'Checkers Gauge' brooch, sterling silver, 2011. Manufactured for Atelier E.B. by Ruth Swan, Scotland.

Sterling silver brooch, made in the form of a checking gauge used to check stitch sizes and buttonhole widths.

© Atelier E.B.

Atelier E.B (Edinburgh Brussels) is the company name under which the designer Beca Lipscombe and the artist Lucy McKenzie sign their collaborative projects. Based between Edinburgh and Brussels, their work blends historical research, design and art, creating fashion collections, commissioned displays and interiors, textiles and publications. McKenzie studied Art at University of Dundee's Duncan of Jordanstone College of Art and Design, and Lipscombe studied Fashion/Print at Central Saint Martins, London. They formed Atelier E.B in 2007 and since 2011 the pair have operated as a fashion label which, where possible, uses local production methods in Scotland and Belgium; and also focuses on alternative forms of distribution and display. Lipscombe and McKenzie place art and design on an equal footing, applying methodologies from both spheres.

This brooch was part of Atelier E.B.'s The Inventors of Tradition collection.

The name, 'Checkers Gauge' originated from the gauge used by quality checkers to check manufactured goods. Lucy McKenzie interviewed the Glaswegian tailor Steven Purvis, who had owned clothing factories during the 1980s supplying clothing to Marks & Spencer, on 2nd September 2010 who told her the following, in his words:

"Marks & Spencer had a bad reputation. If your work was of a standard and you came into their radar they would give you something that was very well paid and quite straightforward, but not a huge run. You would do this first job, and that would be fine, they would take it with no arguments. That might only have been a third of your production - you would have other things running alongside because it was quite a small job. Slowly but surely though, they would take over all your production, so you were completely dependent on them, and then the problems start because at this point, they started to introduce, as you say, an incredibly stringent quality control. It was all about stitches per inch, size of buttonholes, width of edge of stitching. They sent a man in with a gauge to check, if his samples weren't absolutely bang on they didn't want any of it. You couldn't sell it because it had Marks & Spencer's labels on it and you owed them for the cloth. They put a lot of factories like us out of business..."

T.17-2023