ZEROWASTE FASHIONZEROWASTE FASHION

Zero Waste Fashion |

What is in the name?

Rose Kim | Sophia Demetriou | Patty Wong | Johann Freitas | |Grady, Emma. “High Tech Meets Low Waste in New Computer Generated

Eco-Fashion.”

Rissanen, Timo. “Updated: Zero-waste and Less Waste Designers.”

“Subtraction Pattern Cutting with Julian Roberts - The Cutting Class.”

Zero Waste Fashion is exactly what it sounds like - A garment made with no wasted fabric. Although this concept is becoming more common in the working industry and is now being taught to fashion students, zero waste has existed for centuries. Early examples of zero waste fashion consists of many traditional garments like kimonos, sarees, and chitons. Traditional garments that have zero waste outcomes were usually used for utilitarian purposes, and so Zero Waste was not incorporated into the design process but rather seen as a method that made sense. It does make sense. Unfortunately, zero waste became irrelevant after the industrialization of fashion and mass-produced “fast fashion”.

Less Than Zero is an analogue created by future designers to address the fashion forward movement of zero waste fashion and how the industry can benefit from embracing the concept. We want to inform a wider audience of the potential of practicing sustainability, ethical practices as well as current designers in the fashion industry that follow the same philosophy; and our periodical, Less Than Zero, does just that. The idea is to focus on a larger image and go further than simply zero waste that will hopefully trigger a chain of effects that allows our readers to see how much any field, any disciplinary, any country, and etc. can be influenced by sustainability to make the world a brighter place.

a philosophy that challenges the design process, creating a new way of thinking for a sustainable outcome.

LESSTHAN ZERO

Instagram |@0.wastefashion

Twitter |@minusthanzero

Siddhartha UpadhyayaA designer and technologist, has created a process in which a loom is connected to a computer which transfer information for the loom to weave made to fit pieces that is then hand sewn together. The

contraption is named Direct Panel on Loom, DPOL for short.

Yeohlee TengA Parsons graduate, claims “her [Teng] designs are driven by

material, maximizing the use of each fabric by consideration weight, texture, color, and finishing.” Teng’s garments are also manufactured

in the Garment District which practices sustainability efforts.

Julian RobertsHas a well-known subtraction method brings sustainability and zero waste to fashion. His technique does include a small amount of waste (less than 1%), but he calls them necessary waste in which the scraps can be used as additional design components for the garment

or used for other garments.

Ada ZanditionA London based designer, creates sculptural unique pieces that

practice ethical production and sustainable textiles. Zandition sources from principled and reliable manufacturers, using organic and natural fabrics that do not use AZO chemical dyes. Zandition

also used any scrap leftovers for shoulder padding and quilting.

DESIGNERSDESIGNERSLESSTHAN ZERO

LESSTHAN ZERO

Ada Zanditon | “uses a range of organic and natural fabrics as well as innovative waste reducing and energy conscious solutions to create sculptural, elegant, desirable fashion.”

| |Grady, Emma. “High Tech Meets Low Waste in New Computer Generated

Eco-Fashion.”

Rissanen, Timo. “Updated: Zero-waste and Less Waste Designers.”

“Subtraction Pattern Cutting with Julian Roberts - The Cutting Class.”

Today, zero waste fashion is approached in two different ways, one being pre-consumer zero waste fashion eliminates waste during the production phase, and post-consumer zero waste fashion makes use of already worn clothes, giving it an afterlife.

One hundred fifty years of Western design with no regards of zero waste has carried its process to today. Zero Waste has been forgotten by western fashion with an exception of few designers like Clare McCardell, Zandra Rhodes, and Bernard Rudolfski.

Fashion Industry?

15% |

| 3 Billion Tons of Soot a Year

of fabric is wasted when a typical garment is made

78% of people did not know that 11 million tons of textiles are trashed every

Only 15% of the annual trashed clothing is recycled

The Chinese textile industry creates about

Globalization means that your shirt likely traveled halfway around the world in a container ship fueled by the dirtiest of fossil fuels. A current trend in fashion retail is creating an extreme demand for quick and cheap clothes and it is a huge problem. Your clothes continue to impact the environment after purchase; washing and final disposal when you’re finished with your shirt may cause more harm to the planet than you realize.

This trillion dollar industry shows that even though its financial future looks bright, it’s useless if the environment is too polluted for you to walk in your brand new clothes. It is estimated that more than 1 million tonnes of textiles are thrown away every year.

The largest climate change impact from clothing is the energy wasted in washing, tumble-drying and ironing. In the life of an average T-shirt 50% of the global climate change impact of a T-shirt can be reduced by lowering the washing temperature and eliminating tumble drying and ironing.

While cotton, especially organic cotton, might seem like a smart choice, it can still take more than 5,000 gallons of water to manufacture just a T-shirt and a pair of jeans. Synthetic, man-made fibers, while not as water-intensive, often have issues with manufacturing pollution and sustainability. And across all textiles, the manufacturing and dyeing of fabrics is chemically intensive.

WHAT IS WRONG WITH THE

WHAT IS WRONG WITH THE

Fashion Industry?

|Claudio, Luz. “Waste Couture: Environmental Impact of the

Clothing Industry.”

“25 Shocking Fashion Industry Statistics.” TreeHugger.

In New York City, more than 6% of all garbage is consisted of disposed clothes and wasted textiles. which means 193,000 tons of fabrics are wasted every year. According to the statistics, Americans recycle or donate only 15% of the garments they own, which means 10.5 million tons a year goes into landfills. The fragile construction of fast fashion brand clothes and the mass quantity of the garments enables customers to consume more garments in a short period of time. In this kind of culture, clothes exist only to decorate body for the short while and they do not have any meaning to its designer or owner.

Kip Kerkendell a studio professor at Parsons The New Schoo For Design directs students to innovate the current fashion industry by creating meaning as students design. Her class started the zero waste garment construction by using second hand materials to create a fabric. When the fabric ‘tapestry’ is made, students makes a jacket out of the fabric by using every inches of fabric that are there. Because tapestry is consisted of the materials that has meaning to the designers, the final garments that are created from the tapestry creates this visual atmosphere which enable others to feel the designer from the garment. We have interviewed Kip to hear her opinions about zero waste fashion.

A. Yes, if you look at knitwear, they are going into new technologies of using new knitting machines that actually can just knit an entire garment and there is no waste. So I mean I don’t know there are maybe ways that weaving pattern pieces of the fabric itself rather than creating yardage. Weaving to order to form pattern shapes, that’s a thought. Maybe.

A. When I was first in New York I was designing my own collection based on tapestry fabrics I was designing and having woven by hand using very luxurious materials. So the tapestry was quite costly and also because there were different kinds of materials woven together the materials didn’t really match together that well as a fabric so you couldn’t really cut into them if you did the fabric you would have to do a lot to bind off the places where you cut and secure those edges. So we tried to make as few cuts as possible and because the fabrics were so expensive and the materials were so precious, we certainly didn’t want to waste any of it. Tapestries were combinations of cashmeres and wool, hand dyed silk and snakeskin, strips of fur, strips of leather and that kind of thing which are combined in a textural waste and of course these materials didn’t match that well with each other. I was making outwear primarily from those kind of tapestries.

A. Well it certainly is at Parsons, I think it is something that absolutely needs to be focused more for couple of different reasons. I think we must really praise the way we look at fabric and other materials and look at the value of whole piece of fabric. I mean I think we can draw upon traditional cultures and some of the ways that traditional garments are cut from indigenous cultures, theres very little ways because in those cultures fabrics were woven or hunted and skinned and processed and whatever so the materials are so precious to waste. So I think it is really important for western cultures to begin to think think about the value of materials and not take them for granted.

Q. What was your first expression with zero waste?

Q. Do you think zero waste is an important concept to teach?

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SUSTAINABLEFASHION

Q. Last year H&M launched Comeback Clothes campaign but hardly anyone brought their old garments into the store. Why do you think that happened?

Q. What do you think of the aesthetics of zero waste design?

Q. Do you think zero waste techniques could be used to mass produce garments in fast fashion industries like Zara and H&M?

Q. Do you think zero waste will help make working spaces safer?

Q. Recycling, Up-cycling, Zero waste patterns- Do you think there is any other way apart from these to save wasted fabrics but still create a beautiful garments?

A. I don’t think they actually knows how to recycle or reuse those garments properly. I believe they are still figuring them out. I think it is good that they are trying to gather those raw materials back but it would be interesting to see what they actually what they do with it.

A. Well I don’t think there is a single aesthetic to zero waste design. I think it is something that can be incorporated into the variety of designs depended upon the designers and I think that it can reflect the personality of the designer as much as very wasteful design could. So I don’t think there is a particular aesthetic, I think it is more of a philosophy that one uses to approach a length of fabric and quantity of materials.

A. Well the whole philosophy behind the fast fashion brands is that the prices are very low and what I was just talking about takes a lot of tailoring techniques so the current fast fashion industries like H&M would have to approach that a little differently. I mean you know they could perhaps do similar things but system for doing it would have to be different. And in order to make the whole process of producing such inexpensive clothes sustainable, you would have to pay the workers a lot more money than they pay them now. So that’s the big question. Maybe it depends on the technology that could be employ to produce those items and maybe the garment industry can be automated in that way so that the people will get paid a lot more for only what human can do in producing a lot more garments.

A. Yes. You know there are a lot of different angles which to look at garment production which is why we invite our students to praise garment production from a lot of different angles. Not only think one way about trying different methods because in the end there will be a lot of different problems to be solved and it will take couple of generations to change the entire garment industry into something a lot more sustainable.

“‘Americans Now Buy Five times as Much Clothing as They Did in 1980’s’.” The Atlantic.