Upcycled Fashion: Hem & Jaleo Life Drawing
The concepts behind 3 outfits
If you have been reading my newsletter for the past few months, you are perfectly aware that Hem & Jaleo, my textile upcycling showcase is happening in 2 weeks. If you are in Oakland and would like to come to this interactive fashion experience, go reserve your spot!
During this event on Saturday, October 21, I will unveil three new upcycled textile outfits. In lieu of a fashion show - where runway audiences typically have the chance to see garments for 5-10 seconds before they disappear forever, I opt to hold a life drawing session.
Attendees will get to see three diverse models wearing my brand new creations. They will go out one at a time, making and holding a series of poses while attendees sit and sketch around them. During this time, I will verbally share the concept behind each garment and invite them to ask questions.
Since the majority of Fafafoom Studio Newsletter readers won’t be there in person, I dedicate this October 2023 issue to share those concepts in more detail. These outfits represent my raison d'etre of behind textile upcycling, packaged into three chapters.
So let’s get to it, shall we? I have to go back to sewing after this.
AUTHOR’S NOTE: As of time of writing, there are no pictures of the complete outfit, let alone models wearing each outfit. They will be added gradually as each outfit is getting completed in the coming weeks or so. Once they are done, I will start documenting them on dress forms and upload the pictures here.
Pictures of models wearing the outfits are most likely going to be uploaded around the time the November 2023 issue comes out on Thursday, November 9. So check back this article a few more times to see updates!
Chapter 1: Wasteful Culture
I came from Indonesia, a Southeast Asian country where the inhabitants cannot avoid not seeing trash. From piles of trash in front of residences or commercial establishments, burned garbage near farmlands, landfills (either sight or smell), floating waste in the rivers and ocean, and so many other forms of waste.
During the 9th grade national exam, we were even asked to write a short essay about waste. All I could think of was how much disruption* garbages are, from general annoyance to health hazards. It’s essentially engrained in our daily lives.
*Side note: apparently that’s not what the examiners were looking for in a short essay, and gave me low marks. Also, my essay was apparently too long :)
In any case, I grew up VERY familiar with the presence of waste. In contrast, compared to where I live now in East Bay, California, United States, I realize that common residents don’t get to see most of the produced waste.
There’s an outdated study about 97% of produced waste in the United States are industrial, whereas the things we see - residential curb garbage collections, outside bins, etc. - are only part of the 3%. While the actual ratio is questionable, it’s still useful to bring up when we think about establishing a sense of scale.
Because we are shielded from seeing actual amount of waste produced domestically in the United States, we don’t really view them as a problem. In our eyes, it’s easy to dispose of things, and they get taken care of by our respective municipal systems. It doesn’t really matter what things get disposed - anything from plastic bags to clothes, furnitures, and appliances. And this includes things that we donate to charities. Only 10 - 20% of them got sold or recirculated. The rest essentially either gets burned, exported, or landfilled (either domestically or overseas).
We are conditioned to treat things as disposable commodities with little values. Producers race to create cheapest things possible with no regards to the environment or people’s wellbeing.
This kind of “wasteful culture” is what I want to represent in the first outfit. The set is made from deconstructed unwanted jeans sourced from my local community and rib knit cutoffs from a local San Francisco Bay Area designer. The pockets in this outfit are all upside down, highlighting our inability to not be wasteful.
Just think about it - in any given day in our life, how many times do we have to consciously decide to not accept some plastic packaging or one-time-use items in order not to be wasteful? And yet, the current choices given to us are to encourage developing wasteful behaviors. The current “more eco-friendly” or “sustainable” or “bio-degradable” solutions are either greenwashing at worst or not available widely at best, and their implementations vary from state to state.
To bring back the focus to textiles, textile waste is the fastest growing type of waste in the United States according to Recycle.com’s 2020 study. The continued popularity of fast fashion and meteoric rise of ultra fast fashion (large variety of clothes, cheaply made fabrics, highly discounted priced clothes that break down very easily) have no doubt contribute to textile waste’s notoriety.
Getting well-made, long-lasting garments that fit great and are reasonably priced is not a choice that’s available for many, especially considering the variety of socioeconomic conditions people live in.
My intention for creating this outfit is to remind us that waste is everywhere - whether we can see it or not. The current system is designed to favor easy disposal of things without necessarily accompanied by ethical, necessary large-scale processes to turn them into renewable materials. When we start getting aware of this, our perspectives can start changing. In turn, we can start making small changes to our lifestyles and develop new habits that reduce our wasteful culture mentality.
Chapter 2: Textile Economy
The second outfit is the 8th iteration of my ever-evolving Gathered Cloths project. It gradually illustrates the growing threat of textile waste with each iteration. The more iteration this project completes, the more textile waste is repurposed to construct the outfit.
For this 8th iteration, Gathered Cloths has accumulated 100 pieces of ruffled cloths in various sizes. 16 of them are newly made using scraps of a deconstructed rug (sourced from a San Francisco resident who generously shipped them to me). 11 are older pieces that are either repaired or spruced up with new ruffles.
Assembling 100 ruffled cloth pieces of various sizes (from around the size of a hand to a size of a tea towel or a table runner) around one model is rather extreme, but that’s a growing analogy - a glimpse of the gradually overwhelming nature of textile waste.
If textile waste continues to be treated like “business as usual,” then we will see more people get sick, get displaced due to man-made disasters most severely in the Global South countries, where Global North countries ship their waste. People’s labors and skills will continue to get exploited, and the environmental impacts will be nothing like we have ever seen.
With this 8th Gathered Cloths iteration, I want to create a 3D representation of a much-cited diagram in Ellen MacArthur Foundation’s A new textiles economy: Redesigning fashion’s future (2017). On page 20, the study presents a diagram representing the 2015 textile lifecycle - 12% raw materials never made it into consumer products. From 53 million tons of clothes produced, only 12% get properly recycled and 73% gets incinerated or landfilled.
Moreover, I also want to layer one more diagram from Recycle.com’s 2020 whitepaper Textile Recovey in the US. On page 23, there is a hopeful diagram about a possible future where disposed textiles would decrease from 84% in 2020 to 0% in 2040.
Of course, this scenario requires more study for optimal collection methods that include recommerce and curbside collection services, in addition to more robust traditional collection channels for charities and thrift stores. The study also adds that the “20-year timeline is reflective of the time that new fiber sorting and recycling technologies will take to reach commercialization, as it is the end market.”
Using the 8th iteration to do textile-related data visualization is a new experiment for me. I got inspired by Alisa Singer of Environmental Graphiti, an artist who frequently visualizes data through her paintings. Her work is also featured on the cover of IPCC 6th Assessment Report.
By doing this data visualization experiment, I hope the attendees can grasp the current reality of the textile economy beyond a 2D diagram presentation. If they are sketching, it would be interesting to see if the underlying data is absorbed better or if they solely focus on the model’s silhouette and/or outfit textures.
Chapter 3: Hope for Transparency
The last chapter of this textile upcycling story is a continuation of the hopeful, gentler, kinder future that encourages more producer’s responsibility. As you (the reader) or in-person showcase attendees may realize through the previous two outfits, there is only so much a customer can do to make an impact. The power lies in the producers to do better to craft a more sustainable future.
This means I hope for more transparency in their supply chain, no opaque misleading greenwashing marketing bullshit. A real attempt to educate customers to develop responsible, healthy habits.
I hope we can bring more accountability to producers, equipped with laws that can be enforced and implemented at scale. No more overproduction and overconsumption that displaces people we never see, and blatant destructions of ecosystems we are never aware of.
I hope for more investments into textile innovations involving mostly or exclusively natural fibers, even for “high performance” apparels that are almost exclusively made with synthetics and coating chemicals.
I hope for more thoughtful considerations to produce well-made clothes that can also biodegrade in reasonable rate and time frame.
I hope for better treatment and appreciation to garment workers all around the world, most of them females. They need to have more equity in this global supply chain systemic machine they operate.
And last but not least, I hope for a world where we can safely share our planet’s resources with the future generations. Because that’s the actual goal of the term “sustainability.”
Do you share some of my hopes? Are they worth fighting for, or are they dreams that are already out of reach?
I encapsulate these hopes and dreams in an outfit with more ethereal qualities. Layers of tulle scraps laid on top of some cotton lining. The transparent layers, adorned with embroidered plant motifs represent my childlike, sincere and vulnerable yearning towards a gentler future.
This outfit, the closer of my textile upcycling story, aims to inspire others to reassess their understanding about “sustainability” and conceptualize more goals and personal actions they can take in the future.
Parting Thoughts: Beauty / Chaos
I made this collage back in 2018 when I was working through some intense internal feelings. Years later, I feel connected to it again. Preparing Hem & Jaleo showcase fills me with so many emotions: excitement, hopefulness, sense of dread and occasional panic, calm, and…
I see myself in the mirror countless times - holding up a garment or a piece of fabric to measure / re-measure them.
I find myself whipping my hair madly internally while projecting a calm exterior every time I make a stupid mistake and have to redo everything I did for the past 4 hours.
I imagine having invisible eyes watching my every move, their minds incessantly asking why things are still not done.
I see myself surrounded by beauty and chaos - in the sewing studio and beyond. Trails of cut threads on my shirt, on the floor, in the bathroom, everywhere.
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While it’s all chaotic and hard to comprehend at times, I have learned to make peace with it. Life is messy, and we are multifaceted. We can feel various feelings while going through a particular chapter in our lives, and that we don’t know what’s waiting for us at the end of the tunnel.
And it’s fine that we don’t know. What’s more important is that we continue to be open, learn new things, and adapt. We don’t have to be beautiful and composed at all times. We are free to be frantic and messy from time to time. I’m not done with my sewing and I only have 2 weeks left. So be it. They will be done in due time.
Thanks for reading; until next time,
Mira Musank