Sustainability is a keyword nowadays in different fields and practices, from architecture to fashion. As seen in multiple previous posts, creating new garments recycling old materials can also help designers finding new solutions for their collections. This is the case, for example, with Serien°umerica (also spelled Serienumerica), Maria De Ambrogio and Stella Tosco's brand.
A sociology graduate, De Ambrogio became an independent fashion designer and started working for the Serienumerica brand that she originally founded with a friend. At the same time, she taught fashion and textile design in Turin where she met Tosco, one of her students.
Together they expanded and rebooted Serienumerica in 2009, turning it into a brand focused on research and sustainability, mainly producing knitwear and leather accessories.
To create their collections, De Ambrogio and Tosco settled onto reinventing Italian techniques, such as jacquard and intarsia, and traditions with the help of local artisans, to try and find innovative ways to develop new materials and textiles.
With their artisans they developed studies on cotton, wool, silk and linen, experimenting with volumes and weights, producing limited collection of jumpers, tops and dresses in neutral shades or in deep blue and black, all based around the concepts of slow fashion and inspired by minimalism and environmental and social sustainability.
All the items they produce are made in Italy using organic or recycled fabric, they are infused with natural dyes and crafted through manual techniques by Serienumerica's artisans that the designers consider as business partners and who guarantee workers' rights across the supply chain.
“We share the belief that a collective commitment to ensure a more sustainable and fairer world is needed," the design duo states on their site. "Each and every person can contribute with their choices and means to the creation of a wave of positive change for our planet and its people."
So far De Ambrogio and Tosco's concept has worked pretty well for them: though Serienumerica is a small brand, it has distributors in Europe, the United States and Japan, their latest one is Selfridges in London's Oxford Street.
The luxury department store dedicated to the design duo a corner with an installation featuring a tapestry crafted using knitting, crocheting and weaving, dresses made from production scraps that have been re-assembled to create a new fabric, and designs still connected to thread spools that invite consumers to consider the materials employed by designers and the creative process behind a collection.
Quite often De Ambrogio and Tosco move from local inspirations for their work: their studies of knit surfaces is indeed inspired by the deteriorated surfaces of the carts used by vendors at Turin's Porta Palazzo market.
All the pieces included in the installation at Selfridges represent the essence of the brand as they show a great attention to details and in particular a fascination with surfaces: each piece integrates embroidered effects manually executed with a crochet hook.
The humble crochet hook is employed to incorporate in the designs different yarns and the occasional paracord rope. The indigo dyed designs in the installation vaguely call to mind for their colours the Japanese indigo blue cotton garments from the middle of the Edo period (1615-1868) that came to signify the working-class status of the wearer.
Serienumerica also developed interior design pieces (this is actually a chapter they may want to explore further in future) such as the Dora rug, a collaboration with designer Maurizio Battilossi, founder of Marca, made with rough Sardinian wool on a semi-manual jacquard loom.
Three years ago, the duo collaborated with Editamateria creating a no waste handmade multi-layered futon made with interwoven textile layers, foam-rubber and linen, and developed projects suspended between fashion and architecture like the collaboration with the graphic studio Quattrolinee, an installation about knitwear and graphic design in which the duo reproducted Turin's streets in knitwear.
Hopefully Serienumerica will work on further experiments bridging fashion, architecture and interior design as their textile researches could be easily applied to other disciplines.
