ABOUT EMMA

Emma Reichenbach has a Masters in Fashion Textiles from London’s Central Saint Martins, and over twenty years of fashion embroidery design experience gained in London, Italy and New York, working both in-house and through her own studio, Emma has designed and created inspirational, unique embellished textile pieces for many of the best international fashion houses, including Diane von Furstenberg,  Alexander Mcqueen, Coach, Jenny Packham, Lela Rose, Marc Jacobs, Moda Operandi, Oscar de la Renta and Phillip Lim.

It was a natural evolution for Emma to want to create Coded Cloth, modern folklore genderless fashion, re-fashioning the past. Coded Cloth expresses Emma's life-long passion for sourcing and collecting vintage and antique costume and textiles, collage, patchwork and embroidery that spans the historic to the contemporary.

Emma has always been struck by the accumulated hours that were dedicated to the creation of hand-embroidered textiles, usually the endeavour of one or more women, born out of a shared passion to decorate their homes, adorn their tables, and create linens to mark celebrations, or rites of passage. She loves that you can see the different handwriting of the women who create them, some pieces displaying idiosyncratic stitching, others created with an almost machine-like precision, Emma feels an intimacy with the creators when she finds places where one embroiderer stopped and another took over: the moments where they ran out of one shade of thread, then re-embarked with another. Like an antique quilt, these embroideries can be seen as a distillation of the hopes, aspirations and dedication of an individual or community, the very stories of their lives stitched and woven into the fabrics. 

Of particular fascination to Emma is vintage cross stitch embroidery, for the digital, decipherable look of the front of the embroidered design, but even more so, the wild, chaotic 'wrong side' of the embroidery, which can resemble ancient symbols or runic languages. To Emma's eye, the cloth is coded with meaning and histories both visible and hidden.

Emma loves it when someone shares a little history about these pieces she sources, revealing stories of great aunts or mothers, who they embroidered for, and how their work had been cherished through the years. By transforming these textiles into wearable garments, with each named after the town or city according to their provenance, Emma hopes to honour and connect with the women who dedicated their love and skill to the pursuit of beauty.

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