Bold claim: imagination and creativity can outlive confinement, even when freedom seems stripped away. Nazanin Zaghari-Ratcliffe’s story turns that idea into a tangible message. After six years of arbitrary detention in Iran, she returned to London carrying a small patchwork cushion made from scrap material in a prison craft circle. That cushion isn’t just fabric; it’s a symbol of resistance and a tangible reminder that inner life persists when external liberty is curtailed.
Building on that symbol, Zaghari-Ratcliffe collaborators with Imperial War Museum (IWM) and Liberty to launch a project that puts creativity at the forefront of resilience. The collaboration, titled Creativity in Conflict and Confinement, introduces three new Liberty prints—Gathered as Part of a Larger Whole, to be precise—that explore the experience of imprisonment through fabric design. She appeared at the project’s launch wearing a dress crafted from Passage of Time, a green motif that captures nature’s cycles amid imprisonment. The design features white doves in flight, Tehran’s rooftops, the moon in varying phases, and the steady march of seasons—visions she witnessed through cracks in a prison cell.
In her own words, the lesson was simple and powerful: they can take away the world you live in, but they cannot erase what happens in your mind—the imagination and creativity that keep a person intact. Holding onto that inner world helped her survive, and that insight now anchors the project.
This effort is more than a spectacle. It positions creativity as a form of resistance, a theme central to the exhibition and its message. The project, which runs at the Imperial War Museum London, examines how craft sustains dignity during war, conflict, and incarceration. It features designs developed with Zaghari-Ratcliffe, who serves as ambassador for the initiative, and produced by Liberty’s in-house studio.
During her imprisonment, she sewed clothes for her daughter using the prison’s sole sewing machine. Liberty fabrics, familiar to her long before the collaboration, were procured and sent by supporters; she shared some of the fabric scraps with fellow inmates and learned additional crafts such as woodwork and knitting through a prison rehabilitation program led by a professional seamstress. She emphasizes that, for women, creating things is a lifeline: movement may be constrained, but imagination remains uncontrollable.
The exhibition leans on IWM’s historical collections, which illustrate how people in hardship turn to craft to preserve dignity and endure. One display shows a wooden figure made in 1919 by a disabled ex-soldier at the Lord Roberts Memorial Workshops, a program that trained wounded WWI veterans in craft as a route back to work and purpose. IWM associate Prof Sir Simon Wessely notes that craft and resilience have a long-standing bond: creativity helps restore agency, identity, and hope in the face of trauma and confinement.
Liberty designers partnered with Zaghari-Ratcliffe to create three new fabrics—Passage of Time, Obscured Landscape, and Stitch and Community—each capturing facets of her confinement. Passage of Time reflects time’s passage; Obscured Landscape layers Liberty’s geometric patterns over Anthony Gross’s sketches; Stitch and Community blends Liberty florals with personal papers from army generals and prisoners, conveying the solidarity she felt with others behind bars.
For Liberty, a brand with a storied wartime heritage, the project also revisits its own history of creativity under pressure. The three new designs have been enlarged for display on banners hung across the museum’s entrance and atrium through February 2026. They are also available in Liberty’s retail line—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 prisoners, supporting dignity, rehabilitation, and reintegration.
Zaghari-Ratcliffe captures the project’s core message: these fabrics embody time, hope, resilience, and, above all, solidarity. They symbolize a shared endurance that binds people together, even when walls separate them. And as she puts it, the collective struggle becomes a source of strength that persists beyond captivity, a reminder that unity in craft can outlast even the harshest confinement.
