Can You Keep a Building Warm with a Pineapple Jacket?

asafford4

Jan 12, 20205 min read

Updated: Jan 15, 2020

THIS POST IS IN PROCESS

This post includes a few Amsterdam sites and resources I visited this during my April visit. I will mostly let the images and the artists or organizations speak for themselves.

Conny Groenewegen's Fashion Machine at Mediamatic: Keeping a Building Warm While Raising Awareness About Polyester Fleece's Effects on the Environment, and those who live in it

Fashion Machine at OBA (Amsterdam Public Library)

Text from Fashion Machine's website and from the show text http://fashionmachine.org/machines/oba/:

Wall text:

Fashion Machine/ Fleece Afterlife

New applications for the discarded fleece sweater!

Plastic is becoming an ever-growing problem because it doesn't degrade and so it is slowly taking over our world-even our wardrobes?

Transforming PET (or, polyethylene terephthalate) plastic bottles to yarn and clothing is promoted as a remedy to the plastic waste problem. In reality. it's a surrogate solution because the garments contribute to, what is for many people, the invisible waste chain of the fashion industry via overproduction, offcuts, discarded items, and the thousands of micro plastics released when such fabrics are machine washed.

How harmful are plastics when they become part of our ecosystem? And can we prevents this by working together with microorganisms such as fungi and mushrooms?

Designer Conny Groenewegen develops knitted materials for clothing collections and special applications. In addition to the ability to create and develop materials, she also wants to improve our capacity to break down and 'design away' materials. The Fashion Machine project is her attempt to understand how such processes work.

From website:

"Together with fashion designer Conny Groenewegen, participants designed a collection with discardedpolyester-fleece sweaters from Amsterdam. Moreover, we knitted an enormous polyester-fleece tunnel! At the end of the day, we organized a colorful fashion-march at the OBA escalators and in front of the building."

Participatory stations, and information to educate the audience

wall text with some background information on plastic based fleece

"FASHION MACHINE AND THE SEDUCTION OF PLASTIC CLOTHING"

"Plastic is becoming an ever-growing problem because it doesn’t degrade and so it is slowly taking over our world– even our wardrobes!

"Do you have a fabulous fleece onesie in your closet, a soft suit in which you can chill out on the couch for hours? Or, perhaps you have a fleece sweater that you always wear when hiking? It’s very warm, dries quickly and feels light as a feather. They sound ideal, don’t they?"

"Unfortunately, fleece isn’t exactly the ‘eco-solution’ the market once promised. Transforming PET (or, polyethylene terephthalate) plastic bottles to yarn and clothing is promoted as a remedy to the plastic waste problem. In reality, it’s a surrogate solution because the garments contribute to, what is for many people, the invisible waste chain of the fashion industry via overproduction, offcuts, discarded items, and the thousands of microplastics released when such fabrics are machine washed.

"There is a massive fleece surplus, but it is the least popular material at collection centres for discarded clothing. As such, fleece will often end up in the incinerator before it is even worn. Can we together use the Fashion Machine to solve fashion’s plastic problem?"

Display with focus on using mycelium with the poly fleece, and laundry ball and bag to catch the microfibers

Fashion for Good

(text from website, link below )

"Fashion is stuck in a pattern of ‘take-make-waste’, which causes devastating environmental impacts, not to mention huge economic losses. On average, we buy 60% more clothing than we did 15 years ago — but we keep each item only half as long. Plus, it is estimated that nearly 60% of all clothing produced ends up being burned or in landfills within one year of being made. It doesn’t need to be this way. The fashion industry can transform from the linear ‘take-make-waste’ model to a circular Good Fashion approach that is restorative and regenerative by design.

We believe that Good Fashion is not only possible, it is within reach — what the industry lacks are the resources, tools and incentives to put it into relentless practice. Our mission at Fashion for Good is to bring together the entire fashion ecosystem through our Innovation Platform and as a convenor for change.

The ‘Good’ in Fashion for Good™

Good fashion is not fashion that simply looks good or is mostly good. It is good in five important ways:

Good Materials  –  safe, healthy and designed for reuse and recycling Good Economy  – growing, circular, shared and benefiting everyone Good Energy  – renewable and clean Good Water  – clean and available to all Good Lives  – living and working conditions that are just, safe and dignified

“The Five Goods represent an aspirational framework we can all use to work towards a world in which we do not simply take, make, waste, but rather take, make, renew, restore.”

– William McDonough, Co-founder Fashion for Good

By sharing ‘The Five Goods’ widely with practicality and wisdom, and by demonstrating that they can create good fashion that is more attractive, accessible and affordable than its opposite, Fashion for Good will guide the sector with an aspirational model that all can use; a genuine and accountable framework with the promise of social, economic and environmental prosperity."

Interactive wall projections inform you how you can lessen your textile-based impact, and "store" shows different companies working towards making change. Store is more of an educational gallery than a consumer site.

Upstairs near lecture hall there is a display showcasing more environmentally friendly products, projects, and the companies developing them.

In the basement: an exhibition narrating the fabrication of a t-shirt from the field to the wearer. It highlights the human element as well and environmental, to consider the conditions many of the workers creating our clothes. The video is of The True Cost, an informative movie I highly recommend. A link to the movie's website is below.

Fashion Statements at Amsterdam Museum

"The clothing we wear reveals something about our personality. Fashion expressed our identity, what we find important or what we stand for. In this exhibition, six leading contemporary designers put their creations next to and opposite our historic collection with fashion from the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. It is a dialogue between the present and the past; an exchange of statements."

From Amsterdam Museum's website, run through google translate

https://www.amsterdammuseum.nl/en

The show was divided by designer, each area including historical clothing from the museums collection to contextualize and converse with the contemporary.

Dutch designers Art Comes First at Amsterdam Museum

Dutch fashion designer Ninamounah

Amsterdam based Bas Kosters (my fashion crush) featuring his work using recycled clothing.

Dutch designers Karim Adduchi and Marga Weimans

Show in the attic of the museum focusing on street fashion of Amsterdam, including Tom of Holland's sweater repairs

Studio Frowijn

Much more information is available on the website

"Studio Frowijn is a dynamic design-studio and the artistic house of designer Liselore Frowijn. Established in 2014, it offers various services in the field of sustainable design.

“With a formal education as a fashion designer at ArtEZ Institute of the Arts (NL), Liselore Frowijn worked for the first 6 years post-graduation and won two prestigious, international fashion awards. Working alongside the traditional fashion system, she worked freelance for companies all while developing two seasonal collections a year. These were presented in Paris fashion week by a catwalk-show as well as a showroom devoted to her eponymous brand."

"Her practice as a fashion designer has previously been largely defined by the industry’s traditional seasonal production. However, considering the lack of sustainability in this construction, both in regards to materials as well as the futuristic perspective generally, this endeavor wasn’t conceivable as a long term operation."

"For this reason, Frowijn decided in 2018 to change her fashion-label into a dynamic design studio where she launches capsule collections, titled Serie I, II, III… etc.

The series will be locally made and produced on a small scale. As a result, all products will consist of recycled/sustainable material and/or local stocks. The diverse, unique, and exclusive series of semi-couture clothing and accessories will be updated every quarter of the year on the webshop.”

“With all this, FROWIJN moves consciously away from the traditional fashion system of linear growth and attempts to remain small and able to focus on prioritizing sustainable practices and a circular growth that reuses and recycles already existing materials.”