Existing for four years, The Cloth was an innovative interdisciplinary creative collective formed by Royal College of Art (RCA) graduates David Band, Brian Bolger, Helen Manning and Fraser Taylor. With educational backgrounds in printed textiles, this group applied their painterly and expressive ways of working to a variety of creative contexts. They worked individually and collaboratively across different disciplines including textiles, fashion, graphics, illustration, painting, interiors and set design. Although widely recognised in the 1980s as a highly successful innovative collective, The Cloth have been overlooked by textile, fashion and design history. This paper focuses on initial activity and investigation surrounding The Cloth, related to a group of items held by the Archives & Collections of the Glasgow School of Art (GSA), donated by alumni Taylor. The collection contains drawings, sketchbooks, photographs, slides, magazines, letters, samples, textiles, garments, paper artworks and other ephemera relating to Taylor's time as a student at GSA (1977-1981), then at the RCA (1981-1983) and as part of The Cloth (1983-1987). Artefacts from this collection, relevant literature, other records, conversations and examples of creative practice are utilised and analysed to examine the pedagogical approaches and educational experiences which instigated the formation of The Cloth. Examples of the groups creative processes and collaborative ways of working will be described. The paper proposes that learning from the experiences and valuing the practices of The Cloth can positively inform and inspire contemporary textile design learning and teaching. Areas for follow-on activity will also be discussed.

Funding from the Textile Society's Audrey Archivist Award in 2015, permitted the cataloguing of the Fraser Taylor and The Cloth Collection at GSA (www.gsaarchives.net).