Zero-waste Fashion Design A Study At The Intersection Of Cloth Fashion Design And Pattern Cutting

[Randell Magtoto]

Roundaboutthe Zero Waste Design Collective and Worn have joined forces to create a series of in-person Zero Waste design workshops in Lagos, Nigeria and Accra, Ghana in April 2024. With collaboration and knowledge sharing as a key focus, these workshops are dedicated to advancing the practice of Zero Waste Fashion Design within the local African context by offering circular solutions in design and garment making. We invite you to redefine fashion waste as an opportunity for positive change.

We are a global collective, working at the intersection of education, practice and industry. By connecting across boundaries, we harness the power of community to tackle textiles' most pressing problem. Waste.

From academics - to craftspeople, we provide world-class learning and training that is open, accessible and rooted in real-life experience. Our unique insight, collective experience, and practical approach enables us to be industry leaders in making zero waste possible across sectors and scale. We bring together ZWD resources, inspiration, and tools, while building an inclusive international community to harness the power of the collective to design for good.

Roundabout inspires new solutions by highlighting exciting developments in Africa while facilitating access to highly relevant information, expertise, and tools that brands can use in their day - day design work. By building bridges with global communities and co-designing innovative new ideas that are relevant to African issues, materials, and opportunities, the platform serves as a tool and reference point for industry development. Roundabout also supports transparency and access to materials that create opportunities for collaboration and partnership.

Designers Consociate is a full-service consultancy with a trackable record of building brands from scratch and re-establishing brand equity with innovative strategies, actionable insights, compelling stories, and multi-faceted collaborations. We are committed to engineering growth and development by creating sustainable solutions for brands within the creative industry.

We work to highlight, develop, and promote novel and consciously designed Made in Africa brands and products with a core focus on locally sourced natural textiles, raw materials, and manufacturing. We are committed to helping brands make a positive impact, while staying true to their traditional values.

Zara Odu, the visionary founder of Designers Consociate, is a dynamic force with 15 years of experience in Africa's vibrant creative landscape. As a brand consultant and ardent champion of sustainable development, Zara is a catalyst for transformation. Zara's local expertise and network offer a deep understanding of the African market; and through this has helped African designers seeking global impact to overcome local challenges and optimise local supply chains. Passionate about advancing conversations surrounding sustainability and the circular economy in Africa, Zara is a leading advocate in the industry. Through Designers Consociate and her recently launched Roundabout, she works tirelessly to promote conscious business practices and raise awareness about the importance of sustainability.

Cassandra Belanger has 13 years of experience hosting workshops in sustainable design and sewing. Her work is an invitation to a more sustainable future and education is at the centre of her creative practice. She is the founder of The Stitchery Studio, is co-founder and Director of the ZWDC and a founding member of Sustainable Fashion Scotland. She is the resident sewing instructor at the Central Scottish School of Craft and a Fashion and Textile Lecturer at Glasgow West College. Her design and teaching practice challenges makers, designers and educators to think through the social and environmental impacts of their practice, exploring issues such as zero waste, intersectionality, transparency, colour therapy, feminism, sizeism, and body image. Cassandra is committed to decolonising her teaching practice.

April 9 - This workshop is open to anyone interested in Zero Waste Design, regardless of experience level. We will bring lectures, paper demos, and discussion to the table, and dive into how this could work locally.

April 10 - 12 - This workshop is for brands and makers in Lagos. We will dive into the theory and play of Zero Waste, learn how to execute Zero Waste on a garment level, and how it can fit into a wider brand context.

This paper discusses research currently being undertaken which addresses the interrelated volume, value and cost of waste and the responsibility designers have in their creation. The paper beginning by outlining the contemporary waste problem (in the fashion industry). Then utilizing observations made during recent field tests - where waste reduction and elimination were applied to existing designs - the impact that explicit and implicit design hierarchies and complexity have on waste minimization attempts are discussed. Questions such as: is waste a problem in the context of proposed circular economy models? After all, if we have a circular economy, then any waste we make can be put back into the cycle. So, will the CE let designers (and industry) off the hook? Lastly, I speculate as to what a fashion industry without waste might look like, discussing my design response to the issues raised.

As our understanding of fashion and sustainability broadens beyond quantified accounts of supply chains and material use, the fashion system requires an expanded, holistic understanding of the fabricated body and mind, and how design may contribute to their formation. In this chapter we weave connections between mind, body, garment and cloth, beginning with our practice in zero waste fashion design, in relation to industry and user. We then examine these ideas in relation to radical craft practitioners such as the Friends of Light collective and Yoshiyuki Minami of Manonik, both of whom employ hand-weaving to create three-dimensional garments with minimal waste, while intentionally and explicitly giving value to the meditative aspect of the ancient yet modern craft. We contrast these practices with those of avant garde fashion designers Rickard Lindqvist of Atacac and Gabi Asfour of Threeasfour, whose garments may produce fabric waste but whose practices seem to be underpinned by a holistic embracing of the body in their designed garments. The chapter asks questions about the presence and absence of mind-body connections in contemporary fashion design practice, and the roles of technology, weaving and cutting, framed as crafts, in facilitating these connections.

The pandemic slowed fast fashion to a standstill. Now as the world opens up and we are socializing and going places, we want to dress up again. But after living a confined and simpler life during COVID, this is a good time to take stock of the implications of how we dress. Fashion, and especially fast fashion, has enormous environmental impacts on our planet, as well as social ones.

Since the 2000s, fashion production has doubled and it will likely triple by 2050, according to the American Chemical Society. The production of polyester, used for much cheap fast fashion, as well as athleisure wear, has increased nine-fold in the last 50 years. Because clothing has gotten so cheap, it is easily discarded after being worn only a few times. One survey found that 20 percent of clothing in the US is never worn; in the UK, it is 50 percent. Online shopping, available day and night, has made impulse buying and returning items easier.

According to McKinsey, average consumers buy 60 percent more than they did in 2000, and keep it half as long. And in 2017, it was estimated that 41 percent of young women felt the need to wear something different whenever they left the house. In response, there are companies that send consumers a box of new clothes every month.

The fashion industry produces 1.2 million metric tons of CO2 each year, according to a MacArthur Foundation study. In 2018, it resulted in more greenhouse gas emissions than the carbon produced by France, Germany and the UK all together. Polyester, which is actually plastic made from fossil fuels, is used for about 65 percent of all clothing, and consumes 70 million barrels of oil each year. In addition, the fashion industry uses large amounts of fossil fuel-based plastic for packaging and hangers.

As a result, 53 million metric tons of discarded clothing are incinerated or go to landfills each year. In 2017, Burberry burned $37 million worth of unsold bags, clothes and perfume. If sent to a landfill, clothes made from natural fabrics like cotton and linen may degrade in weeks to months, but synthetic fabrics can take up to 200 years to break down. And as they do, they produce methane, a powerful global warming greenhouse gas.

Many people have lived solely in athleisure wear during the pandemic, but the problem with this is that the stretch and breathability in most athleisure comes from the use of synthetic plastic fibers like polyester, nylon, acrylic, spandex and others, which are made of plastic.

Because it must be cheap, fast fashion is dependent on the exploited labor force in developing countries where regulations are lax. Workers are underpaid, overworked, and exposed to dangerous conditions or health hazards; many are underage.

As opposed to our current linear model of fashion production with environmental impacts at every stage, where resources are consumed, turned into a product, then discarded, sustainable fashion minimizes its environmental impact, and even aims to benefit the environment. The goal is a circular fashion industry where waste and pollution are eliminated, and materials are used for as long as possible, then reused for new products to avoid the need to exploit virgin resources.

To eliminate the 15 percent of a fabric that usually ends up on the cutting room floor in the making of a garment, zero waste pattern cutting is used to arrange pattern pieces on fabric like a Tetris puzzle.

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