Democratising fashion is one of those definitions that has been used and abused by many in the last 15 years or so. Mainly employed in connection with fast fashion retailers mass producing trendy garments and accessories cheap enough that high numbers of consumers can buy them, democratisation has its dark sides, since it exploits the people who make these garments and contributes to pollution as well.
Angela Luna and Loulwa Al Saad from New York-based ADIFF have been working instead on democratising fashion from a sustainable and ethical point of view since they founded their label. Their clothes and accessories are made with upcycled materials (on their site you will find for example bags made with UNHCR tents and upcycled life vests that were collected on the shores of Lesbos).
Among their most ingenious design there are a trench and a bomber jacket - upcycled in the label's own resettled-refugee operated facility- that could be considered as commercial versions of Studio Orta's "Refuge Wear" habitats and installations. These pieces can indeed be turned into a tent once you add a base and poles (sold separately on ADIFF's site). Besides, some of their designs are buy-one-give-one products: when you purchase a jacket, they donate a tent jacket to a displaced person; for every face mask purchased, the designers will donate one to a hospital.
Last year the brand was planning to work on several designer collaborations, but they didn't happen because of the Coronavirus pandemic. Luna and Al Saad focused therefore on making face masks for New York hospitals and took part in Black Lives Matter protests. It was then that they had an epiphany and realised that the world was changing, but fashion was not evolving and it was definitely not responding to the needs of many.
So they started working on finding new ways to engage people and tackle sustainability. The result was the Open Source Fashion Cookbook - the volume is supposed to help each and everyone of us, especially those ones who can't afford to shop in a responsible way, to participate in responsible consumption.
The book features indeed a series of what the authors called "recipes", that is instructions to create designs by ADIFF and other contemporary fashion brands including BrownMill, Chromat, Christopher Raebur, and Zero Waste Wardrobe.
The book features step-by-step assembling instructions using existing materials readily available at home. Difficulty varies to allow people with different sewing skills to enjoy the projects, so you can try your hand at making a Perspex pocket from a shower curtain, a bucket hat from a broken umbrella, opt for Chromat's bodysuit or choose more complex projects, from a blanket coat to Raeburn's shark cross-body bag (that you can stuff with scraps accumulated from other projects).
The recipes are featured in the book that is printed on demand and can be bought from ADIFF's site and on Amazon for $60 ($30 for the e-book version; a breakdown of the cost is also clearly explained on the label's site, Amazon takes a 40% royalty; printing is $20 per book; and ADIFF is sharing part of the profit with the designers who lent their patterns. That means ADIFF will make $10 per sale), but the patterns can also be downloaded for free on ADIFF's site, while you can find further inspirations on the label's Instagram page and YouTube channel.
While the main point of the project is making more people realise how to transform scraps or assorted deadstock materials into wearable pieces, Luna and Al Saad also hope that the Cookbook will spark an interest in the fundamentals of fashion and convince more designers to share some of their patterns.
This was actually pretty popular a few decades ago when ready-to-wear fashion wasn't available yet. For example from the '50s until the mid-'70s, quite a few fashion Italian designers created special garments for women's magazines and published in their pages sketches of the pattern cuttings for those garments. Readers who were interested in making those designs could also buy the pattern cutting from the magazine. At the time a few publications even had their own Pattern Cutting Department that dealt with such orders.
Some magazines have relaunched the idea in more recent years, we often released vintage patterns on this site or published monthly posts about patterns and some young designers have jumped at the prospect of sharing their creations with fans (last summer JW Anderson shared the pattern for a patchwork cardigan Harry Styles wore that sparked a trend on social media).
While there may be some designers concerned about copyright issues when it comes to releasing their original patterns, the possibility of allowing people to come up with their own version of an iconic creation from their collections seems intriguing for those designers who firmly believe in genuinely transforming fashion into a more inclusive industry that can have a positive impact on people's lives and on the environment.
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