...and only style remains

You cannot plan for waste. (I learnt this in my final year of university after deciding to work with rags.)
You can work with waste but you cannot design for it.
You can never be sure what you might get.
So, you can piece it together like a jigsaw puzzle but you cannot sketch it.


Months were wasted in mapping out my final year collection; picking out colour schemes and sampling fabrics. Little did I know that the fabric waste was going to have more of a say than I was.

Pre-Consumer Cashmere Fabric Waste

I was lucky enough to gain sponsorship from Scottish textile manufacturers Johnstons of Elgin, but where my classmates were ordering lengths of fabric by the meter, I was handed a black bag of rags.


I was to be working with pre-consumer fabric waste as opposed to tackling the post-consumer waste issue that brands like Junky Styling were dealing with. Rissanen (2008) estimates that an average 15 per cent of the fabric used in the creation of a garment is wasted.

Typical Pattern Layout, London Science Museum

If this is true, and if 35 kilo grams of clothing are consumed per person per year (Fletcher, 2007); with approximately 62 million people living in Britain (The Guardian, 2012) there will be around 325,000 tonnes of fabric waste in the UK per year. that is 325,000 tonnes of waste before the garments even reach the consumer.

My aim was not to save the world but it was to make a difference. Fashion is a vehicle  and it promotes a message.

 'Fashion fades, only style remains.' Coco Chanel