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3. Circular Open Source Fashion


This week we focused on Circular Fashion, Open Design and Modular Design

  • Circular Fashion refers to fashion designed to be recycled, reused, resold, renewed. Typically fashion today ends up in the landfill, or at best in secondhand stores which still one day ends up in a landfill. At the moment of creation of a piece, Circular Fashion keeps in mind the end of the life of this piece.

  • Open Source refers to the idea (FIND GRAPHIC) of making designs accessible and available to all. This creates collaboration among everyone who has access and also allows for local / sustainable creation of pieces. If someone invents something amazing across the world, why should we have to mass produce and ship across long distances (REWORD). Coincidentally, the weekend after discussing this concept in the lecture, I discovered Enzo Mari. Mari is a designer, specializing in furniture, who in the 1970s in response to mass production of furniture (source), released a book Autoprogettazione, which provides instructions to reproduce his works. I love the idea of designing for local production, (elaborate)

  • Modular Design is the concept of creating seamless garments using small laser cut pieces with the ability to interlock. This concept is amazing because a piece can be transformed into many other pieces and back again. This also is especially cool because if a piece or part of a garment gets damaged, its easy to replace certain pieces and renew the garment.

References & Inspiration

I pulled inpsiration from three main sources

Originally, I thought of where we find modular structures in nature. I focused on how fish scales and snake skin fit together and how these structures expand and decrease to allow for the organic shape of the animal.


Then I started to notice "modular" design all over the streets of Brussels.


Generally I don't like to pull inspiration from existing garments, because its hard for me to get those exact designs out of my head, but I found these two pieces very inspiring

OLIMA custom pleated ruffle/stripe corset/skirt combo for La Dona
Eckhaus Latta Aurora Sweater in Pear


Research & Ideation

First a Failure

I began with the idea of scales. I thought about how a piece could fit together and what the effect I wanted was. I created this piece so that each piece fits under the piece above the side, so the bottom would always be exposed like scales. I created multiple rows of holes to allow for the garment to change shape and size. I couldn’t cut it very well with scissors because it was very fragile so I tested it on the laser cutter with some scrap fabric. This piece did not give an effect I liked and it was definitely not zero waste. A failure!


But it taught me a valuable lesson. I rushed through the steps because I felt rushed at the end of last week and I wanted to just pick an idea and get moving. But after I made this, I decided that this was definitely not the right process. I decided to dedicate all the following day to thinking without the pressure of creating anything good (and this ended up being a much better way to create something I loved!)

Next Steps

I found it very difficult to start after this, but after talking to Jeanne at my FabLab, she mentioned that she felt it was helpful to come up with some constraints and go from there.

So the Constraints I came up with were

-Multiple pieces together can make darts or other 3D shapes (e.g., corner of bag)

-Possibility to create increases & decreases (e.g., Loes Bogers)

-Zero waste

Process and workflow

Paper Prototyping


1) I started with a very basic zero waste Square to understand how simple pieces can fit together. I made one piece male and the other female.

2) I decided to lengthen (and make smaller) the square into a 3x1 rectangle in order to create more ways that the pieces could fit together

3) Inspired by Alessia Pasquini, I wanted to expand on the idea of long rectangles fitting together. I created this rectangle with many male and female pieces along each edge so that they can be staggered, and also I included an extra row of female pieces in order to create the possibility to decrease the size of a garment and create 3D shaping.

4) After creating the above and looking at pieces made by previous students, I realized that the shape that is exposed is not the shape of the piece, but rather the shape that remains after hiding the male and female parts of the shape. So I decided I wanted a circle to be the base shape, and created a square with the male and female parts. I loved this one because I could easily create darting without creating multiple pieces

5) Inspired by the Eckhaus Latta piece above, I wanted to create this fish shape. But the first idea I had after making it was weaving (5a), when I tried to really mimic the Eckhaus Latta design (5b) it became overly complex in my opinion. It worked, but I wanted to opt for something more user friendly

6) I wanted to create something like (4), but that could create 3D shapes like the Olima Studio dress above, so I created this curvy shape with afemale part in the center and along the sides to create more options for putting together. In the end I didn't love the effect and it wasn't zero waste

Design (4) ended up being the winner! But I had more paper prototyping to do. This design was zero waste, and created darting, but I still wanted to be able to create increase and decreases.

First I thought I could do this by creating a triangle piece and a pentagon piece


But after creating the triangle it was clear this wouldn't work (see left-most object). I also experimented with making male and female parts on every side of the piece to make it easier to construct and so that I wouldn't have to be so careful about placement. However, I didn't like the look of that (see right-most piece).

So I took a deeper look at Loes Boger's piece from 2020, and they included very detailed explanation of how they created increases and decreases by increasing the shape.


So I decided to opt for a diamond shape, increasing only one pair of sides, which worked great. The increases I wanted were subtle, around the bust, after the waist etc., so this was perfect

Inkscape



I used Inkscape and it was super easy to created my shape, I measured the circle, sqaure, and border I used and created these shapes on Inkscape and placed them using the X, Y inputs so that everything was perfectly aligned (more detail later). To create the tiling I clicked Edit --> Clone --> Create Tiled Clones...


Then to create the diamond I rotated by 45 degrees and increased the X axis by 120% so that I would have a subtle increase. To tile the diamonds is a little more complicated. I had to rotate the object again so that one of the lines is parallel to the X or Y axis. then click Edit --> Clone --> Created Tiled Clones... and in the "Shift Tab" I entered the settings below. This is just trial and error depending on the angle of the object. Unfortunately the Diamond shape is not zero waste around the edges.


After constructing the garment, I realized I needed 4 more pieces that had were female on all sides.

Laser Cutting

I experimented with a few different fabrics. My favorite fabric that I tested failed the Belstein test


I found these two green fabrics that I loved. I'm not sure what they are, but they melt nicely around the edge to create a seal, but hold up well.


I also tested this fake leather.


I chose to go with the green fabric because I loved the look and it seemed to hold its shape well with the test. However, after putting together all the pieces its clear this was not the right choice. Despit my male pieces having quite long edges, its still not so secure and often comes apart as I move or pull, so I don't think its even possible to wear this garment. I think if I remake with the fake leather it will be really solid though!

Assembly

To create the garmented I just start started by experimenting. I started with a dart, created by 3 pieces put together and winged it from there.


Once I had something I liked, I mirror imaged it on the opposite side. Since I didn't have male and femal on each side, I had to be careful to keep all the male pieces facing up and right, and the female pieces facing down and left so that all the pieces could continue to fit together


The first iteration I didn't like. The shape of the circles felt like armor to me, along with the army green color. However, when I flipped it inside out, I loved the look! Even though its not practical to wear, I want to continue to experiment with the placement of the 2 green colors. Currently I made the front one color and the back another, but I'd live to create stripes or different shapes.







Tools

- [TinyPNG](https://tinypng.com/)
- [HEIC to JPG Converter](heic.online)
- [BeamStudio Laser cutting Software](https://flux3dp.com/beam-studio/)
- [2D modelling Inkscape](https://inkscape.org/)

Fabrication files [TO ADD]

  1. File: Modules ↩

  2. File: Laser cut sheets ↩