft as resistance.
Upon returning to London after six years of arbitrary detention in Iran, Zaghari-Ratcliffe brought home a humble patchwork cushion. Made from scrap fabrics on a solitary sewing machine in prison, it emerged from a communal craft circle and became a symbol of inner life persisting under pressure. That small artifact now inspires a larger collaboration between London’s Imperial War Museum (IWM) and Liberty’s fabric department. Together, they produced three new prints that explore what it means to experience imprisonment, not just physically but mentally and emotionally.
At the project launch, Zaghari-Ratcliffe arrived wearing a dress crafted in the week prior. The fabric, Passage of Time, depicts nature and the cycle of life in imprisonment: white doves, Tehran’s rooftops, the moon’s phases, and the unending cadence of the seasons—images seen through the gaps of a prison cell. “We used to say in prison that the world you live in can be taken away, but not the world inside your mind—your imagination and your creativity,” she recalls. Holding onto that belief helped many endure.
This conviction sits at the core of Creativity in Conflict and Confinement, a collaboration launching at the IWM London. The project examines craft’s role during war, conflict, and incarceration, presenting designs created by Liberty’s in-house studio in collaboration with Zaghari-Ratcliffe, who serves as ambassador. The initiative foregrounds creativity as a meaningful form of resistance and self-definition amid oppression.
During imprisonment, Zaghari-Ratcliffe sewed clothes for her daughter with the prison’s sole sewing machine. She already had familiarity with Liberty fabrics, having collected pieces long before the collaboration, and managed to have some sent to her. She also shared fabrics with fellow inmates and learned additional skills—woodworking and knitting—through a prison rehabilitation program led by a professional seamstress. “As women, making and creating things was crucial,” she notes. “Even if freedom of movement is restricted, imagination remains unbounded.”
The exhibition draws on items from IWM’s collections to illustrate how people turn to craft to preserve dignity and endure hardship. For example, one display features a wooden figure made in 1919 by a wounded ex-soldier at the Lord Roberts Memorial Workshops, where craft work helped reintegrate veterans into work and purpose.
Professor Sir Simon Wessely, an IWM associate, emphasizes the long-standing link between craft and resilience: “Creativity helps restore agency, identity, and hope in the face of trauma and confinement. It has consistently been a way to process pain and reclaim resilience.”
Liberty designers collaborated with Zaghari-Ratcliffe to develop three fabrics—Passage of Time, Obscured Landscape, and Stitch and Community—each echoing different facets of her confinement. Obscured Landscape layers geometric Liberty motifs over sketches by British war artist Anthony Gross. Stitch and Community, the most personal of the set, overlays Liberty florals on private papers from army generals and prisoners in the IWM collection, capturing the solidarity she felt with fellow inmates.
For Liberty, a brand with a storied wartime history, the project also represents a return to its own heritage of creativity under pressure. The designs have been enlarged to hang as banners in the museum’s entrance and atrium through February 2026 and are also launched as a retail line, available in-store and online as scarves, ties, pillowcases, and other accessories—each fabric offered in four colorways. Additionally, 225 meters of fabric will be donated to Fine Cell Work, a charity that provides paid craft opportunities to people in prison to support dignity and rehabilitation.
Zaghari-Ratcliffe reflects on the collection’s scope: these fabrics address many aspects of incarceration—time’s passage, hope, resilience, and above all, solidarity. “You endure pain together; you survive through shared strength.” The project invites readers to consider whether collective creativity can offer a durable counterforce to confinement and whether such art can translate into meaningful change beyond museum walls.
