What are some other ways to play sustainable fashion?

When most students face the topic of sustainable fashion, the first thing they think of is to start with clothing fabrics and solve the problem of clothing recycling through the use of sustainable textiles.

But in fact, there is more than one entry point for "sustainable fashion", and today I will share a few different angles.

Zero waste design

In contrast to the recycling of textiles through sustainable fabrics, the concept of zero waste design is to reduce the output of industrial waste at the source.

As ordinary consumers, we may not have an intuitive understanding of the waste that occurs in the manufacturing process of the fashion industry.

According to Forbes magazine, the fashion industry generates 4% of the world's waste each year, and most of the fashion industry's waste comes from the excess scraps generated during the production of clothing.

So instead of producing fashion junk and then figuring out how to deal with it, it's better to get the most out of these excess scraps at the source.

Swedish Stockings, for example, which is well known in Europe, uses nylon waste to make stockings and pantyhose. According to his family's research, as a kind of fast consumable, more than 8 billion pairs of stockings are abandoned every year in the world after only passing through twice, which also makes the stockings industry one of the world's highest product waste and pollution rates.

In order to reverse this phenomenon, all Stockings and tights products of Swedish Stockings are made of nylon which is recycled and extracted from fashion waste. The predecessor of these wastes is used to make various clothing materials. Compared with the pure synthetic fibers used in traditional tights, they have stronger elasticity and toughness, and can also increase the number of wear.

Not only that, Swedish Stockings is also working on how to start with the raw materials and introduce fully degradable stockings, taking sustainability one step closer.

Remodel old clothes

The life cycle of a garment is about four stages: production, retail, use and waste recycling. Zero-waste design and the introduction of sustainable textiles belong to the thinking in the production stage and waste recycling stage respectively.

But in fact, in the phase between "use" and "waste recycling", we can also bring used clothes back to life, which is one of the most important ideas in sustainable fashion: the transformation of old clothes.

The principle of old clothes transformation is to make old clothes into new items by cutting, splicing and reconstruction, or from old adult clothes to new children's clothes.

In this process, we need to change the cutting, outline and structure of the old clothes, to change the old to new, to big and small, although it is still a garment, it can present a completely different look. However, it is said that the transformation of old clothes is also a handicraft, and not everyone can transform successfully, and it is necessary to follow the guidance of the methodology.

Wear more than one outfit

As mentioned earlier, a fashion item will go through the life cycle of "production, retail, use, waste recycling", and the sustainability of the production and waste recycling stage can only be achieved by the efforts of enterprises, governments, and organizations, but now, whether at home or abroad, more and more practitioners of the concept of sustainability have begun to work in the "consumption and use" stage. This has also sparked a large number of bloggers on social platforms at home and abroad.

After realizing this demand, many independent fashion designers also began to think about how to make a dress wear different effects, so as to reduce people's pursuit of new clothes.

Emotional sustainability design

In addition to the material, production and collocation of fashion items, some designers have taken the edge and introduced the emotional design that has been popular in recent years into the field of sustainable fashion.

In the early years, the Russian watch brand kami introduced such a concept: it allows users to replace different parts of the watch separately, so that the watch can keep up with the pace of The Times, but also maintain a constant in life, and enhance the connection between people and the watch.

This approach, by making the relationship between the product and the user more valuable over time, is also applied to the design of other fashion products:

By reducing the style, enhance the stain resistance, wash resistance and comfort of clothes, so that clothes have emotional needs for users, so that consumables become a part of consumers' lives, so that consumers are not easy to discard.

For example, the University of the Arts London -FTTI (Fashion, Textiles and Technology) Institute collaborated with the well-known denim brand Blackhorse Lane Ateliers to jointly create the UK's first denim cleaning machine, designed to allow consumers to spend the least price on the purchased jeans professional cleaning, thereby extending the life of jeans. Make it sustainable. This is one of the teaching goals of FTTI.

5. Refactor
The concept of reconstruction is similar to the old clothes transformation, but it is further than the old clothes transformation, so that the existing clothes are returned to the fabric stage, and then according to demand, the formation of new items, not necessarily clothing, such as: sheets, throw pillows, canvas bags, storage bags, cushions, jewelry, tissue boxes, and so on.Although the concept of reconstruction is similar to the transformation of old clothes, it does not have such a high threshold for the operator's design and hands-on ability, and because of this, reconstruction thinking is also a very familiar transformation wisdom for the older generation, and I believe that many students' grandparents have experienced the stage of "finding some unused cloth to change something". So next time if you run out of inspiration, you can actually ask your grandparents to take lessons, which is likely to open a whole new door for your portfolio!