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

Material resourcefulness

Garments are fusions of materials and energy brought to the body in myriad configurations, yet the dominant force in fashion, consumerism, tends to value only a narrow spectrum of fashion activity. The practices of material resourcefulness broaden this view and show a burgeoning testing ground of an alternative flows of fibre, fabric and product.

Memory scarf

"I worked in Nigeria in the late 1970s and I came back and I got a job in the north of England and it was very cold and my mother was very worried about me so she knitted me this scarf obviously out of old bits of wool that she had got left over from other garments so there is a nice degree of continuity because I know, for example, the original garments that this wool came from. I’m colour blind by the way… so is this orange? Yes that came out of a sort of sleeveless pullover that she knitted for me. The blue was a jersey that she knitted for my sister I remember. The brown and the fawn, not so sure about."

Berlin - July 2010
Photograph by Stefan Rother

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