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We don't want to wear the same clothes everyday and charity shops aren't everyone's bag, but with around two million tonnes of textiles going to landfill every year in the UK alone, it doesn't take a genius to realise we must find a sustainable alternative to our addiction to 'wearing something new every day'.
At Chelsea College of Art and Design they have decided to look deeper into this dilemma, and as part of a research project on sustainable textile design, 34 designers have created an exhibition, Ever & Again, which explores the phenomenon of 'upcycling'. Upcycling is all about using waste products to create something new and useful. This exhibition focuses on textiles, improving them in some shape or form every time they're ready to be recycled. The reason for this, explains curator and designer Rebecca Early, is: "there needs to be an economic incentive for textiles recycling to have a future in the UK".
The project is based on research by the Design Council, which concluded that if designers make informed and appropriate design decisions at the beginning of the chain, then the environmental performance of any product can be improved by up to 90 per cent. Early explains how the designers have made use of that information: "We explore the role that the textile designer can play in creating textiles that have a lower impact on the environment. This includes recycling and reuse. Over the past ten years TED [Textiles Environment Design at Chelsea College] has been developing a set of practice-based eco-design strategies for textile designers. In this exhibition we combine the strategies to show how we have begun to make better textile products using these ideas."
The exhibition consists of 16 old wardrobes containing the designers' different ideas of how it would be possible to 'upcycle' various textiles. One of the most prominent examples of 'upcycling' is Gary Page's 1-2-6 exhibit, which shows how one dress, if designed to do so, can be transformed into six different dresses over a period of six to 12 years, so theoretically its consumer can alter her dress as the fashion changes. Imagine the amount of textiles we would rescue from landfill if all clothes were designed that way.
Ever & Again is showing at Chelsea College of Art and Design from Thursday 18 October to Thursday 25 October.
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