New York Fashion Week has officially started, but the debate is rife not only about reducing the number of people invited at catwalk shows (considering also that twenty minutes after the designs are presented on a runway, they usually end up on the Internet and can be enjoyed on a global scale…), but also about the relentless rhythms of the fashion industry and the need to produce more clothes and accessories every few months.
Hands up who hasn’t spotted in the same high street retailer the same pile of cheap shirts or dresses still hanging in the same spot week after week, month after month, a clear sign that ordinary consumers may be tired of these mass produced rags (because in most cases that’s what they are) that usually do not even fit properly since sizes seem to be nowadays completely irrelevant.
We all know that, if we stopped producing clothes tomorrow, we wouldn’t find ourselves short of garments to wear for the next 15 years or even more, since we have overproduced piles of items that we buy and wear for a very short time, either because they don’t last very long or because we throw them out to move onto the next trend.
So, while buying vintage has turned into a fashionable option for some, others are looking at new ways of going green and recycling clothes, disassembling and reassembling what they find on the market to reduce waste.
Despite this is a noble way to avoid textiles ending up in landfills and polluting the environment, many feel recycling is not enough, but we should actually focus on finding new ways to reduce waste in the production of clothes.
I was pleased to see that some researchers and fashion designers have already started experimenting along these lines, combining recycling and reducing waste using technology and science.
Some of the results of these researches are currently showcased at London’s Science Museum in a small exhibition entitled “Trash Fashion – Designing Out Waste” that you will find on the ground floor, in the Antenna Gallery area, near the Imax cinema.
The project is divided in different sections each looking at new ways to create fashion designs and each featuring three different items of clothing.
The first section is entitled “Material Desires” and looks at developing via technology new fabrics that can quickly break down without releasing toxic substances into the environment and could be therefore easily recycled.
This section features for example a knitted dress made with a vegetable fibre based on nettles; a dress called “Sugar Rush” (second image in this post) made from ‘Ingeo’, a bioplastic called polylactic acid (PLA) similar to polyester but made from plants such as corn, wheat, sugar beet or sugar cane, and a very intriguing piece, a jacket (third image in this post) made from sheets of sugary biofilm produced by the microbes that ferment in bathtubs of sweet green tea.
You will discover further from the embedded video that shows how designer Suzanne Lee uses bacteria to grow the material to make her designs.
The jacket is actually my favourite design out of this project since, though at the moment the research is still in its early stages (the material generated isn’t perfect and may need the addition of water-repelling molecules to avoid seeing the jacket going mushy if caught in the rain), I find fascinating thinking about the applications that bacterial cellulose may have in future in the fashion industry, but also in the creation of other items, such as books and magazines.
The section entitled “Cut It Out” looks instead at clothes characterised by a perfect cut and fitting.
One of the pieces included in this display is a jumper developed by Sandy Black from the London College of Fashion. The item is produced in just one piece on an automated knitting machine that uses individual measurements taken in a 3D body scanner.
In this case waste is reduced by producing on-demand, customised clothes that make sure we actually get the clothes we want.
The "Cut It Out" section also includes a made-to-measure jacket (fourth image) developed by Fashion technologist Siddhartha Upadhyaya through a new process called “Direct Panel on Loom”.
The latter is based on weaving made to fit sections of a garment reducing in this way materials and dyes and combining the weaving, fabric-cutting and patterning stages all into one process.
Designer Mark Liu, developed instead a “jigsaw” dress (white dress in the fourth image).
The intricate motifs on this design aren’t actually appliquéd pieces of fabric but the result of a clever solution, carefully designed patterns in which all the parts fit together like pieces of a jigsaw puzzles. When the design is assembled there are no scraps of material left over and consequently no waste.
The next section - entitled “To Dye For” - explores a vital problem, how dyes and finishes release toxic chemicals in the world’s water systems.
One of the solutions suggested is a little black dress (first item on the right in the fifth image) made with a new dyeing technology that doesn’t use water at all, but focuses on colouring the polyester as it is made.
This system was researched and developed by expert in colouration technology at the University of Leeds and founder of DyeCat company Richard Blackburn.
Fashionistas who are into brilliant colours will instead be fascinated by the dress in this section made in Morphotex fabric (same pic, dress in the middle).
The latter is characterised by an iridescent effect recreated by using nanotechnology that allows to copy the nano-scale structure of the cobalt-blue wings of the morpho-butterfly.
The fabric is produced by Japanese textiles company Teijin using 61 ultra-thin alternating layers of polyester and nylon.
The thickness of each layer - between 70 and 100 nanometres – controls the way light bounces, bends and scatters inside the fabric, generating different nuances and colours (could something along these lines be the secret behind the fluidly iridescent fabrics for the designs we saw on Armani Privé’s Spring/Summer 2011 runway?).
This dress is actually quite interesting because its fabric may open new possibilities in the production of colour-changing materials.
This section also includes another alternative to dyes: designer Kate Goldsworthy’s recycled polyester shift dress that features an intricate pattern made using laser beams.
The exhibition also includes a paper dress made with Metro magazines (first image in this post); a display on digital prints with a violet vintage dress reprinted on a red dress and a piece of fabric left for fifty days underground to show how bacteria ate the cotton hemp but not the polyester parts.
Among the most interesting pieces there is also a cocktail frock with coloured sections (made without using any toxic dyes) that can be folded and clipped into place, mixing and combining in new ways its structure without using any stitches,(I'll try and look at this design maybe in a future post).
This exhibition shows that creating without waste but with science in mind may represent a viable way for the future.
Fashion weeks victims should maybe stop quarrelling about front row seats and follow a bit more the experiments that these designers, researchers and scientists are carrying out.
Chances are that the future of fashion will end up coming from a laboratory and not from a conventional atelier.
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