Thank you Francesca Granata for facilitating and thank you Mae Colburn for the interview at Fashion Projects! The interview is the first in a series titled Towards a More Sustainable Fashion.
Interview at Fashion Projects
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Zero-Waste is Sexy at Indianapolis Museum of Art
Tomorrow night I am honoured to speak at the Indianapolis Museum of Art as part of the Indy Talks series. I’ll be sharing the stage with Michael Bricker, founder of People for Urban Progress; I’m particularly looking forward to hearing how the organization is dealing with five miles of Superbowl fabric!
My talk focuses on waste in fashion but more than previously, I make the connection between fashion waste (both pre- and post-consumer) and all waste that we, humanity, are creating. The way the fashion industry is wasteful with fabric (pre-consumer waste, my focus for the past eight years) has parallels in how humanity (that’s all of us) is wasteful with a whole lot of things, including fashion (post-consumer waste). Transforming one will transform the other. I propose, let’s start with humanity; get to work with me. In my talk I will share about Local Wisdom, a research project on user-level innovation in fashion that Dr Kate Fletcher has been working on for over three years, and that she wrote about in my book with Alison Gwilt, Shaping Sustainable Fashion. Fletcher’s book with the ever-inspiring Lynda Grose, Fashion and Sustainability: Design for Change, came out a couple of months ago (London folks, the launch is next week!) and I thank both for constantly expanding my vision as well as the quiet, nourishing conversations. I’m honoured and excited to work with both on Local Wisdom during the next two years!
So, if you’re in Indiana, come along to the Indianapolis Museum of Art tomorrow (Thursday) night at 7pm! If you’re not, I request you change your plans and come along, too! Let’s get this conversation really going; the solutions to the problems we’re facing will require all of us, and I invite you to join me now. More details and registration information is available here.
Snehal Bathwal
Snehal Bathwal was one of my Seniors last year at Parsons The New School for Design; she was an amazing privilege to work with. She had a very clear plan from the start last August (2010), and whilst the process was anything but easy, she succeeded in the end. She has now entered a competition through lookk.com: have a lookk, and please vote. If anyone deserves it, she does!
Emotional zero-waste?
Some very valid points are raised in this rather hilarious discussion at Artisan’s Square, even if fuming is not one of them. I’ll address certain points in coming weeks; just too much to do right now. Over-simplification and binary opposition of issues (‘X is better than Y’, when in fact X might be the more appropriate in one situation, and Y in another) – the main points I need to address – are very common, and understandably so, flaws in much of Western thinking. But I get Frances Grimble’s point 
Disclaimer: I’ve never claimed to have invented the term zero-waste, and I have always said it is as old as clothing i.e. I didn’t invent it so don’t even dare try pin it on me. What other people do with using it as a marketing tool, that’s their battle. In seven years, I have made very little money from ‘it’. Of course, zero-waste is not an ‘it’; it’s a philosophy of making and being in the world, not another ‘eco’ product category (if you still believe in ‘eco’…) But that’s just me. Certainly I’ve not made enough from it to pay for my PhD, or for my undergraduate degree, for that matter. In fact, it is due to my commitment to bringing forth sustainability in fashion (of which zero-waste is one little part, and you using a tumble dryer is a much bigger one) that I’ve chosen jobs in education that pay much less than industry for some years now.
I do like the idea of all of us wearing rectangles as proposed by ljh. Kind of like what the Russian constructivists and Thayaht (Italian futurist) proposed, no? Totalitarian dress codes – bring it on! Because, let’s face it, fashion hasn’t offered much personal choice for a long time, if ever (read Sustainable Fashion and Textiles: Design Journeys
Thank you, Marimekko
Marimekko, it was amazing working with you on ‘Why Not Together?’. As was meeting Vuokko Eskolin-Nurmesniemi. This is what I said about the competition:
“This competition provides an insight into what design competitions of the future will likely look like, with its open design briefs and by expanding the definition of design beyond products to also designing services and systems. It has been a pleasure to witness the Marimekko philosophy and spirit being interpreted from a variety of international perspectives. By creating the competition Marimekko and Aalto University have demonstrated that international collaboration between universities will be increasingly important, as many of the problems design needs to solve are shared regardless of national boundaries.”
Yield catalogue now available
The catalogue for the Yield exhibition is now available. Proceeds from the sales of the catalogue support programming at the Textile Arts Center, the New York home of Yield. The exhibition opens to the public this Saturday and runs through December 2.
Zero-Waste: Fashion Re-Patterned – photos
Zero-Waste: Fashion Re-Patterned, curated by Arti Sandhu, is open until April 16 – that’s Saturday next week, so be sure to visit A + D Gallery at Columbia College Chicago. Thank you to Jennifer Murray, Gallery Director, and Megan Ross, Preparator, for sending the installation photographs. I’ve also included some process photos.
One of my grandmother’s sheets from the 1940s with the patching visible; I used two of these.
Some process for the pyjama pants (see page from Julian Roberts’ book):
The final pattern:
Above, a paper folding exercise for the pyjama top and below, the final pattern.
The pyjamas in the exhibition:
Fioen van Balgooi (Refinity) and Berber Soepboer:
Holly McQuillan:
Padmaja Krishnan:
A Magazine – I used to give these instructions for a sock jumper by Maison Martin Margiela to my students back at UTS so it was great to see them included here:
Artisanal by Maison Martin Margiela:
Nick Cave:
Derick Melander:
