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When doing some research before leaving for India I found that I was very interested in the idea of designing for disassembly. When arriving in India and discussing the project with Ina she didn’t have too much of a direction in which she wanted to head with the project however she was interested in transformability. Originally we began looking into how we could merge both designing for disassembly and transformability but after a few days we found it to be too much given the timeframe so decided to stick with just designing for disassembly.
Within this idea we looked into ways in which we could make a garment easy to disassemble. Firstly we looked at things like water soluble threads and threads that were heat sensitive but we decided this was too simple and not our of the box enough for us. So we began looking at unconventional closures (you can see the images that we found and took inspiration from on the 4th board in our presentation). As a group we really liked the idea of using magnets as it was an easy way for things to be snapped together and also apart. Khush also thought that using magnets could have an added bonus as they are proven to help with blood pressure so could be beneficial to those whom have issues with blood pressure.
Once we had looked into closures we thought about other ways in which we could design for disassembly but in a way that we hadn’t seen it done before. I’m not sure how we came to the conclusion but we decided to design our garments being made entirely out of square and rectangle shapes. This gave us two benefits, the first being the patterns naturally would be zero waste or very minimal waste and secondly once disassembled the garments could be used to create lots of other things as the consumer would be left with a whole lot of squares and rectangles.
Moving on from this we began to design.
I found it quite challenging trying to design using purely squares and rectangles so I decided to do some draping and draw from the images to get the ball rolling.
I then began designing on the body.
From here we collated our designs and began to pick our favourites and put them into a line up. (final line up can be seen below in the presentation slides)
throughout the design process we naturally moved away from sticking purely to magnets for attachments as we decided it was a bit to insecure to construct an entire garment however they were still included in a few of the designs along with other enclosures that we liked. because of this change we then decided to look into seams and what kind of stitch could be easily removed but also hold the garment together securely. I did some sampling and decided a regular running stitch was the most effective.
We decided as a team that to keep the line up consistent Ina would illustrate it, so whilst she was doing that I curated our presentation slides and also drew some little close ups of some of the garments.
I also drew all the doodles and the writing and the design for the booklet that you can see in the presentation.
Whilst Ina and myself headed the design process our NIFT students Khush and Barsha focused on creating a textile that the were really interested in, we decided that within our collection we wanted to use entirely natural fibres just to add to the sustainable outlook of our collection. So Khush and Barsha decided to experiment felting merino wool with other types of recycled fabrics and yarns. Unfortunately the fabrics did not integrate well into the felt so that trial didn’t work, but the yarns worked and created a really cool print in the end. we also played around with natural dyes, the main one being turmeric, this was very interesting to me as I had never seen fabric being dyed and knew nothing about the process so I learnt a lot from the NIFT students in this aspect of the project. The final result of the felt turned out very well and Barsha decided to do some embroidery onto it which looked beautiful, we were all very happy.
After all this we were ready to create our final slides for the presentation at the High Commission. These slides can be seen below.
FINAL PRESENTATION SLIDES
Showing the harm of textile waste and the effects that fabric dying has on our water ways.
Our mood board combining NZ trends with Indian trends
Concept board showing ideas of disassembly and what we were inspired by for our concept.
looking at concepts for closures both conventional and un-conventional.
textile board showing our colour palette, including lots of different prints as we plan on using dead stock fabrics so will not always find the same patterns etc.
Mood board, showing that our collection is ageless as their are designs to suit everyone. our collection is also timeless as the garments are all reasonably simple meaning they fit with any trend to increase their wear time. We will sell this collection at community gatherings so that we aren’t promoting fast fashion and can create connection with our consumer and create relationships between them and their garment.
Final line up
An example of what the pattern for a Dress from the collection looks like.
Production of the felt
Dying and embroidery of the felt.
Booklet that would be sold with each garment.
The presentation at the NZ high commission was such a great experience. I felt very privileged to be able to stand up in front of an audience of such prestige and present the work that we had done.
Overall I think we were all very happy with our project, although there were a few hiccups along the way we worked as a team and found ways around them. Personally I enjoyed our concept and would love to push it further to see it become something bigger. I’m very proud of our group as we did only have 6 or so days to complete this project so I think we did awesome to produce the work that we did
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