Needle Trades
Soft Opening
Women’s History Museum
Opens January172026

Company Gallery is proud to present Needle Trades, the first solo exhibition in London by Women’s History Museum hosted by Soft Opening as a part of Condo.

Founded in 2015 by Mattie Barringer and Amanda McGowan, the fashion-art duo began out of the desire to create novel and previously unseen images of beauty. The duo engages with fashion as a medium that has the potential to exist beyond regurgitative spectacle and the ability to change the fabric of reality. In this exhibition, Barringer and McGowan utilize imagery and aesthetics from fetish photography spanning from the 1800s to the present. These references are explored through a series of new mannequin sculptures, drawings, video and faux advertorial works, reflecting on commodity fetishism, their own position within this social phenomenon, and the dehumanization of women as a by-product.

Women’s History Museum’s new sculptures feature repurposed lingerie mannequins from the 1930s through the 1950s. With built-in heeled feet, impossible wasp waists, and torpedo busts, they appear as seductive cartoons, their bodies molded by the garments they were meant to advertise. They are dressed in new garments and accessories by WHM – constructed from historical and fetish materials including a lurid 1890s French calico, printed latex, bovine casino chips, brass, antique French alcohol tokens, perfume nips (a patented technology of perfume sampling from 1930s-50s referring back to the time period of the chosen mannequins), porcupine quills, antique nacre casino chips, poison labels, bobcat fur, and clear leather, amongst others.

Some mannequins are bound, pierced, masked, and disassembled—adorned in ermine printed bandages, quilled, or built from vintage perfume, poison, and medicine bottles. One twin figure wears a singed evening gown with an oversized brass cat paw belt, holding a duality of bondage and animal power. The sculptures evoke a disturbed yet beautiful landscape: one of intricate and fantastical clothing, but female figures depicted as restricted, suffocated, and disembodied. Presented alongside these works are layered drawings of various garments and prototypes, which create a splintered, dissected vision of the tradition of fashion illustration.

Also hanging in the exhibition are three oversized signs that present the ecstasy, vagueness, sex appeal, and abstraction of the female form in vintage advertising. They were shot by the two women of WHM—Mattie as model and Amanda as photographer. Mattie’s face and body are sliced and segmented into large strips, like a car wash curtain. The latter more personal and historical works speak to a self reflexiveness and vulnerability in the show. Needle Trades explores the psychology of being a fashion designer—the masochism, pain, and ecstasy of working with clothing, a form of self-imposed bondage in one of the world’s most tedious and fickle trades. The fantasy spirals into darkness when you confront your own role as a cog in a capitalist hellscape.