An international fashion research project exploring the 'craft of use'

Easy Repair

The fashion industry’s industrial cut and sew techniques produce a polished garment, so polished in fact that it seems complete as is, closed to improvisation from the ‘outside’. But the design and construction of some garments are different, more like a work in progress, open to adaptation and repair and to building understanding about how things are made.

Mismatch buttons

"This is a chambray shirt and I took off all the buttons and replaced them. I have jars and jars of antique buttons. So I did a bunch of totally mismatched buttons. It’s not the most original idea… there’s a project of a carpet maker… who designs carpet tiles that are purposely mismatched, so that if you stain one of the tiles and have to replace it, you won’t notice that it’s been replaced because all the tiles are mismatched anyway. So I thought, if I loose a button on the shirt, you need to have a matching button unless you purposely mismatch all of them, so that was the plan with this shirt."


San Francisco - July 2012
Photograph by Paige Green