I’d been asked a few times whether I was going to do a Halloween range.
The obvious answer would have been pumpkins.
Ghosts.
Skeletons.
A cartoon bat wearing a little fucking hat.
But I don’t really do Halloween in the commercial sense.
The Christians have already bastardised Christmas. Let the Wiccans keep something.
So instead of trying to work out how many smiling pumpkins I could fit on a hoodie, I did what any completely normal clothing-brand owner would do.
I started reading about seventeenth-century witch trials.
Because apparently that’s where we are now.
I’ve always been a history buff, and the Salem witch trials have fascinated me for years. Not because I believe they were surrounded by actual witches, curses and supernatural goings-on, but because the reality is considerably more interesting.
Fear.
Religion.
Power.
Reputation.
Old grudges.
Social expectations.
And, very often, women discovering that being slightly too loud, too independent, too knowledgeable or simply too inconvenient could become extremely dangerous.
Salem in 1692 has become shorthand for the witch trials, although accusations and executions for witchcraft stretched far beyond one town and one year. But there’s something about those four numbers — 1692 — that immediately carries weight.
And that became the starting point for the collection.
I didn’t want cartoon witches.
No green faces. No pointy hats. No comedy broomsticks.
I wanted the designs to feel darker and more uncomfortable than that.
Because once you strip away the Halloween imagery, these were real people.
People were accused.
Families were destroyed.
Communities turned on themselves.
And women who didn’t quite fit the version of womanhood expected of them could suddenly find ordinary behaviour reinterpreted as something sinister.
That gave me the direction.
SHE WASN’T A WITCH. SHE WAS INCONVENIENT.
THEY CALLED HER A WITCH. SHE CALLED IT HAVING AN OPINION.
HER CRIME WAS DISOBEDIENCE.
TOO LOUD. TOO CLEVER. TOO FREE. MUST BE WITCHCRAFT.
There’s humour in some of it, because this is still The Wandering Manc and apparently I’m physically incapable of leaving anything completely serious.
But underneath the jokes is something I genuinely find interesting.
How quickly societies can decide that somebody who makes them uncomfortable must also be dangerous.
The word witch became useful because it didn’t just describe an alleged crime.
It created an outsider.
Someone different.
Someone suspicious.
Someone you were allowed to treat differently because everybody had agreed they were now the problem.
And that idea is considerably more interesting to me than another pumpkin T-shirt.
So that’s the TwM Halloween collection.
Except it isn’t really a Halloween collection.
It’s 1692.
History, uncomfortable women, religious panic and the occasional swear word.
Which, now that I think about it, is probably much more on-brand anyway.