Dressmaking may not be high on most people’s list of
waste-generating activities, but in fact, between 15 and 20 percent of each
bolt of cloth ends up being discarded when garment pieces are cut out. Between
that and clothing that’s worn and then discarded, the US throws away up to 21
billion pounds of textile waste a year! But Assistant Professor Ju-Young Kang
is leading her fashion design students to challenge these numbers in two ways,
both by more sustainably creating garments from whole cloth and by “up-cycling”
already-made garments.
These two pursuits are known as pre- and post-consumer
zero-waste design. The first is a sustainable design technique that reduces
textile waste at the design’s decision, pattern-making, knitting, and draping
stages. The technique combines efficiency with aesthetics by more mindfully
creating garments, placing the pieces on the fabric to maximize the use of
space and using the scraps that are generated as design elements. Constraints
can actually unlock creativity, as the designer has to think in new ways to
work around them. This is beautifully evident in the 2013 UHM senior fashion
show segment showcasing Dr. Kang’s students’ designs, “Écobilan,” which also
incorporates natural dyeing techniques using local plants, flowers, vegetables,
fruits, and coffee.
The following year, Dr. Kang spearheaded a segment entitled
“Reinvented Culture” in the 2014 fashion show, focusing on a “recycle, reuse,
and rewear” approach to waste management. The students hit lanai sales and
thrift shops for second-hand clothes and other recycled materials, from couture
gems to short-lived fad-wear of yesteryear, then recut and resewed their finds
into cutting-edge garments of their own.
Dr. Kang and her students are not alone. Due to
the increasing consumer awareness of environmental issues specific to textile
and apparel production, as well as firms’ commitment to putting sustainable
practices into production, a growing number of fashion retailers, including
Gap, American Apparel, Eileen Fisher, H&M, and Levi Strauss, promote sustainable
concepts in their operational practices including material preparation,
manufacturing, distribution, and retailing. Designers such as Mark Liu make
zero-waste one of their trademarks. Of the thousands of tons of
garments/textiles that consumers dispose of every year, as much as 95% could be
re-worn, recycled, or not generated in the first place—nothing ever need go to
waste.