Circular fashion / waste

I have been reflecting on my research and project as a whole as I’m pulling everything together. For me, the highlight has been doing the typography cutting, where for my first experiment I deliberately picked the worst piece of clothing and fabric as whilst I played around with the type idea. 

I’d decided to try another item to see if I could make a better piece and used my sketchbook to play around with the word Trash to see how I could cut it within the material. From doing this, I noticed that the ’T’, ‘A’ and ‘H’ when capitalised, are the same forwards and backwards. So using the letters in sequence but reversed on the back of a garment, they’d mirror the word trash. 

This felt like the various threads of my research all pulled together for this one garment. The word trash as my slogan, hidden in plain sight, symbolising the clothes had been thrown away. The concept told through “The Story of Stuff” being linear needing to become a circular system, to have less waste and circular fashion, using existing textiles rather than producing more. And the mirror is a reference to a Greenham Common booklet and the idea that people change by reflecting behaviours they see modelled at them which is the only way, that I believe fashion consumption will change. 

The material for this experiment has been much nicer to play with folds and how the material falls. In the essence of Greenham Common, I did a lot of hand sewing as well as using my machine, I tried incorporating pleats and bows to experiment with different techniques and a few iron pieces also made their way in as I had a bit of space to fill. Here’s the final garment.

References

Leonard, A. (2009, April 22). The Story of Stuff [Video]. YouTube. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9GorqroigqM.