Tag Archives: Future Fashion

Sustainable Danish Fashion

28 May 2013

Scandinavian sustainable fashion has recently been represented in several international events. After a great showcase at the Scandinavian Showroom during London Fashion Week in February, the Danish Fashion Institute has recently exhibited at the Cerralbo museum in Madrid, and the exhibits can be seen at the Aula Magna of the Istituto Europeo di Design until end of May. This is definitely a must see event if you happen to be in Madrid. Among the designs exhibited are H&M, Marimekko, Nina Skarra and work by Swedish fashion designer Matilda Wendelboe, also featured in one of the articles on our MISTRA project website Textiletoolbox. Several representatives from NICE (Nordic Initiative Clean and Ethical), the Danish Fashion Institute and designers took part in the program that featured a fashion show and talks. More about the events can be read following this link.

Copenhagen will host its first Sustainable Textiles Fair. The September trade fair and the conference CIFF Future Fabrics in Copenhagen, Denmark, will showcase eco-textiles, innovative materials and environmental awareness, in partnership with The Sustainable Angle, an organisation which supports projects that minimise the impact of industry on the environment, and international green practises initiative Sustainia.

Copenhagen is also preparing for the second Copenhagen Fashion Summit in April 2014. TED attended the first Copenhagen Fashion Summit in May 2012 and the TED’s TEN have been featured as a guideline for designers in the ‘NICE Code of Conduct and Manual for the Fashion and Textile Industry‘ that has been published for the event. “As the city of Copenhagen is Green Capital of the European Union in 2014, the Copenhagen Fashion Summit will be a perfect platform for engaging politicians in the matter of sustainable fashion,” says Jonas Eder Hansen, Development Director at the Danish Fashion Institute.

The Eco Chic Design Award is open for entries

29 April 2013

The EcoChic Design Award is a sustainable fashion design competition inspiring emerging fashion designers and students to create mainstream clothing with minimal textile waste.

The 2013 competition cycle is now open for applications from fashion designers with less than three years’ professional experience and fashion design students living in Hong Kong, Mainland China, Taiwan, Singapore, UK, France, Belgium and Germany.

Applications can be sent until 15th of August 2013, with this year’s focus is on zero waste designers, upcycling designers, and reconstruction designers.The first price is to design a sustainable collection for Esprit’s Recycled Collection range next to a winner’s show at Hong Kong Fashion Week and £3000 price money. Last year TED researchers met with the touring finalists Wister Tsang and Angus Tsui from the competition and introduced them to TED’s TEN and our work at TED research.

For the full schedule, prices and information on the award please visit the Eco Chic Design Award site.

Black Hack Chat today

18 April 2013

A key element for TED researchers is to facilitate workshops that can inspire consumers and designers to engage with materials through closed-loop thinking, and to share their ideas with fellow participants. With this at the heart of today’s workshop Professor Becky Earley will run the Black Hack Chat session – via Skype – at the Crafting the Future Conference in Gothenburg, with collaborators Jen Ballie and Otto von Busch hosting the session in the space. The event will be filmed and the team will document the discourse and the making with the participants. Watch this space for updates on the outcomes of the session and follow the Twitter feed #blackhackchat.

TED’s suggested reads

28 March 2013

Sustainable activity is in the air this Spring. Here are some projects we think are a great read to further look into. A brand new report by TexSture entitled ‘The Better Consumer in Europe: The Trends fashion companies should watch to make good decisions.’ can be downloaded for free following this link. The report pulls together all existing data around sustainable consumers in the EU as of date, analyses it and explains what it means for EU retail market overall.

The Textile Exchange features new events for 2013, including the Textile Sustainability Conference in Istanbul in November 2013, and the 3rd Annual Evolving Textiles Conference in North Carolina – where TED researchers completed a project last year-  on sustainable practice in domestic textile production, companies and retail.

Redress are featuring the launch of the fourth sustainable fashion competition. The EcoChic Award is open to designers from Hong Kong, China, Taiwan, Singapore, UK, France, Germany and Belgium. Find out more on their Facebook page. Redress also launched a 365 Challenge, featuring key experts celebrating swapping as a stylish and sustainable way to maintain a wardrobe without waste.

Another good read is the Danish Fashion Institute‘s and Deloitte’s published free downloadable report on ‘Fashioning Sustainability’, focusing on environmental issues in the supply chain, reuse of materials and closed loop thinking in the landscape of the increasing need to engage consumers.

H&M, one of the organisations part of the MISTRA Future Fashion consortium, has published their new sustainability report 2012. The key achievements are mapped against their seven conscious commitments. The highlight of the report is that for the first time H&M published a full list of their suppliers. More comment on the report can be read on Ecotextile News and Ecouterre. TED researchers will deliver a bespoke training program at H&M between April and June, featuring a series of inspiring lectures by Professor Becky Earley to 600 design staff, and an in-depth workshop with the New Development team, to explore design thinking for sustainability.

Film Vert night Film List

18 March 2013

During Green Week at UAL, TED and TFRC hosted a Film Vert event in the lecture theatre at Millbank, screening inspiring film clips for sustainable design in fashion and textiles. Lucy Siegle introduced the event with a sneak-peek of her latest project, Green Cut, a film featuring eight seminal fashion designers paired with eight iconic British films to raise awareness of a sustainable approach to fashion design. She introduced each film category focusing on the TED’s TEN strategies for sustainable design, and was a great host as she prompted visitors to reflect on the style of the films, and to think about how the content is communicated. We would like to thank all who came to the Film Vert night and expressed the wish to further discuss sustainable film. As promised we are publishing the Film List of the night for download here below, and we will soon be in touch regarding the Vimeo platform for UAL students to upload their films focusing on sustainable Fashion and Textiles.

Film Vert_Film List_7 March 2013

Konstfack Elective Course update

18 March 2013

Last week was the second meeting for the Guest Professorship role of Becky Earley and Kay Politowicz at Konstfack in Stockholm. TED Senior Research Fellow Dr. Kate Goldsworthy joined during week two to attend the presentations organised by the students. The MA Textiles in the Expanded Field course at Konstfack consists of a small group of up to 15 students, and the TED elective program is joined by a multi-disciplinary group of fine art, interior and textiles students coming from a diverse range of locations, including London, Russia, Switzerland, Romania and Sweden. Many of the MA students have a background in running their own companies and working as freelance textile designers, and they chose the Konstfack two year MA to further progress their skills. The first two weeks of the Elective ended with the students developing their first MANIFESTO for their individual practice, which will be refined using TED’s TEN strategies during the next weeks and will lead to prototypes we will be showcasing on the Textiletoolbox Synergies section – possibly  extended into an exhibition. The TED team will also link the Konstfack students with the MA Textile Design course at Chelsea via virtual sessions for a shared reflection on their practice through the lens of the TED’s TEN sustainable design strategies. Konstfack is also showcasing an exhibition of Shibori Textiles in their gallery this week.

Fire Up at London Fashion Week

18 February 2013

Tonight sees the launch of the Fire Up project at Somerset House during London Fashion Week. TFRC Director and TED Reader Becky Earley is co-investigator on this project and the full TED team will be present to answer any questions regarding TED’s portfolio of expertise. The event today from 4pm to 6pm at the Estethica space, will see the launch of a new web-based platform which will map the UK fashion industry and allow for knowledge exchange between university research and designers. Attendees will take to Twitter for the conversation around innovation and the needs and wants of the users of this new platform. Follow the event at https://twitter.com/FIREupUAL #LFWFIREup to post questions and answers on the day of the event. For more information please visit the Fire Up website.

 

TED Paper and workshop at EAD conference in Sweden

23 January 2013

This spring’s team commitments in Sweden also include a workshop and paper presentation at the 10th EAD Crafting the Future Conference in Gothenburg in April. Professor Becky Earley collaborates with Jen Ballie (TED PhD student) and Otto von Busch (Konsfact University Sweden) on a hands-on workshop. TED PhD Researcher Clara Vuletich has successfully submitted a paper and will present this at the conference.

Titled Black Hack Chat, the workshop will combine two design activism research projects - The Black Hack where Earley worked with participants on upcycling old polyester shirts and Old is the New Black, where Ballie and von Busch re-worked old clothes using black paint. The aim of the workshop is to push the boundaries of textile design practice through co-design to identify how it can be used as a tool for citizen engagement, for both: the individual creating for themselves, and the retailer who wishes to creatively engage with their products over a longer time frame.

The paper ‘We Are Disruptive: New Practices for Fashion/Textile Designers in the Supply Chain’ explores a recently completed project as part of the Clara’s PhD research (funded by MISTRA Future Fashion research project 2011), that examines how a designer can use design skills throughout a supply chain to identify opportunities to improve both environmental and social impacts for a company.

Image: Black Hack, Sept 2012

Fire UP launch event

23 January 2013

Today Wednesday 23rd January the UAL’s Fire Up project launches at London College of Fashion. The one year project will invite SME’s to get involved in this exciting initiative running throughout 2013.

Becky Earley is a co-investigator, with Adam Thorpe (Design Against Crime), and Professor Sandy Black (CSF) as Principle Investigator. The project is aimed at leveraging the social capital vested within alumni networks to engage with small businesses within this sector, particularly those that do not access or take advantage of new research developments.

FIREup will focus on the creation of a prototype digital platform that will research new models of knowledge exchange and foster open innovation. The platform will create an accessible knowledge base for academic/B-2-B interactions, integrate research methodologies into the industry creating new collaborations between science and design disciplines, and support the industry to reduce its carbon footprint by sharing best practice.

The event is at London College of Fashion, and opens at 5.30pm for 6pm briefing and Q&A. Please RSVP to r.mallinson@fashion.arts.ac.uk

For more information please follow this link.

Manifesto for Creative Innovation

10 December 2012

Print Room at Konstfack

Weave Room at Konstfack

TED has recently launched a new elective program at Konstfack in Stockholm, Sweden, encouraging students to create their own Manifesto for Creative Innovation following a five-week course designed by TED. This new course proposal is shaped by the outcomes of 14 sessions on sustainable design led by TED with Chelsea MA Textile Design between October 2011 and April 2012.

The team will deliver this course between February and March 2013 to an inter-disciplinary group of students and the outcomes might be documented in an exhibition or in a report. The educational purpose of the course is to offer the students design-led and practice-based approaches for sustainability that they can incorporate and build upon throughout their studies.

Guest Professors: Professor Kay Politowicz & Becky Earley