Ph.D. student Romy Kaiser awarded for research work on Master thesis Kera-Plast
February 16, 2021
Genders, Equity, Diversity and Inclusion in Research at the 2021 Marie Curie Alumni Association Annual Conference
March 1, 2021
Future Wardrobe is a partnership of artists, designers, and researchers collaborating to propose new perspectives on textile & fashion design, intersecting with materials, tech, and living species and aiming to design a future with plurality and equality of shared nature. Within the scope of the 3rd call of winning Worth Partnership project, Future Wardrobe is currently developing a ‘living jacket’, using, among others. living algae. As an embodiment of the vast knowledge and deep philosophy of the team behind Future Wardrobe, the jacket acts as a discussion piece to raise awareness for the urgencies and opportunities related to rethinking our relationship with fashion and nature.
I've been a part of a multidisciplinary team that was successfully granted EU funding to develop the project Future Wardrobe as a critique on human-centred thinking. The team comprises of me (Thora Arnarottir) and Jessica Dias from Biobabes in collaboration with Catherine Euale & Larra Campos.
Future Wardrobe is a material based proposal where micro-algae is grown and nursed as a companion, harvested, and used for the material within the garment. The challenge is to merge biotech and fashion, demonstrating innovation in materials, technologies, and digital fabrication and mutating the concept of wearables to a human-microorganism symbiosis.
Humans' disconnection to non-human nature causes rampant overconsumption of anthropocentric products. Textiles and garments are produced, worn, and discarded with no regard for people, planet, and non-human organisms. This project aims to offer viable alternatives to fossil fuel-based textiles and synthetic dyes extraction, production, uses, and end of life within the fashion and textile industry.
The project is about creating a 'living jacket,' serving primarily as a space to host a community of algae. As an embodiment of the team's planet-centric philosophy, the speculative interspecies design of the jacket acts to raise awareness of the urgencies and opportunities related to creating empathetic relationships to cloth and stewardship of our natural environments and the other living beings which share this space.
We see the future of our wardrobes as circular and planet-centric, rather than anthropocentric in design. The project showcases circularity by creating a biodegradable material that can be harvested during maintenance as biomass from the decaying algae and recreated into our algae-based textile. Though the material is a tangible alternative proposal for fossil fuel-based textiles, it is not the main focus of Future Wardrobe. The shift from anthropocentric to planet-centric design happens as we work with living algae and approach them not as a resource, but as our client. A non-human client to whom we structure our design methods to accommodate the nurturing of its needs. We apply processes and techniques that challenge the status quo. The project is highly conceptual and speculative but involves many immediately applicable techniques.
This project is supported by the WORTH Partnership Project that is funded by the European Commission under COSME, the EU Programme for the competitiveness of Small and Medium-sized Enterprises.
