The Battle for Good, Evil, and Genuinely Cool Museum Merch (EXCLUSIVE)
A grimacing creature, shackled at the heel, reaches out from a burst of flame to grasp at a glowing angel, who clutches a child in its arms. Sunlight and earthly flora shroud the holy figure, who stands firm against the gruesome interlocutor.
When fashion designer Bianca Saunders first glimpsed this artwork, William Blake's The Good and Evil Angels, it stopped her cold.
“It stayed with me because of its power, the struggle between forces, both internal and external,” she says. “It represents this constant duality between grace and control, something that I often explore in my tailoring and silhouette work.”
At the time, Saunders was simply seeking inspiration, something she often seeks from scrolling Tate's deep archive. The British-Jamaican designer was initially content to pull elements of Blake’s Romantic-era paintings for her menswear designs but, akin to how you'll keep a good earworm on repeat, Saunders couldn't stop thinking about The Good and Evil Angels.
Now, in collaboration with Tate, Saunders is flipping the script, turning a point of reference into genuinely cool museum merch.
Her four-piece capsule, arriving at Tate Shops on October 23, evolves Blake’s paintings into approachable wearables. A fiery red knit sweater takes its flowing lines from the background of The Good and Evil Angels, while a similarly warm-temperatured T-shirt wears the orange flames from Blake's early 19th-century painting The Simoniac Pope.
“Blake’s expressive figures, his use of light and shadow, and his poetic storytelling resonated with my ongoing exploration of movement and identity,” says Saunders. “I wanted to channel that sense of emotion and depth into the collection, translating his visionary energy into something tactile and wearable.”
Fluid lines, soft tailoring, and expressive prints have been a cornerstone of Bianca Saunders’ work since she founded her menswear line in 2017, where traditionally stuffy tropes, like peak-lapel pinstripe suits or dressy black leather loafers, are distorted and softened through intuitive interventions. It’s good stuff, so obviously good that it’s earned Saunders platitudes like the British Fashion Award’s New Establishment Menswear Designer of 2023 and 2024’s BFC/GQ Designer Fashion Fund.
This is a beautiful tension, where conservative dress codes clash with Saunders’ clever eccentricities. And in William Blake, a fellow Londoner born nearly three decades ago, she spots a similar kind of conflict.
“What drew me to William Blake is his ability to merge the physical and the spiritual, the way his art explores tension, transformation, and duality,” says Saunders. “That balance between control and chaos felt deeply connected to how I approach design.”
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