Ideational Stocktake: Poetic processes for material repurposing

Fashion repurposing methods such as upcycling, restyling and remanufacture all involve making with waste or disused textiles as a material source, seeking to ameliorate the impacts of an unsustainable fashion industry. Such materials come in varying shapes and sizes and demand specialised approaches to design processes to be crafted into new forms). However, whilst crafting garments through repurposing is a popular approach to sustainable fashion, pedagogical texts aimed at students and teachers of fashion design do not yet appear to capture in their characterisations of the fashion design process the possible creative methods for engaging with waste in terms of both its materiality and aesthetic qualities. This photo essay explores the framework of “elements and principles of design” as an existing theory of design that can be usefully co-opted as a creative method to encourage and support design ideation and exploratory problem solving in a pedagogical context. Elements and principles vary from one account to another, nonetheless elements including line, shape, direction, size, texture and colour and principles including balance, repetition, alignment, contrast, proximity and space are considered in this work as a framework for reflecting on the aesthetic efficacy of fashion repurposing projects. The work presented comprises imagery, reflective annotations, and drawings from a series of epistemological experiments conducted by the author with various disused textiles. These experiments are not finished garments, but speculative development at the ideation stage of the design process. The photo essay, presented online, uses reflective methods within a practice-based research methodology to explore “ideational stocktake” as an active creative method of coming to terms with non-standardised materials the designer has at hand and their potential within design, through reflective sorting, observation and documentation.