The Royal Melbourne Institute of Technology is on our sustainable fashion radar this week following their extremely successful inaugural "Commune" sustainability festival and lecture series. Featuring world leading thinkers in sustainable fashion: Timo Rissanen, Otto von Busch, Paula Rogers, Sue Thomas, Grace McQuilten, Angela Finn, Emma Lynas and Georgia McCorkill amongst others, the event attracted researchers from all over Australia, and encouraged a dialogue amongst Melbourne fashion design students.
Creative producer, Patricia O'Brien was happy to bring attention to the many areas of sustainable fashion including low-impact fabrics, slow design and even compostable garment technology. Her vision of the fashion future engages the concept of quality, inclusivity and designing with the entire life cycle in mind. As an attendee (and speaker) on the day I jotted down some of the most interesting projects and will give a quick snapshot of who is doing what in sustainable fashion.
Timo Rissanen
We first explored Parsons New York's first Professor of Sustainable Fashion, Timo Rissanen when we talked about
zero waste design. As a stalwart of sustainable fashion, Rissanen's work with zero waste is inspiring his students to design-out fabric scraps, and also create beautiful garments with intergenerational emotional connectedness, with not just one wearer but an entire family.
Otto von Busch
"Haute couture heretic, and fashion renegade" Otto von Busch is one of the most fascinating, compassionate fashion theorists provoking thought through clothing. His main research was published in his book
Becoming Fashion-able in 2008. Since then he has gone on to incite many other open source and hacktivist fashion projects and I will definitely be doing a follow up column on him in the coming weeks.
The Social Studio
Grace McQuilten and her partner Raphael Kilpatrick started The Social Studio in 2009 as a community environment where garments can be created using the skills of the young refugee community. The Social Studio sources fabric from industry excess, and refashions it into cohesive and vibrant collections. The Social Studio has been a force for good in the local industry, helping people who have experienced being a refugee along a pathway to employment or further study, and winning a swathe of awards along the way, including the Small Business of the Year Award, being commended in the City of Yarra Sustainability Awards and a finalist spot in the Melbourne Awards.
Emma Lynas
Emma Lynas is exploring notions of slow design as specifically related to textile surfaces. Exploring the connection between object and person she is involved in learning more about creating a "beautiful strangeness" to invoke a sense of curiosity and connection which she hopes will lead to a slowing down of consumption, less owned "junk" and more meaningful connections.
Georgia McCorkill
Georgia McCorkill is a fashion activist and researcher at RMIT exploring the idea of commandeering popular culture to sew seeds of sustainability in the minds of a wider audience. Through her Red Carpet Project she dresses celebrities in sustainable occasion wear and spruiks the message of sustainability. She recently dressed Zoe Tuckwell-Smith, star of Chanel 7's
Winners and Losers for the Logies. Tuckwell-Smith spoke about her dress and sustainability on the red carpet, a flash of inspiration in
an otherwise frivolous evening. The dress was so divisive it made several best dressed lists and also appeared in worst dressed lists, which is an amazing feat considering the banally pretty frocks advised by most stylists and television network guidelines.
With the very interesting array of strategies for working towards sustainable fashion, RMIT should be commended for attracting the well regarded assembly, and they are bound to be inundated with enrolments from students with a real interest in sustainable fashion.
As Patricia O'Brien, Commune Creative Producer, summed up, "It was a great opportunity for the fashion and textiles community to gather with sustainability as the common thread and it was also a great deal of fun!"