Business Name: White Line Projects
Support received: Start Up Loan
Location: London
Website: http://www.whitelineprojects.com/
With support from LSBC, Fiona McKay and Xenia Capacete launched their fashion business, White Line Projects.
White Line Projects is a curatorial and creative studio based in London, specialising in innovative, digital and multidisciplinary methods of curation and content creation.
They curate, design and produce a diverse range of outcomes from exhibitions to installations and digital experiences to websites for a wide range of clients in the fashion and cultural sectors.
Fiona and Xenia also provide consultancy on interpretation, narratives and display techniques within fashion exhibitions and installations, as well as lending their experience to archives on both the digitisation process and museum practices.
We spoke to them about how they have gone from fashion students to entrepreneurs.
Why did you start the business? What motivated you?
The traditional path for a fashion curator is to work within public institutions such as academia or museums. It was really a mixture of not having the desire to work within these institutions, as they are often quite restrictive, but also the current economic climate meaning a lack of secure full time positions. We saw more opportunities to work independently and freedom to work for all kinds of clients and on a variety of projects.
It was overall an organic process. We started working as a collective after studying an MA in Fashion Curation at London College of Fashion for about a year on various projects to build up our own portfolios. It was only after being commissioned to curate an exhibition in Beijing at the end of that first year, that we established ourselves as a curatorial studio.
Where did you get your business idea from?
The key reason why we started working together was a shared interest in utilising digital technologies within fashion curation, archives and communication. During our MA, there was a lack of knowledge research in the area and museums were only just starting to realise its full potential. It was clear to us that this would be something that would set us apart from the rest.
However, it was through the process of refining the business plan for LSBC that we came up with a sustainable business model.
What have been the advantages of running your business in your particular location?
Apart from living close to our studio in Dalston, East London is such a hotbed for creativity and potential collaborators, particularly in our building of studios. It is a cliché but it’s definitely one of the best places to run a creative business.
What are you key successes/milestones you reached so far?
This year has been really good for us. Our exhibition Mode In Flux at Roca London Gallery was really well received and seems to be opening up lots of doors for us. It was also pretty cool to have some good press come from it including the Evening Standard and Aesthetica Magazine.
We are also working with a producer at BBC Radio 4 on a radio documentary which will air next year. It will focus on the Pit Brow Lasses, women in 19th Century Wigan who re-appropriated mens’ workwear and trace the legacy within the 20th Century and also within contemporary fashion. The subject area has an ongoing project of ours for the last couple years and it’s just great to see it manifest into something.