Covered with large double-welt slots, this design allows for double-sided strips of fabric to be woven through creating a change in colour and print, making it be infinitely adjustable for the wearer. The strips are made from a mix of upcycled tapestries and silks, cotton craft offcuts and hemp. The dress base is made from deadstock cotton. By exploring the role design can play, Alicja Kuzmycz’s fashion practice examines how design interventions can imbue garments with higher intrinsic value and engagement for the wearer—exploring strategies that will enable clothing to stay active in the wardrobe for longer.

Alicja Kuzmycz is founder of the artisanal label PoMo is Dead, making art designed to be worn with the smallest possible impact on the planet. PoMo is short for Post Modernism, with one of its main themes being deconstruction and REconstruction. Closing the loop on a wasteful world, recycling, and reimagining fashion, pieces are REconstructed with recycled, upcycled and deadstock textiles—experimental garments that are more flexible and updateable so that you need less, keep them longer and wear them more often.

Jogakbo is a traditional Korean patch-working practice using textile scraps and developed at a time when textiles were extremely precious. Steven Junil Park utilises this ancient technique to connect with his culture and reevaluate our relationship to materials during a time of unprecedented textile waste. He is particularly interested in the lives and memories that these pieces contain, considering the rips and stains as part of their narrative, rather than defects. All materials in this ensemble were salvaged by Park, Ash wood from a senile tree that had to be felled in a local park for the shoes and seasonal foraged black walnut hulls and rust from scrap steel to dye the jacket.

Steven Junil Park is a multidisciplinary artist living and working in Ōtautahi Christchurch, Aotearoa New Zealand. He works under the name 6×4, producing everything himself, including clothing, shoes and jewellery. Steven creates his work by being resourceful and using previously existing materials in a world of excess: conscious of the devastating environmental and social impacts of the textile industry. As a Korean-born New Zealander, Steven examines ideas of identity, exploring his own feeling of belonging to neither culture, through clothing.

Historical references and techniques are reinterpreted through a contemporary approach to collaborative making in this sophisticated suit by Amy Forbes and Caitlin Mullaly of Veils of Cirrus. The main body of the ensemble is constructed from Prince of Wales superfine merino suiting and lined with locally sourced deadstock Tencel. Glimpses of the hemlock plant, an original artwork commissioned from local tattoo artist Lucy Waldron, was printed in three stages from a hand-carved block. The outfit also features a button made from upcycled aluminium cans by Harley Herrera, and a Victorian-inspired chatelaine featuring varying gauges of metal chain, hand-blown glass beads by Kylie Neilson, Veils of Cirrus embossed leather, perspex laser printed harpy logo and ceramic tile fragments.

Veils of Cirrus is a Naarm-based creative practice and curatorial partnership formed by long-time friends Amy Forbes and Caitlin Mullaly. It is a conceptually driven project borne out of a shared love of artisanal processes and the desire to learn the ways of the old and new. Conjuring one-of-a-kind garments from their studio in Brunswick, their multidisciplinary work is driven by storytelling and craftsmanship. Motivated by a necessity for slow methods of design, their practice investigates historical techniques and archetypes, deconstructing them for a contemporary audience.

Growing up in London, Eliz Yusuf has been witness to constant and rapid urban renewal. As architectural developments grow to dizzying heights, they close in the sky and create waste that is shipped offshore. Finding traces of this industry, such as scaffolding netting and tarpaulin she has sought to represent this situation through fashion. The blue represents the sky, while the deep orange was dyed with rust. The visible scraps below the transparent top layer create depth, suggesting a topographical map, while the clean lines of the ensemble reflect the architectural landscape.

Eliz Yusuf is a London-born artist and recent graduate of the University of Portsmouth, UK. Yusuf’s work combines her Turkish Cypriot heritage with a passion for sustainability and textile design. Developing her skills early in life through inter-generational exchange with her grandmother, Yusuf’s resourceful approach is indebted to this training. Through her work, she aims to bring attention to the things we discard and inspire us to reconsider their reuse.

From a waterproof blanket to a comforting cape, this garment was made from upcycled production waste by Vida Straseviciute in collaboration with Barker Textiles. This partnership was initiated by Designregio Kortrijk as part of their 5×5® project when Kaunas became member of the UNESCO Design Cities Network. Designregio Kortrijk’s aim is to connect talent and promote Design Thinking to reduce waste in the circular economy.

Vida Straseviciute is a graduate from the Vilnius Academy of Arts, Lithuania. Her Master’s thesis analysed the role designers play in the sustainable development of the textile industry. Following this, she developed the sustainable initiative Upcycled by LT. She now leads the new upcycled limited edition B2C line for Barker Textiles.

After finding this supposedly damaged fabric, Baaqiy Ghazali was inspired by nature and the cycle of life to explore the inevitable decay at the end. The sculptural shape represents a flowering tree and, like a sartorial momento mori (reminder of death), combines structure with delicacy to express our ephemeral existence through fabric and form. While thoroughly avant-garde in approach, the resulting outfit is designed to be inclusive and wearable.

Baaqiy Ghazali is an independent fashion designer and recent graduate from the Whitehouse Institute of Design. With a background in architecture, she explores the world of haute couture through sustainable and responsible practices. Ghazali was the winner of MYER Fashions On The Field – Emerging Designer Award 2022, and her winning design featured in VOGUE Australia.

Made from natural raffia, sustainable and biodegradable plant fibre, and hand-gathered emu feathers, Jasmine-Skye Marinos’ Kaweerr Koorran Dress (emu feather dress in Wadawurrung language) is a compelling example of Indigenous basket-weaving applied to fashion. By eschewing modern machinery she pays respect to her ancestors who lived off the land for thousands of years and demonstrates how sustainable practice is inherent to First Nations making.

Jasmine-Skye is a proud Arrernte woman who has lived on Wadawurrung country for over 10 years. She takes inspiration from her culture and the local Wadawurrung community in her artwork and was selected to be part of VACCHO’s Beautiful Shawl Project and she was winner of the National Wool Museum Scarf of the Year 2018 with ‘Dreamtime feathers’.

This sculptural quilted coat is wadded with multiple-coloured scraps, details made visible through the mesh of the lace top-layer, thereby creating a pattern reminiscent of patchwork. However, this is more than simply an ingenious design. By revealing that which is usually hidden, Jedda Bahloo’s work comments on the fashion system at large, and its contribution to environmental waste and the exploitation of human labour.

Jedda Bahloo is a Naarm-based multidisciplinary artist and designer who is passionate about creating social change through fashion, art and textiles. She aims to incorporate elements of waste, modularity, functionality, emotional durability and mending within her work to critique how fashion (the entire industry & mode of production) impacts the world around us. Bahloo explores ways in which “sustainability” is defined and questions the capacity for the fashion industry to be truly sustainable.

Dense and organic, this kaleidoscopic intertwining of fabrics forms a new landscape from recycled and deadstock materials. To make this textile, scraps of fabric were matched with spooled wool, ensuring that every inch was used. The compression and overlays make for spatial inconsistencies and unexpected combinations, an idiosyncratic approach that is the antithesis of fast fashion.

Based in Sydney on Gadigal, Jordan Gogos’s practice encompasses functional art and compression wall textiles, as well as his eponymous fashion label, Iordanes Spyridon Gogos. Sharing a cross-disciplinary interest in the arts that unites seemingly disparate ideas, Gogos works tirelessly, traversing materials, shape and form. His collaborative approach has seen him work with both emerging makers and icons of Australian fashion such as Jenny Kee and Akira Isogawa

Created entirely from repurposed and remnant fabrics, this bold patchwork ensemble reduces waste while making a powerful statement about the current political climate. With a feminine look on a masculine figure and subtle gender role play in the shoes, this outfit pushes boundaries and challenges traditional fashion norms to encourage colourful self-expression without limitations. Emily Rastas’ playful approach to a serious topic is informed by her work on dopamine release and multisensory experiences.

Emily Rastas is a Finnish-Australian artist and designer currently working and living in Geelong. She works predominantly in the realms of painting, wearable art, sculpture, fashion and installation. Rastas is passionate about sustainability and slow fashion and her brand Emipeli Design sells her upcycled clothing range, hand painted shoes and boots, and unique accessories made from discarded fabric waste. Collecting and salvaging the smallest textiles and fabrics and assembling them to create new work reflects her dedication for sustainability and slow fashion.

Drawing from her Chinese-Indonesian heritage, Ruth Hadinjoto’s work uses the batik process to imbue her work with an authentic approach to slow fashion. By using natural dyes and fabrics, zero-waste patterns and designs, she crafts garments that are adjustable to various forms. These methods are a return to historic dress-making traditions of many different Asian cultures in which textiles were highly valued. Hadinjoto further explores the cross-cultural aesthetics through the motifs, batik Megamendung and batik Lasem, which were introduced to Indonesia from China centuries ago.

Ruth Hadinjoto holds a BA (Hons) in Fashion Design and BA in Fashion Design and Technology from RMIT University. She was a semi-finalist of the Redress Design Award, Hong Kong and finalist in the Victorian Premier’s Design Awards, The Global Design Graduate Show.

Using the body as a loom, Lilli Mckenzie takes one of the most historic crafts to solve a particularly modern problem, demonstrating that almost anything, in this case t-shirt off-cuts and electrical waste, can be woven. Working on mannequins, she strings the warp yarns, made taut with small weights and wire hoops, then hand-weaves the weft. Through this process, the silhouette and fit of the garments takes shape, with small bows as design details to signify the beginning and end of a piece of yarn. This technique can also be unwoven and re-woven into a completely new design thereby creating circular fashion from these waste materials.

Lilli McKenzie is a fashion designer based in Naarm. She is a recent graduate of the Bachelor of Fashion (Design)(Honours) at RMIT University. Her graduate project ‘Re-Weave,’ is a hand-weaving based practice that involves recycling material off-cuts and weaving them into new forms. She was invited to be a resident designer at the Future From Waste Lab, in Southbank for the WasteFest as part of Melbourne Fashion Week.

Made from salvaged Australian wool found in Japan, Gakuki Ito incorporates the defects of the fabric into part of the design. This elegant form, inspired by that of a mermaid, ensures that what was once damaged is transformed through clever pattern-cutting to mimic the scales of a fish-tail. The marine theme is further enhanced by the deep blue fabric, evoking underwater habitats and a reminder of the oceans such fabrics traverse in their life-cycles.

Based in Niigata, Gakuki Ito is a graduate of Bunka Fashion College, Japan’s leading fashion college. His work has been recognised at numerous competitions in the Asia-Pacific, including the Nippori Fashion Design Contest in Japan, Hempel Award International Young Fashion Designers Contest in China, and World of Wearable Art in Aotearoa New Zealand.

Considering the accumulative challenges of fashion waste that increase with every moment of inaction, Carol Yang’s theme of procrastination is both witty and apt. By taking fashion waste of all types, including broken clothes hangers and unused clotheslines, her layered garments recall domestic clutter, a constant reminder to us all of our role in over-consumption. This conceptual approach makes for a wearable outfit that can also exist independently as an artwork or ‘activity sculpture’, aiming to express and amplify the feelings of procrastination in a humorous way.

Carol Yang holds a Masters of Fashion Design from RMIT university where she developed her practice from standard collection design to contemporary project design, with a desire to move beyond the shackles of the body. Her work was part of the National Graduate Showcase at PayPal Melbourne Fashion Festival and she was one of four designers selected to be part of the Future From Waste Wastefest for Melbourne Fashion Week.

In this ensemble, Samara Darling uses unexpected creative methods to represent wild landscapes and the interaction between human and music. A photograph of a lover in the shadows is transferred onto the shirt, while hand-made clay embellishments adorn a jacket made from deadstock hats. Together they share the intimate connections between the designer, garment, wearer and observer. ‘Open Voices’ pays homage to the interdependence of elements that make up the natural world.

Samara Darling is a student at the Fashion Design Studio on Gadigal Country. a designer who uses visual communication to explore our relationships with the natural world.  Allowing for the design to be informed by the materials, this play and evolution of designer and fabric support an authentic connection to the story that garments tell.

Meticulously de-threaded by hand over seventy hours, this gown is made from just two recycled and deconstructed t-shirts, revealing just how much fabric goes into one garment. This transformation of mass-produced clothing into slow art respects and celebrates the beauty of the fabric revealing the true quality of the fabric and creating a new malleable textile that transcends fast fashion into conceptual design. Though seemingly ethereal, the intricate weave of warp and weft is quite durable and capable of manipulation, as it indeed reverses the time investment of creating a garment. Through her work, she intends to inspire a positive response that is empowered by the beauty of the things we take for granted.

A graduate from the Victorian College of Arts, Kate V M Sylvester is a conceptual fashion artist working across installation, sculpture, video and performance. Based in Portarlington, Sylvester has been a finalist for numerous award exhibitions including the Yering Station Sculpture Award Exhibition, Emerging Artist Award 45downstairs and Scenic World Sculpture Show, Blue Mountains. She has exhibited as part of the Melbourne Fashion Festival Cultural Program and was selected by Craft Victoria for their 21st annual graduation show, Fresh!2015.

Starting with the unlikely combination of a friend’s damaged wedding dress and lamb skull from a farm based on the Bellarine Peninsula, Lazarus Gordon re-imagines the Welsh character of the Mari Lwyd- a phantom like costume with a horse’s skull worn in the holiday period. The base garment was restructured and then covered with fragments of lace sourced in local op-shops, a textile now abundant in the second-hand market due to changes in domestic, rather than sartorial fashions.

Lazarus Gordon is a queer artist based in Geelong West, Victoria. Their work is centred around clothing, costume, and wearable art for everyday wear and their own independent busking as a Living Statue. Everything they make is a one-off design, typically starting with an aspect of a second-hand material serving as the inspiration. The Bride is one of their many busking characters, handing fortunes of love and romance to curious strangers.

Playing on the concept of the T-shirt as an historically masculine and utilitarian garment, this dress subverts this archetype through the use of pastel colours, tie-dye, bold prints and contrast embroidery. Designed and made by Ashley Martiniello, the deadstock T-shirts are ruched and draped to create a strikingly feminine garment.

REBORN, a diffusion label of the Melbourne-based charity and streetwear social enterprise, HoMie,   is a circular economy solution to the chronic issue of textile and garment wastage that plagues the fashion industry. HoMie supports young people affected by homelessness or hardship through education and employment programs. Utilising HoMie’s status as a DGR-1 charity, REBORN is able to receive pre-loved, faulty, or unsold garments from other designers and labels as a charitable gift donation, providing a tax receipt in return. These textiles and garments are then upcycled by the REBORN team in Melbourne, hand-cutting, sewing, printing, dying, and altering garments to create unique pieces reflective of the journey they have been on.

Within this project, Evie Rosa expands upon notions of upcycling in fashion through a return to craft and play on fashion history. Her material process involves dry felting cut garments onto a wool blanket backing, informed by the rag paper technique, but using specialised needles instead of a water bath to interlock the garment fibres. The result is a new indistinct textile redolent of waggas, Australian quilts made out of necessity. This reflective aspect of the ensemble is heightened by an exaggerated form that evokes Victorian fashions.

Evie Rosa is an emerging creative practitioner who adopts an interdisciplinary approach to critical fashion design and production. Her work aims to expand the way fashion practice and design processes can foster more reflexive, creative practitioners capable of responding to the challenges in the modes of production and consumption facing contemporary society. She was a finalist at the Melbourne Fashion Film Festival and collaborated with ACMI on a range inspired by Jane Campion.

Taking inspiration from Chinese cosmology, in particular the trigram ‘Fire Feng Ding’ (change the old to the new), Canwen Zhao’s ’35 Life’ provides playful solutions to the increasing environmental threat of sun exposure. The metamorphic piece, which can be worn in multiple ways and packs down into a bag, is made from both functional and decorative materials. Both the colours and the form are indebted to historic Chinese dress, but reimagined for a contemporary wearer.

Canwen Zhao is a multidisciplinary fashion designer currently based in Melbourne. With a background in Chinese painting and further studies in fashion and art, Canwen brings a unique aesthetic vision to her practice. During her studies in 2017, she visited a recycling depot and experienced garment sorting, which made her aware of the waste of resources in the fashion industry. She has worked in various fields ranging from fashion and film costume to IP design and commercial illustration, and her designs often address cultural, religious, and environmental issues.