Frances Murphy
Frances is a highly experienced fashion textile designer and researcher with over 20 years of experience in the luxury fashion and textiles industry. Her work has been sold at high-profile stores worldwide, and she has collaborated on textile fashion projects with well-known designers and fashion stores such as Selfridges, Liberty, Harvey Nichols, Lane Crawford in Hong Kong, and Colette store in Paris. Frances has also partnered with The Design Museum, The Victoria and Albert Museum, John Moore, Comme des Garcons Trading Museum in Japan, and Dover Street Market in London, LA, and NY to work on various textile fashion projects.
Frances and her husband Denis started their vintage London Label FDS (For Design Sake) in 1997. Their brand specialised in customising vintage T-shirts from popular brands like Nike, Puma, Disney, and Adidas. They used various techniques of rubberised inks and foils to overprint splattered paint, graphic slogans, and scribbles on these T-shirts. Their unique style gained popularity, eventually leading to an exclusive collaboration with Nike and Dr Martens in 2001. In 2001, FDS was selected as the next big thing, for the Young Designers show at London Fashion Week.
In 2004, the label INSIDEOUT was launched with a focus on digital printing techniques of Monochromatic Surreal Trompe l’oeil. Frances, the print creator, moved away from the traditional silk screen printing and explored the new concepts and techniques of digital print. Her collections were a blend of early Surrealism, London Glamour and Punk. In 2010, her Trompe l’oeil designs gained international recognition, and she won the coveted ‘Young Designers Award’ in Berlin, as well as the Fendi ‘Best Innovative Textile Designer’ award in Milan.
In 2014, Sarah Andelman, the owner of the Colette store in Paris, invited her to exhibit her surreal artwork and exclusive surreal silk T-shirt collection there. In S/S 2019, she launched a new showroom, John Moore Reimagined, for Paris Fashion Week, where she continues to take the avant-garde, post-punk do-it-yourself surreal concept into the 21st Century.
Her educational background includes a diploma from Chelsea School of Art, a Fine Arts Degree from Norwich University of the Arts, and an MA in Textiles from the Royal College of Art.
Frances is passionate about sustainability in the fashion and textiles industry and understands the importance of technology and manufacturing in creating a more sustainable future. Her recent PhD research at the RCA, focuses on the reinterpretation of textiles craft through 3D printing, specifically using 3D printed materials and patterns such as lace. Frances has developed a 3D printing methodology that bridges the gap between 3DP technology and textile fashion. She is exploring how 3D printing can revolutionise the way we produce and consume clothing, challenging production in terms of ecology, sustainability, consumption, fast fashion, and mass production. By enabling the “3D printing” of clothes to order, manufacturing could be reconfigured towards democratic manufacturing and design.
Her contributions to the industry extend beyond her research, as she has taught as a visiting lecturer at various universities and is an Ambassador for Create Education and a member of the (DFAM) Design for Added Manufacturing network and Future Fashion Factory. In 2023 she was nominated as a finalist for the UK TCT Awards, Creative Application Award. Frances was also invited to speak at the International Manufacturing Productivity Conference in Hong Kong in 2019, to 3D printing in textile manufacturing and its future possibilities.
