Tomorrow’s Wardrobe Design Review
January 29, 2025Tomorrow’s Wardrobe Design Review. The Design Museum’s Tomorrow’s Wardrobe – Researching Better Futures for Fashion is a very good source of ideas and information about what designers and companies are doing, or proposing to do about the climate crisis. It is a mixture of information, awful theoretical ideas and rather more practical solutions.
The exhibition opens with an interactive information panel which allows you to see the processes involved in creating various garments, and exactly how they could achieve a second life through recycling, re-use or recovery. It also points out the barriers to that. So, looking at a wool jumper, for example. Wool is promoted as a natural, biodegradable fibre. But it cannot be recycled if the label has been cut out, and its fibre content is unproven. It also will not degrade properly if it has been dyed with chemical dyes. The label thing goes for all garments, but something made from cotton and linen can be recycled, as they are compatible with each other. I also learnt that cotton can be chemically recycled, with its fibres being broken down entirely into liquid cellulose which is then re-formed.
Tomorrow’s Wardrobe Design Review Photo G Jones
Tomorrow’s Wardrobe Design Review – Practical Solutions
Pattern pieces for the pictured coat. Tomorrow’s Wardrobe Design Review Photo G Jones
Fast fashion is unlikely to be curbed unless by drastic laws or terrible circumstances that force change. So it seems best to work with industry, but make the processes big manufacturers use better. So I particularly liked Eva Yin’s work with AI to minimise wastage when cutting clothes out.
Western garments are made from many different pieces, each diverse shapes and sizes. These all have to fit onto one flat sheet of fabric. You can try to tessellate them in different ways, a bit like fitting together shapes in Tetris. The closer together you can get them, the least waste of fabric there will be. You can try different ways to lay them out to fit, such as turning them around. It’s an interesting puzzle, and definitely a skill. However, it’s also a specialised and time consuming one. Especially if you are trying to make lots of different garments at speed. Yin has created an AI system that will try all the different combinations for you, depending on how many pieces you want to make. This means much less fabric wastage, which means each garment costs less. It will definitely appeal to manufacturers on this basis alone.
Robots
However, the flip side of this is that AI and robotics are replacing skilled humans. We do not have enough trained people in the UK for specific jobs, especially those who will work for the low wages that are paid in other countries. So robots are being trained up to do the same job. Robot arms are used across all industries, like car factories, where they are used to spray paint amongst other jobs. In fashion, they can be programmed to cut out fabric and other jobs. It means that more clothing could be produced here, instead of being made far away and shipped over at great environmental expense.
The fluff from bullrushes, partly processed in order to make padding for coats. Tomorrow’s Wardrobe Design Review Photo G Jones
Tomorrow’s Wardrobe Design Review Photo G Jones
British and Irish made clothing has a reputation of being expensive, but usually better quality. It has been surpassed by cheaper imports and we don’t have anything like the clothing industry we used to. But there are efforts to revive it. Mourne Textiles discovered an abandoned linen factory which they are trying to get back into production. It is astonishing how many stages linen traditionally has to go through to make a garment. Harvesting, retting, scutching, hackling, spreading, spinning, weaving and finishing. No wonder it costs so much!
Linen is a very old traditional fibre for clothing but all plant matter contains fibre. There are efforts to make clothing from the discarded plant matter from growing potatoes in Jersey, or from parts of bulrushes in Greater Manchester.
Tomorrow’s Wardrobe Design Review – A Utopian Future
The introduction of what would have to be draconian laws is touched upon in Max Guther’s series of images and accompanying stories about the future of garment design in an imaginary 2030. As the story goes, a Green Textile Act has been passed. As well as this, non-Western nations are no longer accepting our rubbish, and so it is imperative that clothing and accessories are reused, repaired, revitalised and, if beyond any kind of sprucing up, the fibre recovered. This means efficient fibre-to-fibre recovery, on-shore production, local community involvement and testing to ensure that the landscape is not damaged. These utopian ideals are actually all within possibility.
Modular shirt design. Tomorrow’s Wardrobe Design Review Photo G Jones
Why?
There were a couple of exhibits in here that I didn’t like and seemed too naïve to be included. One was a pair of shoes by Olaniyi Studio made from agricultural waste, natural fibres and root extract. They are designed to slowly decay as they are worn, releasing honey and ginger as medicinal extracts. This sounds very unpleasant, but then again, I hate bio based art. Other garments included seaweed extracts and probiotics. It makes my skin itch to think of these additives.
Another exhibit designed to be more theoretical is by the Textiles Circularity Centre which is a team based at the Royal College of Art. Along with the designer Morag Seaton, the Modular Shirt is designed with various extra bits and pieces that you add or shed to change the appearance of your shirt and therefore ring the changes. It’s like those watches with different wristbands or glasses with a range of different frames to be clipped on – that box full of options is destined to sit gathering dust and only creates more waste.
But these “provocative” pieces only stand out in light of the professionalism of the rest of the exhibition. it’s certainly interesting and worth visiting for anyone who is involved in or likes fashion or clothing, even as a consumer.
Tomorrow’s Wardrobe – Researching Better Futures for Fashion is a free exhibition at the Design Museum, London. It is on until August 2025.
Tomorrow’s Wardrobe is curated by Future Observatory, the Design Museum’s national research programme for the green transition. Future Observatory is coordinated by the Design Museum in partnership with the Arts and Humanities Research Council.
The display has been supported by curatorial advisors Kate Goldsworthy (UAL), Jalaj Hora (Nike) and Susan Postlethwaite (Manchester Metropolitan University).
