Garde-robe sensible
Gare-robe sensible discusses the future of fashion in the context of climate emergency. How toxic are colours in fashion? How toxic is fashion? Does fashion have boundaries? What does rural Sweden say about fashion? What does weather say about fashion? What does fashion say about climate change? This work questions fashion’s relationship to environment and environmental anxieties using colour as a method. It is a body-dress-space exploration looking for embodied alternative aesthetics for fashion for a more critical future. Six colours (yellow, orange, pink, purple, blue and white) have been investigated so far. These are installed in the landscape, activated, arranged and manipulated in various ways, interacting with weather and in-situ designs. These textile installations are situated in a bodily practice and relate to garment as a trace and materiality, as well as work of imagination. Together with these photographs, poetry-based texts address the link between image and fashion.
Making process
Colour interaction has been used as a method, based on a back-and-forth process of sketching and draping.
Sketching enabled analysis of colours contrast and intensity depending on the landscape, weather, time of the day and use of artificial light. Draping method aimed at looking for forms related to body and fashion. They were then translated in the landscape and documented through photography.
Both methods were intertwined and drove the choice of natural colour palette, looking for recognisable, high saturated colours for a stronger colour effect on photographs, resulting for example in dyeing with insects like cochineal for pink and plants like reseda for yellow. The aim was to push the boundaries of natural dyes colour effect. It addresses fast fashion’s use of industrial dye mostly looking for high saturation of colours while natural dyes are seen as less saturated colours. Natural dye, an ancestral colourist knowledge, has been here used with an innovative tweak of artificial light and contrast with colours of the landscape.
All in all, these series of images question the relation between fashion and the environment in the context of climate change, and address the future of fashion’s colours for a more critical future.
Text submitted by the maker and edited by the Future Materials Bank. For information about reproducing (a part of) this text, please contact the maker.
Ingredients
Plants and insects based colour, silk