Have you ever given thought to where what you wear comes from? The fibre, the manufacture and the design process are all part of the lifecycle of a garment. Alice Payne, PhD student from Qeensland University of Technology, is investigating mass market fashion and has come up with a concept called ThinkLifecycle, a system to promote sustainability in the fashion process which won “Fashioning the Future Awards 2011″ for the Unique Enterprise category. The notion of ‘lifecycle’ is drawn from the natural world, in which, as McDonough and Braungart (2002) describe, all waste becomes food for the next lifecycle. This provides a model for developing materials and processes which mimic this natural order. Listen to RadioNational interview where she explain her project.
Openwear
Io Artigianato / Tu Industria: un incontro in Olanda per parlare del futuro della manifattura
Nonostante nella società dell’informazione il lavoro manuale si sia guadagnato una brutta reputazione per la sua mancanza di status e per i bassi guadagni, il contributo degli artigiani e delle artigiane nell’economia olandese è considerevole: si contano infatti 900mila posti di lavoro su un totale di 16 milioni di popolazione. E’ snocciolando questi numeri che Henk Oosterling inizia il suo intervento. Filosofo, professore e fondatore di Skill City, il progetto che sta rivitalizzando e rinnovando il tessuto urbano di Rotterdam a partire proprio dal connettere le abilità manuali a traiettorie di formazione e occupazionali. Quello di Oosterling è il primo degli interventi programmati per MeCraft/YouIndustry, il simposio organizzato dall’istituto olandese per la moda e il design Premsela in collaborazione con il museo Zuiderzee, che ospita, in contemporanea, la mostra Industrious|Artifacts con lo scopo di esplorare e indagare il significato dell’artigianalità contemporanea. Henk prosegue l’intervento raccontando come negli ultimi anni il governo olandese abbia lanciato una campagna nazionale coinvolgendo celebrità, artisti,
(Re)Searching for a sustainable fashion system – Interview
(segue in italiano) Thanx to the collaboration with Jen Ballie, who kindly accepted our invitation last year to our Openwear conference, I had the chance to get in touch with Kay Politowicz, professor of Textile Design, co-founder and Project Director for the Textiles Environment Design (TED) research group at Chelsea. For many years she was Director of Undergraduate Textile Design Course at Chelsea – and promoted a high-level of achievement of students working with specialist material processes in textiles: knit, weave, print, stitch – increasingly using digital processes and a wider variety of workshops – such as ceramics, wood, metal. In that role she became increasingly aware of the need to develop an environmental focus to curriculum developments within the subject and the opportunities that such a focus would reveal. In the last few years she moved to an entirely research-based and funded role and she believes it has been a great way to develop opportunities for externally funded practice-based
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From knitting machines to wearable technology in Florence
(segue in italiano) Last april I was in Florence with some friends and had the chance to meet Riccardo Marchesi, electronic engineering, managing director of Inntex and founder of Plug&Wear, an e-shop offering materials and components specifically targeted to creators of interactive fashion. He let us visit his lab, showed us experiments and prototypes around e-textiles, and here’s some bits about the long conversation we had. An electronic engineer in the fashion world. First involved in the business of knitting machines, then getting into innovative textiles, and now being passionate about wearables. Is there a connection among those three, a path that you are following, or is it only a matter of chances? Life is a matter of chance. You must be at the right time in the right place or you will miss the train. I moved my first steps in a family business going around the world trying to sell our knitting machines. At the beginning I was
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Summer thai
(segue in italiano) It’s been quiet on Openwear blog recently as we’ve been really busy working on our platform, surviving the hot peaks of euro summer, and also because some of us had the chance to visit Bangkok and take a deeper look on what’s going on in the creative sector in Thailand. Thanx to our thai friends studying in Milan and some good connections Michel Bauwens gently provided us, we were able to meet and discuss with different interesting people keeping the creative scene alive in the city. From the institutionalized and western inspired structure of the TDCD, founded in 2005 with the aim of monitoring and fostering the relationships between creative projects and businesses, to the sprawling activity of the biggest market of Bangkok Jatujak or the shops of Siam Square satisfying the need of self expression at low prices, Thai fashion has given us a lot of interesting highlights to framework Openwear model in the right direction.
ZOESCOPE 