Hacking Sustainable Fashion

Photos by Megan MacMurray

Fashion Projects readers might be familiar with Giana Gonzalez, an interaction designer and artist who seeks to hack into the fashion system. I had interviewed her back in 2006 about her Hacking Couture workshops. Results from her workshops given in New York, Chicago, California and Istanbul are on view now at Eyebeam as part of the exhibition Re:Group: Beyond Models of Consensus.

Giana and I will be giving a FREE workshop this coming Wednesday, July 14th, at Eyebeam using the hacking methodology Giana has created. Only this time, instead of trying to hack the code of fashion brands, we are setting our sights a bit higher - we aim to hack into the sustainable fashion movement. In fact, we know that ultimately, a hack into sustainable fashion is really about hacking the entire fashion system...something we are very excited to try. Please do attend if you can, as we cannot do this alone.

Of course, we will be posting the code we develop on the Fashion Code Wiki.

More images from the Re:Group: Beyond Models of Consensus exhibition after the jump.

Sarah Scaturro

An Other Fashion: Claiming America Through Dress

Dancers from San Francisco nightclub Forbidden City, backstage 1950

Fashion Projects is pleased to help spread the word about an exhibition that Minh-ha and Mimi over at ThreadBared are mounting. I've been working a bit with Minh-ha on how to go about organizing such an unprecedented exhibition as "An Other Fashion: Claiming America Through Dress" and am very excited to see what the outcome is.

Besides this exhibition being groundbreaking due to its topic, it is also on the cutting-edge through its use of crowdsourcing. One of the main difficulties is that the type of material they want to show has not typically been collected or exhibited by museums, and thus they are actively seeking contributions for objects to display. It is us, the public, who will help shape the outcome of this exhibition. Please pass this exhibition call on to others out there...

Sarah Scaturro

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An Other Fashion: Claiming America through Dress So much of the African American experience is stashed in basements and attics. So writes fashion journalist Robin Givhan in her recent article about the Black Fashion Museum Collection’s move to the Smithsonian National Museum of African American History and Culture. For Givhan, the new home of this “treasure-trove of garments designed and worn by African Americans over the course of generations” at the Smithsonian Institution secures the preservation of a “hidden history . . . in danger of being washed away by the enormity of another Katrina or even a trifling family rift.”

An Other Fashion seeks to find these hidden histories stashed in the basements and attics, in the backs of closets, and in lesser-known personal and institutional archives of and about women of color. These histories are not only kept hidden due to the informal and often inadequate practices of preservation by ordinary people; instead, it is the official cultural archives such as museums and libraries that have played a significant and profound role in keeping hidden the sartorial histories of racially minoritized women.

Recent fashion exhibitions in New York City have included “Night and Day” and “Fashion and Politics” (both at the Museum at FIT); “American Woman, Fashioning a National Identity” (Costume Institute); and “American High Style: Fashioning a National Collection” (Brooklyn Museum). While these exhibitions focus on the convergence of fashion, nationalism, and collective memory, their emphases on formal politics, designer fashion, and eveningwear implicitly privilege dominant styles of dress and womanhood and tacitly inscribe Americanness with bourgeois white femininity. If racial, gender, sexual, class, and language barriers have historically shaped and limited the achievements and life chances of non-White and working women, then traditional museum exhibitions that emphasize the styles of bourgeois white womanhood to the exclusion of Other women collude in the ongoing marginalization and erasure of the lives and material cultural histories of minoritized American women.

An Other Fashion is a critical intervention into traditional understandings of fashion history, histories of “American” womanhood, and official memory practices. The exhibition seeks to critically explore the creative, cultural and political ways in which racially minoritized women in the U.S. have employed practices of dress and beauty to claim Americanness. Through highlighting garments, accessories, photographs, videos and texts, An Other Fashion does more than rediscover a hidden past; this groundbreaking exhibition reimagines our understanding of and relationship to the past. In providing a glimpse of the sartorial ephemera of women of color’s material cultural histories, this exhibition commemorates lives and experiences too often considered not important enough to save or to study. ** Contributing to the Exhibition **

We are looking for donations that will enhance the breadth and depth of this exhibition. Items we are interested include, but are not limited to:

Handmade, store-bought, or altered garments and accessories. Please note that garments do not need to be in perfect condition. The life of the garment is important to us!

Family or vintage photographs featuring women of color in fashionable looks

Newspaper and magazine articles and advertisements targeting women of color. Original prints are useful.

Other sartorial ephemera, such as accessories, packaging, cosmetics etc.

Please provide as much information as possible about the objects—for example, who made or designed them, who wore them, where they were used and how and why they were passed down to you. It is especially helpful if you send photographs of the pieces for consideration since we cannot accept all the objects offered to the collection.

The goal of this exhibition is to honor the life and memories of your treasures. Our fashion and textiles museum expert will make sure your items are well cared for and returned to you in as good or, when possible, better condition. The condition of your garment will determine the method of display—we will not display or store your objects in a manner that can cause further harm. You will be listed as a donor and items will be returned to you or otherwise disposed of in accordance with the donor’s wishes.

If you have or know of material, visual, and textual objects that you believe we should consider, please contact us at threadbared.75@gmail.com. (Include “An Other Fashion” in the subject line.)

Costs, in time and materials, for shipping and storing items are quite substantial. Our museum expert estimates that each object will require approximately $100 to appropriately store each object (shipping and display costs excluded). We would greatly appreciate your help toward meeting these expenses and hope that you will accompany your gift with some of the funds necessary to help us preserve it.

Exhibitions off the Beaten Path: Fashion at the Time of Fascism

The exhibition Fashion At The Time Of Fascism - Italian Modernist Lifestyle 1922-1943 examines the relation between fashion, modernism and Fascism and will be on view through June 18. Although, not off the beaten path geographically, as it is in London, the exhibition is housed within a smaller and relatively new venue, the Fashion Space Gallery at the London College of Fashion.

The exhibition is curated by the Italian scholars Mario Lupano and Alessandra Vaccari and it is based on their honominous book. It is, in fact, described as a visual essay. (For those who miss the exhibition, the book, which is described in a New Yorker review as "handsome," can be easily found in Italian and English.)

Like the book, the exhibition, which is comprised of a range of media from actual garments to fashion and film magazines, is organized around four main concepts: Measurement, Model, Mark and Parade. Those are described in the literature accompanying the exhibition as follows:

"Measurement investigates the aspects of modernism which are closer to the concepts of order, rationality, scientific rigor and technical control. Rationalization in the productive processes of fashion is exalted by the use of beauty machines and sartorial instruments to measure the body, such as the one Domenico Caraceni patented.

Model is more directly connected with the discourse on “types” and lifestyles and is devoted to the dress code and models of style that become reference points for the whole epoch: from the iconic value of the “duce” to the stars of Hollywood and Italian cinema.

Mark analyses the connections between fashion and the construction of identity processes: from search for originality in national products, to authority of fashion creators, to the attempt of structuring an Italian fashion system.

Parade deals with the catwalk rite in its elements of modernist seriality and is concerned with fashion display in exhibitions, shop windows, cities and parades. In order to better grasp the theoretical configuration elaborated in the book and consequently organize a critical discourse on the modernist conception of fashion design in Italy, the exhibition includes the conceptual maps which, for each single session, identify the relationships between modernist ideas on the one hand and fashion practices on the other."

Francesca

Gone Green Long Ago

Left to right: Martin Margiela, jacket repurposed from vintage scarves, Spring 1992; Martin Margiela, socks, partially constructed sweater, and completed sweater, early 1990s; XULY.Bët, recycled ensemble, Fall 1994

All photos courtesy of the Museum at the Fashion Institute of Technology.

Fashion Projects is very pleased to present an interview with the curators of Eco-Fashion: Going Green, currently on view in the Fashion and Textile History Gallery of the Museum at the Fashion Institute of Technology. Jennifer Farley and Colleen Hill have thoughtfully, and at times provocatively, organized an enlightening and entertaining exhibition about eco-fashion, tracing the movement back over 200 years. The show is based around six themes: fiber origins, labor practices, the re-purposing and recycling of materials, quality of craftsmanship, textile dyeing and production, and the treatment of animals.

This exhibition importantly fulfills a gap in scholarship available about the eco-fashion movement. Recent exhibitions like the one that Francesca Granata and I co-curated at Pratt Manhattan Gallery, Ethics + Aesthetics = Sustainable Fashion, surveyed and tried to make sense of the movement as it exists today, seeking to suggest ways to balance aesthetic needs with environmental stability. However, Farley and Hill have taken a different course. They have used a tough mandate – to chronologically tell the history of fashion over the past two centuries using only the MFIT collection – and ingeniously exposed the ways in which sustainability and fashion have always been intertwined. There are some very special things in the exhibition - besides an arsenic-dyed dress, there is a rare cape made from exotic bird feathers, a man's dressing coat made from a patch-work quilt, and an electric blue fringed cellophane cape from Parisian couturier Lucien Lelong. I wish there would have been some examples of 19th century aesthetic dress, like a robe Jane Morris might have worn, but given the tight constraints of the gallery and the six themes, such a garment doesn't really fit in. For any fashion student or scholar who is interested in sustainability (which is hopefully all of you) this exhibition should be a requirement.

Farley and Hill graciously took a moment out of their day to answer the following questions for Fashion Projects:

Fashion Projects: As you mention in your essay for the exhibition, recently there seems to be a critical mass of exhibitions and writings on the current status of sustainable fashion, but relatively little on its history. What made you both decide to tackle this incredibly important gap in scholarship? Was there anything surprising that you learned?

Jennifer Farley and Colleen Hill: Our general interest in the topic started with the small selection of eco-fashion included in The Museum at FIT exhibition Fashion & Politics (July – November 2009). We discovered that the approaches to eco-design are very diverse, and we began thinking that those varied points of view would be interesting to explore in a historical context. When we intensively researched contemporary eco-fashion, we were surprised to discover very little discussion of fashion’s impact on the environment prior to the 1960s and 1970s. We thought the Museum at FIT’s Fashion & Textile History Gallery, which traces the history of fashion from the 18th century to the present, would lend itself perfectly to an evaluation of the topic.

In researching this topic, we delved into topics ranging from the science of synthetics to mechanization of production to labor regulations. Researching these often very technical subjects helped us to look at fashion from another perspective. We learned that synthetics can have merit in terms of production (i.e. using less water) and recyclability.

We knew the dangers of chemicals, such as chromium used in leather production, but were surprised to discover that the use of large amounts of salt, a seemingly innocuous substance, can also be an environmental concern.

1920s actress Minnie Maddern Fiske's anti-fur stance was also a bit of a revelation. Celebrity activism has become common, but it was amazing to find that such a well-known actress (in her day) had taken a public position more than 90 years ago.

Left: roller-printed cotton dress, circa 1821; right: jacquard-woven silk dress, circa 1830

The Fashion and Textile History Gallery is a wonderful idea in theory (to present fashion in a chronological order around a certain theme using MFIT collections), but seems like it would be very challenging in practice, particularly with its rigid structure and requirement that all objects be from your collections. What were some of the challenges you faced in trying to mount this exhibition?

The gallery can pose a curatorial challenge. In many cases, the 18th and 19th centuries are the more difficult time periods to cover. Surprisingly, in this case, it was significantly easier because of the range of subjects we explore in the exhibition – industrialization, synthetic dyes, and innovative modes of repurposing textiles.

We also needed to acquire contemporary sustainable garments, which required careful consideration as to which pieces we’d like represented not only in the exhibition but also in the museum’s permanent collection. We are very pleased with the selected objects and are grateful to the designers for their positive responses and generosity.

Since all of the garments shown in the gallery must be from the Museum’s collection, I noticed that you acquired quite a number for this exhibition. How many did you acquire? What were your favorite acquisitions?

We acquired 25 new pieces – 7 are accessories, the rest are costume. We are so pleased with everything we have acquired, it’s nearly impossible to choose a favorite. We have wanted to collect Natalie Chanin’s work for some time. We also learned so much from working directly with many of the designers, like John Patrick, who are very committed to sustainable fashion. We also love the Carlos Miele Fuxico gown.

We are pleased to have featured a number of local companies, like Bodkin, naturevsfuture, and Costello Tagliapietra. The museum's Deputy Director Patricia Mears featured Costello Tagliapietra in her recent exhibition – American Beauty: Aesthetics and Innovation in Fashion – and we are thrilled to now have their work represented in our permanent collection.

Carlos Miele, Fuxico gown, Spring 2008

Of the six themes that you identified within the ecofashion movement, did any resonate personally with you? Did you split the choosing of objects by themes or type of objects, or did you choose everything together?

Repurposing. This theme has such deep roots in the history of fashion, and it was amazing to see the ingenuity with which people have reinvented extant pieces. It also was interesting to see the degree to which value is placed on textile objects throughout history and how consumption patterns have changed.

We conferred on every object chosen to ensure the most cohesive selection possible.

I noticed that you placed Stella McCartney’s garments prominently at the opening of the exhibition and that the theme “treatment of animals” was identified often throughout the Gallery. Your label copy also leaned towards an anti-cruelty stance. What are your thoughts on the contemporary use of fur, feathers and leather in fashion?

As curators, we try not to inject personal opinion into our exhibitions. We didn’t intend to pass judgment on those who wear fur, feathers, and leather, but we did want to make our visitors aware of how those materials might be sourced and produced. We hope that our exhibition provokes thought on the production of all types of materials, including various types of fabric. Overall, our aim is to make people think about the origins of all the clothing they wear.

In the contemporary fashion section, there are three examples of garments by British designers Ciel (Sarah Ratty), Enamore (Jennifer Ambrose), and Rebecca Early. You also mention the writings of Sandy Black, a professor at the London College of Fashion. Do you think there is a difference in the way that sustainable fashion is approached and understood in the UK and the USA?

The approach to or understanding of sustainable fashion in the UK and the US is quite similar – these designers are all creative, compassionate people who strive to make a difference in some way. What we found most interesting in the selection of contemporary fashion overall – regardless of nationality – was the difference in approach to eco-friendly design. These differences are readily apparent among the three examples you cited: Sarah Ratty’s dress utilizes the increasingly popular eco-fabric lyocell, Jennifer Ambrose repurposes vintage fabric, and Rebecca Earley’s secondhand shirt is “upcycled.” We found the various approaches to sustainable design to be fascinating, and we tried to express to our visitors that there is no one way to be “eco.”

You broach the idea of slow fashion through your theme “quality of craftsmanship.” Do you think that slow fashion as a movement will catch on? Were you tempted to acquire a fast fashion garment to use as a counterpoint to the quality of craftsmanship thread?

Slow fashion has many positive points. In some ways, the slow fashion movement is reintroducing high levels of craftsmanship and quality that the average consumer has rarely seen, simply because fast fashion is so much more prevalent. Slow fashion is often more expensive by necessity, but we hope that people will realize its benefit as an investment purchase – something that could become an integral part of their wardrobe for many years. Since the average person is so familiar with fast fashion, we didn’t feel it necessary to include something to counterpoint good quality. We also don’t want anyone to feel bad about what they choose to wear – we simply want to educate our viewers about the benefits of more thoughtful consumerism.

NOIR, multilayered evening gown, Illuminati II cotton and silver studded leather, Fall 2010, Denmark, gift of Noir/In Darkness All Colors Agree.

Now that you’ve explored the historic and current state of eco-fashion, where do you think the future of eco-fashion will lead us? Are you more hopeful or less after having gone through this experience?

We’ve received a very enthusiastic response to the exhibition from the contemporary designers who participated, from the media, and from our visitors, which makes us very hopeful about the future of eco-fashion. Since eco-fashion – at least as we perceive it – can be approached in so many ways, any designer or consumer who becomes more conscious of where their clothing comes from – and acts on it – can make an impact. Additionally, many of the designers we worked with emphasized that they want consumers to first see their clothing as chic and fashionable – only later discovering that it is also sustainable. We feel that this “fashion first” attitude is important, and will help to move the eco-fashion movement forward.

The exhibition is open until November 13, 2010.

MFIT
Seventh Avenue at 27 Street
New York City 10001-5992
Information: 212 217.4558
Tues – Fri Noon – 8pm
Saturday 10am – 5pm
Closed Sundays, Mondays, and legal holidays.

Sarah Scaturro

Eco Chic: Towards Sustainable Swedish Fashion

Julian Red. Photo: Mikael Schultz @ Swedish Institute

by Francesca Granata

The Eco-Chic: Towards Sustainable Swedish Fashion Exhibition at the Scandinavia House opened with an interesting panel discussion including Marcus Bergman (managing director of Ecocotton, a pioneer in organic cotton production), Sass Brown (a professor at the Fashion Institute of Technology whose research focuses on women’s cooperatives in Latin America) and Karin Stenmar (a founder of the Swedish eco-fashion company Dem Collective). It was moderated by Hazel Clark, Dean of the School of Art and Design History and Theory at Parsons, who has a longstanding interest in slow fashion and the secondhand clothing trade.

Organized as a roundtable discussion, it covered the difficulty in sourcing sustainable material, partially attributed to the lack of innovation in the textiles industry, the need for living wages and the development of women’s cooperatives. Bodkin tied her interest in eco-fashion to her interest in Swedish Modernism and a drive towards functionality in clothing. However, it was interesting to hear how, according to Bergman, the ethos of Swedish design “of functionality and honesty in design” did not sufficiently enter the realm of fashion, due to the fact that fashion/textiles studies developed separately from other branches of design, at least in Sweden. The need for a new fashion design education was thus addressed to allow for the development of more aware designers. Also mentioned was the need for mass-market companies to join the conversation. According to Brown, this is actually occurring: As an example she mentioned Wal-Mart’s commitment to transitional cotton—a company which seemed odd to bring up due to their long-standing history of labour exploitation.

Clark asked about the creation of memories and narratives through clothes, something that Stenmar’s company, Dem Collective, addressed by having buyers record the life of their clothes in a project called One in a Thousand Jeans. This reminded me of an evocative and inspiring project I had been meaning to write about by a Dutch designer Ruby Hoette—Worn Relics—which involves the recording of the life story of one’s favourite piece of clothes.

The exhibition, shows the diversity of design comprising Swedish eco fashion, and proves a real commitment on the part of Sweden and the Swedish design community to the search for sustainable solutions for the fashion industry. It remains open through August 21.