Juliana Sissons
Juliana Sissons (co-founder of the global Rebel Tartan Project for Sustainable Design) is a designer, educator, and author; she is the course leader of ‘MA Fashion Knitwear Design’ at Nottingham Trent University, UK, and she also lectures at several Universities internationally, most recently in New York, India, China and Japan.
Her Knitwear Design label focuses on developing sculptural forms and pattern making, and her collections have sold in London, New York and Los Angeles.
As a ‘Designer in Residence’ at the Victoria and Albert Museum, London, 2011- 2020, her solo collections of conceptual knitwear have been exhibited in the V&A galleries and in exhibitions at the Fashion & Textile Museum, British Fashion Council, Textile Institute and The Craft Council, London. Her work has been published in several fashion, design and art journals, and she has written two educational Knitwear Design books for Bloomsbury Publishing, UK.
She has collaborated with many creatives throughout her career, such as designers Alexander McQueen, Shelly Fox, Andrew Logan, Isabella Blow and Leigh Bowery. She has had her Archive of fashion collections from her 1980s label “Call Me Madam” shown at the retrospective ‘Club to Catwalk’ exhibition V&A Museum London 2013, the ‘Punk Rage and Revolution’ exhibition Leicester Museum & Art Gallery 2023, the Outlaws exhibition Fashion & Textile Museum London 2024 and the Holly Johnson Story exhibition National Museums Liverpool 2024.
Her background is in Savile Row tailoring, costume design for BBC and pattern cutting for designers such as McQueen, Shelley Fox, and Betty Jackson has provided her with a plethora of problem-solving skills and many unique starting points for design.
After serving as the leading consultant to ‘sKINship’, working in collaboration with the British Association of Plastic, Reconstructive and Aesthetic Surgeons (BAPRAS), she is currently researching different forms of pattern cutting. She has had the opportunity to work as a pattern cutter for fashion in collaboration with several reconstructive plastic surgeons. She is currently developing innovative pattern-cutting and fitting techniques for fashion design based on surgical cut and construction processes.
