Nazanin Zaghari-Ratcliffe, who was held in an Iranian political prison for close to six years after being detained in April 2016, has spoken publicly about the role that sewing played in preserving her sense of self during captivity. Addressing an audience at the Hay Festival in Hay-on-Wye on Thursday, she described how permission to receive fabrics from outside the prison was eventually secured through special written authorisation — a concession that is said to have been far from straightforward to obtain, given that fabrics were not ordinarily permitted. It was her collection of Liberty London cloth, set aside before her arrest for what she had imagined would be a more conventional special occasion, that came to carry the deepest symbolic weight. "We had a place where we had no liberty," she told the crowd, in a remark that drew a sharp contrast between the store's name and the conditions of her confinement.

Rather than keeping the material for herself, she began distributing it among fellow inmates, a gesture that is understood to have fostered a shared sense of dignity in surroundings where personalisation was otherwise largely impossible. Zaghari-Ratcliffe has acknowledged that she was not a confident seamstress before her imprisonment, though she recalled a long-suppressed desire to sew that she traces back to her mother's reluctance to let her use a sewing machine. In prison, that inclination was finally given expression: she made clothes for her daughter Gabriella, who is now eleven, as well as neckerchiefs for other women detained alongside her. Rehabilitation classes offered within the prison, she said, helped her develop a dress pattern with the guidance of a teacher.