This blog has now run its natural course and I will be continuing my writing and thoughts on a new blog - mainly related to my PhD research - coming soon. I am also compiling the best content from this blog into a small publication, also coming soon!


In the meantime please see my updated website with an archive of my past work and my latest projects www.claravuletich.com

Design for Change

For the last six months I have been working on a project that explores some of my thoughts on how a textile/fashion designer can 'design for change'.

With a commission from a large US clothing company via TED, I was asked to consider new ideas around social enterprise models and philanthropy for the garment industry.

I worked in collaboration with Tom Rowley from Pipeline Project/Good for Nothing who are experts in social business/innovation strategy and who are developing exciting new methods for creative collaboration between the commercial and third sectors (NGO's, charities etc).

We developed a 'model' for how a clothing factory/brand can take more responsibility for their place in a community through developing a small range of fashion accessories made using waste from the production process, employing local people to make the new products, with this all generated from a 'Design Hub' that is led by a team of designers and embedded or located near to the factory.

It is inspired by the research I have been doing on the new role that designers are playing in local communities, outside of their normal 'design studio' contexts. But my question was: what does this mean for fashion/textile designers?

Three prototype bags were created along with a short film that explored the issues and context to this new 'design activity'.

I will be presenting this project as part of my PhD presentation in a few weeks to my fellow first years. The presentation is titled 'I Am Disruptive: a new role for fashion/textile designers in the supply chain'.

More on my thoughts and findings around this project will emerge as I prepare for this presentation.

Paris delights

The bricolage + friends show is installed and it looks great. It included beautiful work from Mentsen (simple wall shelves), a hand made office set from Thomas Wagner, wall pieces from Studio Glitheroe (the circular 'Fire Drawing' on the wall left in image above, and the Blue Tiles on the wall right), amongst the textile work from the bricolage members, more images coming soon.


My work is called 'Re Assemblage' and is a combination of textile samples I have created over the least 2 years. I also created a 'map' of the samples, that describes their processes and materials. I also showed a video I made in collaboration with Uli Schade and Katherine May that features myself doing some printing and Katherine doing some quilting.

Go here to see more images from the Private View and show.

bricolage + friends in Paris

bricolage have curated an exhibition of our work and invited a small selection of some of our favourite product and furniture designers, at the Centre Commercial space in Paris in June.

The show is inspired by the spirit of bricolage as a process, which is experimental, playful and collaborative. It is about using existing materials to re-assemble things into new objects and new meanings. It is also about the process of making and crafting and getting your hands dirty.

As textile designers, we make objects and textiles that will have a long life, and become modern heirlooms. We believe there is an honesty and timelessness in a bricolage process, that is grounded in the everyday but still elegant and beautiful.

For this exhibition at Centre Commercial, we have been given carte blanche to invite our favourite designers and makers from London to show with us. The designers we have chosen, from Studio Glitheroe to Mentsen, are working across a range of disciplines from product, jewellery to furniture design, and they all create beautifully crafted pieces that explores the wonder of materials and processes.

So why has a textile design collective chosen to show their work with these designers? Textiles have always been a raw material for other designers, taken on and adapted for use in either garments or interiors, with the textile designer mostly hidden from view. However, recently there has been an increasing visibility and interest in textiles, from fine art to product design, and the bricolage collective aim to explore and facilitate these new dialogues.

Natural dyes, textiles and urban agriculture

Great article in the New York Times recently about the revived interest in natural dyes for textiles. Sasha Duerr of Permacouture Institute features and the Textile Arts Centre (TAC) in Brooklyn, which is just setting up their own garden of plants to use to teach natural dyeing.

A lot of this activity is happening in urban settings, and is seeding at the same time as interest and action around urban agriculture. The TAC's project is called Sewing Seeds and the garden is being developed in partnership with a Community Supported Agriculture programme and 596 Acres, a group who find disused land and offer it to community projects (like the Capital Growth scheme in London).

I had several undergrad textile students this year writing their final thesis on design, textiles and food, looking at the designers who are either making products using food or artists like Sasha Duerr who are holding 'Dinner to Dye For' events where participants learn how to dye cloth using plants, and then cook and eat food using the plants.

Another student explored the idea of 'rurbanism' (a phrase coined by some future forecasters to explain the interest in urban agriculture etc) and how designers are getting involved.

All of these has been the inspiration behind the development of my Local textiles Project, more of which will be coming over the coming few years.

Out of the studio and in to landscapes

Since I started my PhD last October I have barely had a chance to reflect on what I've seen and experienced. This is what I am doing now and boy has it been a journey so far!

One of the highlights of the conferences, workshops and events I've been to was the 3 day trip around London's water ways with the Cape Farewell people, called Short Course UK. A group of post graduate art and design students from CCW were lucky enough to be invited with a selection of scientists and artists to accompany us (This short film is about the trip, and that's me with the pink bobble hat).

The first day we journeyed up the Thames on a boat to the largest landfill site in the UK and discussed waste, plastic and ocean bacteria; on the second day we visited the Thames Flood Barriers and discussed climate change and the affects on sea levels, and on the third day we went up the canal on a barge to the Olympic Site and ended up at the Farm Shop, London's only farm in a shop in

Hackney, that I've written about before.

The experience of this trip was multi dimensional. Thinking about waste, lifecycles, precious resources such as water and soil, and the human impacts on environments, in this case mainly dense, urban environments was absorbing and intense.

It also made me think of my own life and experiences of landscape and place, particularly the discussions around water. I had grown up around water in Australia – it was down the back of my grandmothers garden in the form of a reservoir; it was crashing onto the shores of the beaches we swam in and worshipped every weekend for all the hot, long summers of my childhood and it was glistening silently in the coves and hidden spots around Sydney Harbour, visible from the end of the street I grew up on. But, Id also been mainly absent from living in Australia over the last ten years during the severe droughts there. So I hadn't really reflected on water until now. And now England is expecting a drought this Summer.

Most of the information I was exposed to – the dangers of climate change on water levels; our ignorance and short sightedness of the practices of landfill - I already knew about intellectually, but here I was exploring it from a different angle and with a group of people who all brought new perspectives – scientists, artists and designers. It was an exchange and a shared experience and this was crucial.

Alot of the time we were moving between places, waiting for boats to arrive, or wandering as you do in large groups. Sometimes, it was boring, but sometimes you’d end up having a conversation with an expert in soil ecosystems. By sticking with it, and experiencing the whole three days, it started to make sense to me at a more profound level, the place inside me where personal meaning is formed by my past and present experiences.

This touches on something I have been thinking a lot about with my own research. Sustainability is personal – we have to make sense of it for ourselves as human beings.You can't force a design student to care about the environmental or social impacts that their future, distant actions may have. It has come from within them, but hopefully we can guide them towards that 'knowing'.

This experiment in new ways to teach art and design students about sustainability, has great potential. As they ask on the Short Course UK website: "What is the role of the art school in a time of environmental crisis? How can we reflect a growing interest in multi-disciplinary learning, where expertise is shared and where concern for sustainability and local environmental issues figure prominently? And what does it mean to be an artist or an art student; what is at stake, now, in being called a sculptor or a painter, an architect or a designer".

Some of the people involved went on to create new work based on the experience, and this was shown at Chelsea in February. For me, it has inspired my Local Textiles Project which had it's first iteration in Melbourne at Harvest Textiles in January.

Textiles & Interdependence

My work and thoughts will be included in a publication and on a website called ATLAS:Geography, Architecture and Change in an Interdependent World that comes out of a project called Interdependence Day back in 2009.

The book brings together geographers and architects, writers, artists, and designers to test novel ways of understanding and responding to global environmental and economic change.

(The project is run by Dr Joe Smith, an academic who looks at the impact of environmental change on culture, and he was one of the editors of a recent publication I have also picked up called Culture and Climate Change.)

I contributed my thoughts on ‘textiles and interdependence’ and the role of textile and fashion designers in this changing world, which is repeated below:

"Sustainability is a complex subject that most often baffles designers. If we are going to tackle the issues at all, mostly the focus stays at a simple materials and process level – what fabrics or materials you choose, and their subsequent environmental impacts. While this is important, the complexity of the subject also requires ‘joined-up thinking’, where we start to think of our products and skills in a broader way - what we can do with our products once they have finished their useful life, or with textiles and garments, how to encourage more sustainable behaviour in the ‘use’ phase, with washing and drying. These broader issues require a different way of approaching design which calls for a more collaborative way of working, across professional disciplines, but also with consumers and users of our products and services.

Collaborative work is not easy, and it often takes time to build trust and a rhythm. It requires designers to finesse that delicate balance between remaining experts while also being open to new ways of working and new modes of engaging with people who use our products or could benefit from our skills.

There are certain special qualities of a craftsperson or a designer, that I believe will be vital for the challenges we face – a sensitivity to materials, a natural resourcefulness and an ability to solve problems through trial and error. These are all skills that give one an autonomy and control over the materials and objects in our everyday life, and that are needed for the new types of wellbeing that we will need to create for ourselves.

This understanding of craft processes and design thinking methods means there are exciting new roles for designers to embrace - How can a textile or fashion designer become a design activist? What role is there for us in the new forms of social innovation which are emerging?

Working with textile collective bricolage, allows me to try out some of these ideas. Whether it is running a workshop on darning and mending skills or selling our handmade products through innovative retail models, the skills and expertise of a textile designer/maker are unique and should not only be more visible, but should be shared and encouraged in others.

On a material level, my own practice uses printing and pattern, stitching and layering of fabrics, to create textiles that embody and reflect some of the ideas and theories I am exploring in research. My work touches on ideas of emotional durability, material resourcefulness, and the intimate relationship we have to textiles and pattern in our everyday lives. What does a ‘slow’ textile product look like? How can a designer facilitate a more resourceful and meaningful way for people to live with textiles and garments?

For me, the complexity and globalised spread of the processes involved in producing textiles represent so well the ‘interdependencies’ being highlight by this Project. Manufacturing, washing and drying and disposing of textiles impacts on many peoples’ livelihoods and produces a serious environmental burden. It is through my textile practice and exploring the new emerging role for designers in this complex, uncertain context that I hope to contribute a vision of for the future."