Florence Barnby

Siren: Mayfair clubs designed for women.

The inspiration.

Imagine a club in which women are required to wear heels, where entry fees fluctuate according to their perceived attractiveness, and where male promoters earn commission for delivering “desirable” women to wealthy male clientele. This is not dystopian fiction but a description of the contemporary London Mayfair nighttime economy, where such practices operate in plain sight.

This project extends my dissertation, If No One Were Watching: Reimagining Female Students’ Fashion Choices Freed From the Male Gaze in Nightlife Economies. I examined how the presence of the male gaze restricts women’s nighttime sartorial autonomy. Female university students described how their current club outfits are calibrated around risk: safety, unwanted sexual attention, and social judgment. When invited to imagine a speculative women-only club, every participant articulated a desire to dress more expressively and revealingly.

In response, this work proposes a speculative, biomaterial-driven and futuristic reimagination of Mayfair’s clubbing landscape—redesigned entirely for women.

It asks what a nightlife interior might look and feel like if it were structured around care, pleasure, solidarity and environmental responsibility rather than surveillance and display.

My key aim of the project is to challenge the persistent assumption that biomaterials must appear neutral, muted or “earthy”. By foregrounding saturated colour, gloss, translucency and layered depth, the work plays with the tension between material appearance and material truth. This project is made to unsettle expectations of what “eco” should look like. Biomaterials are used not as reluctant substitutes for plastics, but as agents with their own formal and expressive possibilities.