About
TROJAN UNICORN GLITTER is a design system of 3D bead shapes — part queer signifier, part camouflage. Sparkly and camp on the surface, they act as discreet, adaptable symbols that can slip into spaces where queerness is often erased, bringing protest, joy, and a sense of home.
If you would like to commission a mural, discuss a collaboration or project please get in touch.
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It's very difficult to explain how hard it is to invent anything new in textile design. It's a bit like trying to find a new sound in music. It's hunting for unicorns. I created this design system of 3D bead shapes while playing around with 3D software, bored while recovering from an accident which left me with vast swathes of time on my hands. When I found it, I knew I had something special. At the same time as this discovery I was discovering myself. I was finally leaving a high control religious organisation I had been part of for most of my life in one way or another, having cult exit counseling and therapy.
As well as dealing with the myriad other symptoms of leaving a high control group (including compulsively shopping for vintage clothes) it resulted in me coming further out of the closet to myself in terms of my sexuality. I thought that instead of just making another fashion/interiors brand, perhaps I could put my invention to good use - to help the queer community in some way.
The LGBTQIA+ community faces three big and growing challenges:
- Cultural co-option – Our symbols get absorbed by straight culture because they’re “cool,” stripping away meaning.
- Seasonal visibility – Businesses fly the rainbow flag in June, then pack it back in the closet, leaving no subtle year-round way to signal LGBTQIA+ friendliness.
- Erasure of symbols – Many LGBTQIA+ symbols have been erased from history, leaving designers with few cultural references to build from. In Russia, a Pride flag can mean prison. Earlier this year, Derbyshire County Council became the first in the UK to ban the Pride flag from its buildings, mirroring similar moves in parts of the USA.
My solution:
TROJAN UNICORN GLITTER – a system of 3D bead shapes that act as a discreet, adaptable signifier to slide into spaces that would not normally display queer symbols.
My inspiration comes from:
- Breakfast at Tiffany’s — written by gay author Truman Capote — where the heroine seeks safety in a jewellery store when scared (having the "mean reds")
- Lady Gaga’s line: “Being gay is like glitter — it never goes away.” Have you ever tried to hoover glitter out of a carpet??
- Arup’s research on Queerification which highlighted the need for more LGBTQIA+ signifiers.
Glitter runs deep in LGBTQIA+ culture:
- Unicorns — Scotland’s national animal — are LGBTQIA+ mascots, and they always sparkle.
- The disco ball with glittering facets and sparkles became popular in Harlem’s underground drag balls and speakeasies in the 1920s helped make them part of queer nightlife’s visual language.
- Drag without glitter? Unthinkable.
- Glitter, like these 3D shapes was a waste product - overlooked and deemed trash until someone decided to turn it into a business.
Tartan has also become increasingly popular in the LGBTQIA+ community, adopted as a gender-neutral yet flamboyant design. Being Scottish, I couldn't resist. I took the glitter balls, wrapped them in tartan, and called them Queer Tartan. Tartan is used by brands worldwide from Fortnum and Mason to Hello Kitty. I set up the Queer Tartan Register, sending free (for now) custom glittery tartan graphics to the LGBTQIA+ community and allies for their websites, weddings, merch and events.
These patterns and shapes work across multiple mediums:
- animations
- fabrics
- wallpapers
- murals
- websites
- vehicle livery
- fashion
- projection
...even artwork that resembles giant costume jewellery letters which can be printed up to 7 meters high to be put on the outside of buildings.
My hope is that this quite literally becomes part of the furniture.
My design system is, at heart, a very British response to attempts at queer erasure - eccentric, silly, and rather fabulous - a visual, playful expression of queer joy. As drag queen and activist Pattie Gonia tells us, ‘Joy is a strategy to fight back.’
It is also high femme when most queer symbols have been designed with masculine energy - flags after all, were designed to be seen on battlefields or at street protests. This design system offers another way — one designed to integrate queer culture seamlessly into spaces.
That's not to say they have any less power. In 2024 there were two major exhibitions in London—at the Barbican and the Fashion & Textile Museum—that explored the politics of textiles. Textiles have always carried a quietly revolutionary force. After the Jacobite Rising, the British government passed the Dress Act of 1746, making it illegal for Scottish Highlanders to wear tartan and kilts. The tartan ban lasted until 1782.
As Emma Goldman (and Banksy) might say "if textiles changed anything they would be illegal."
These designs stand in that lineage — using pattern as communication, and beauty as subversion. Sometimes quietly, sometimes loudly, but always in harmony with the spaces they occupy. This time, though, instead of physical fabric, I’m working with the power of technology too. And it’s much harder to erase a meme. 🍉
When I first read Susanna Crossman’s memoir Home is Where We Start, it hit me hard. She writes:
“We are all constantly poor but in the community poverty is a medal pinned on jumble sale clothes. It makes us equal to the working class. It is almost a version of double-tracking. A term coined by the writer Tom Wolfe and later explored by the critic Rosanna Mclaughlin, who described it as being ‘a bum with the keys to a country retreat.’ Double-tracking is to be establishment dressed as counterculture. It is often like this for the communal adults. The house is an adventure they will live through. A freeing up, a chosen experiment, whereas for the kids it is our life.”
I knew that world. The high control group I was in had a commune that I lived on. I was surrounded by people like this. Who treated radicalism as performance. People who could click their heels together at any time and return to their old lives, while I was stuck — often cold, hungry, and unsafe. Occasionally I was rescued, briefly, by my kind and wealthy grandmother, who, like a fairy godmother would whisk me away for high tea in country house hotels and buy me horse riding lessons.
That experience gave me a transferable skill. I learned to double-track in reverse, to code switch. I learned the language of luxury by buying clothes from charity shops in Primrose Hill and Highgate, from the Johnstons cashmere and tweeds my grandmother wore. I also studied at Central St Martins. This led me to pitching silk scarf designs to Ed Burstell then at Liberty London and designing extensively for luxury brands.
This project is an extension of this process. On the surface, my design system is camp, sparkly, luxury. Underneath, it’s camouflage: Trojan Unicorn Glitter, a way to smuggle queerness into spaces that don’t usually allow it — to create visibility, connection, and safety in spaces that are traditionally heteronormative.
I’m writing this on 21 August 2025, the day before my Trojan Unicorn Glitter will be broadcast to 1.5 million people worldwide as the idents for the Women’s Rugby World Cup 2025.
I don't know yet what this will mean for my future but my hope is that it will be as magical as a pair of ruby slippers. Maybe they can bring some magic to you and your community too. Because there’s no place like home.
Fritha Lewin
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I’ve been a designer and illustrator for over twenty years, working with brands including Manolo Blahnik, Burberry, Jo Malone, Regent Hotels, InterContinental Hotels, The Body Shop, Charlotte Tilbury, and many more.