The greatest thing a human soul ever does in this world is to see something and tell what it saw in a plain way. ~ John Ruskin, Modern Painters, 1843
We launched the Rebel Tartan Project (RTP) ten years ago to give students the freedom to confront harsh realities that are often hidden, normalised, or politely ignored, and then to translate what they saw into material form. RTP's founding director is Juliana Sissons, a renowned educator and former Designer-in-Residence at the V&A whose clients include Alexander McQueen, Shelley Fox, Hewitts of Savile Row and the BBC.
The focus of the first cohort, drawn from textile and fashion design programmes at several UK universities, was the scourge of human trafficking. Every competing team worked from the same visual reference: Liberation Kilt's Blueheart tartan. Endorsed by the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime, the Blueheart tartan symbolises the collective heartbeat of victims of human trafficking.
UN Guide wears Blueheart sash, Vienna (2016)
One team from Brighton University stood out immediately: Catherine Brown, Holly Gillan, and Samantha Kendall. Through their research, they identified something most people never notice: the recurring use of barcodes in human trafficking. Not metaphorical barcodes, but literal ones, tattooed onto physical bodies. As they wrote at the time:
“As a group we have also been very interested in the idea of branding. Our research showed us how many trafficked people are branded by their captors, often with a tattooed barcode. The barcode seems to be a symbol used worldwide for human trafficking, visually demonstrating how vulgar human trafficking is and bringing reference to humans being treated as ‘objects for sale’.”
The students traced how trafficking networks borrow directly from commercial logistics, inventory systems, and retail semiotics. The same visual language that allows goods to move frictionlessly across borders is repurposed to strip individuals of identity and agency. They carried this insight into knit and weave, abstracting barcode structures into textile form. They also created a QR code embedded in the work, linking directly to a United Nations human trafficking information leaflet.
Catherine Brown wrote:
"The key theme and message running through this project is the idea of barcodes and how humans are being treated as commodities. To convey this within my work I started by experimenting with different techniques to create linear structures within my knitted samples. Using techniques such as plating and mock ribs creating stripes of colour travelling up the samples as well as across, creating a tartan like effect. I chose to use the brighter colours from our colour palette as I believe they work really well with the Blueheart tartan and the woven and printed samples."
Catherine used silver to reference the diamond trade, which her research showed to be a major contributor to human trafficking. Orange was used to connect to the palm oil industry, drawing on the colour of the fruit used to produce the oil. By combining these colours within the same samples, she wanted to highlight how industries that appear unrelated are often connected through shared dependence on trafficked and forced labour.
“Working on this project has really opened my eyes and made me so much more aware of the true impact that human trafficking has on all of our lives,” Catherine wrote. “Having researched the issues surrounding human trafficking and just how extensive its impact is worldwide, I am inspired to keep working on ways to bring awareness to the issue through fabric and fashion.”
It is important to remember the moment in which this work was produced. While these students were developing their project in 2016, Ghislaine Maxwell was being questioned under oath about her relationship with Jeffrey Epstein, her knowledge of his sexual activities, and her role in recruiting and grooming girls for exploitation. At the time, human trafficking was widely framed as distant, exceptional, foreign.
Students enrolled in the Rebel Tartan Project learn not only to see and tell what they have seen in a plain way, but to do so creatively, using material form to cut through cultural blind spots. Design, in this sense, becomes a means of collective reckoning: a way of exposing what entrenched systems hide in plain sight.
Lianne La Havas wears Blueheart at Glastonbury Festival, 2017
