Circular design is about regeneration
This entails going beyond simple end-of-life solutions, like making T-shirts out of plastic bottles, and instead working toward actively restoring regional ecosystems and communities.
Circularity, according to Rousselot, “is about designing for systems change, for a future when the sector may become a solution to those concerns instead of being a source of global challenges like climate change or biodiversity loss.”
Because it affects each and every one of us, fashion also has connections to how we manage lands and agriculture due to the crops we use to manufacture fibers, she continued.
“All of the authors we have in the book go beyond developing functional, visually pleasing goods made of sustainably produced materials, and they also take into account aspects of community, place, and designing for a better system.”
Rousselot discovered in her studies that this shift from an exploitative to a reciprocal relationship with nature frequently coexists with the rediscovery of indigenous knowledge and proficiency.
There is a noticeable trend toward returning to what is previously understood, she claimed. When you speak to certain designers in China or Africa, they will tell you that they simply do things that way. Circular design is a new idea in Western countries.
Orange Culture by Adebayo Oke-Lawal
Adebayo Oke-Lawal creates gender-neutral clothing that is made with a supply chain that is 90% indigenous to Nigeria and includes everything from sourcing materials to dying and printing.
The designer tries to guarantee that money stays in the community through his Lagos-based brand Orange Culture, and he also teaches his suppliers and workers about sustainable production techniques so they may apply what they learn to other initiatives.
According to Rousselot, “Orange Culture creates new products or pieces, like lining, using leftovers from its production process.
It goes beyond just a repair service; it’s almost like giving the garment a second life by asking customers to return unwanted clothing so that it can be transformed into new clothing and sold.
Raeburn by Christopher Raeburn
While pursuing a degree in fashion design in London in the early 2000s, Christopher Raeburn began experimenting with excess materials and clothing, purchasing 1950s military jackets that had never been worn for just £1 each and turning them into brand-new outfits.
Since then, he has worked to increase the use of recycled materials in mass manufacturing through his own British Fashion Award-winning brand, Raeburn, and in his capacity as creative director for the footwear company, Timberland, where he has transitioned the company to regeneratively farmed leather.
In a way that is appealing and distinct from what you would anticipate from a “eco brand,” he was one of the pioneers in bringing this method to a commercial scale, according to Rousselot.
He now has a room in east London where his team organizes workshops so people can learn new techniques and sew together. “The most wonderful thing about his work is the community he is developing around circular design,” says the author.
Marine Serre
In addition to using repurposed materials including carpets, towels, and household linens in 50% of her designs, French designer Marine Serre is well renowned for her signature crescent moon print.
Serre’s work demonstrates that waste materials can be used in the luxury fashion industry despite their negative reputation. Serre was given the coveted LVMH prize in 2017 and his designs are carried by well-known retailers including Selfridges and Browns.
She uses these textiles in a very innovative way, according to Rousselot. “In fashion design, students are typically instructed to select a color scheme that will serve as the foundation for their collection before looking for textiles that go with it.”
However, “it’s a whole different beginning point when you start designing based on the material, as this informs the color palette and everything else about your collection.”
Fibershed
With the use of regenerative farming techniques that capture carbon in soil rather than just emitting it, Fibershed is a nonprofit that assists brands in gaining access to hyper-local textile supply chains.
Designer Phoebe English recently produced a line of clothing that was displayed at the COP26 climate conference (above), working with its regional arm in South East England. For this collection, all textiles were grown, dyed, spun, and processed within a 250-kilometer radius of the designer’s London studio.
With this strategy, Rousselot explained, “you’re not cultivating acres and acres of cotton; you’re planting different types of crops that naturally thrive in the environment, like nettle or hemp.”
These crops are raised in a way that is environmentally friendly, restores soil health, sequesters carbon, and mitigates the loss of biodiversity.
Creativity in Cross-Dressing
Although it may sound strange, the transvestite is solely motivated by the kinds of questions that we often find to be quite admirable in the writing and reading of fiction.
The depth with which Tolstoy was able to describe the feelings of a gorgeous married woman in love with a handsome army commander is what makes Anna Karenina so poignant. Jane Austen had to learn how to dress up in order to write Mansfield Park. She had to learn how to don the braided jackets of a middle-aged swaggering member of the aristocracy (Sir Thomas Bertram), the black waistcoat of a sensitive would-be clergyman, as well as the grey simple frocks of an impoverished sixteen-year-old schoolgirl (her heroine Fanny Price) (Edmund Bertram).
The balding, highly mustachioed Flaubert famously remarked to his partner Louise Colet that his heroine Emma Bovary had evolved into more than just a character he was presenting as a detached spectator of a fictional landscape: he believed he had essentially become her. Therefore, it was natural for him to tell Louise that he had just masturbated at the thought of being Emma, laying back on a bed in a little hotel in Rouen with her arms up while being deeply entered by the local landowner Rodolphe.
Transvestism is a manner of exercising our right to universal citizenship since it is the most dramatic form of resistance to being creatively constrained by the specific gender province we happened to be born into. Cross dressing illustrates Terence’s famous dictum, “Homo sum, humani nihil a me alienum puto,” which means, “I am human, nothing human (even little skirts or a hair band) is alien to me.”
