The Local Cloth Project - Day 1

“I love quality. I love longevity. I love good design. I love ideas. I love this town. But most of all I love that I can wrap all these things up into a pair of jeans.”

This quote comes from David Hiatt, the founder of Howies, the sustainable clothing label who is now setting up a new venture called Hiut Denim, based in a town in Wales in the UK.

It encapsulates what I am trying to do on this short residency here at the Harvest Worksroom in East Brunswick – to explore through textiles and cloth, larger ideas around quality and craftsmanship, emotional attachment to products, and what it means to feel connected to a place, a location and to a community of people.

In Hiatt’s case, he has decided to set up a small denim brand in the town he lives in, in Wales. He discovered the town had a heritage of producing denim jeans – it had the last denim jeans factory to close in the UK - and has decided to revive the dying industry and bring back employment and skills training into the local community. He will only sell jeans – beautiful quality, well-made in the UK, jeans. Simple. The press images on his website, pre the launch of the collection, are not of models in sample garments but are of his farm, and his Landrover, and the owls that live in the barn next to his house.

His UK-based customers (although no doubt it will attract cult following world wide like many of these small, niche denim brands) will be willing to spend a premium amount to own a pair of jeans that have been made in their own country. The customer will feel connected to the jeans because they probably know someone very like the person who made these jeans in Wales, and they may even know the town. They understand the culture, the location and the way of working that produced the jeans. They may even feel a sense of national pride.

Hiut Denim is not the only clothing brand that has gone local. There is also Raleigh Denim in North Carolina in the US, set up by a young creative couple, to nurture the local denim industry, notably the Cone Denim Mill which has a very long history in the area. There is even a young guy in east London, near to where my studio is, who has set up ‘London’s first micro mill’. He has installed an industrial loom in his London studio, rescued from a closing mill up near Manchester. It’s called the London Cloth Company, and he is teaching himself how to weave woven tweeds.

Here at Harvest Textiles, I’m going to try to map these ideas of the local and what it means for Harvest and for the neighbourhood they exist in. In a way, this is a relatively easy site for investigation. Harvest are already a textile printing enterprise, who are aware of their ‘footprint’, and who have a positive impact socially (through their workshops and encouragement of local creatives). Also, the neighbourhood of East Brunswick, was actually the original site of most of Melbourne’s early textiles and garment production.

All of this is rich pickings for a design researcher. I have my new desk, and am sharing the space with a lovely group of people who are on the Summer School printing class for the week. You are welcome to come by and say hi if you are in the area and I would love to get any feedback or share a conversation about what local textiles means for you.

The Local Cloth Project at Harvest Textiles

Im a Designer-in-Residence' at Harvest Textiles this week and will be beginning my Local Cloth Project, as part of my PhD research.

The residency will explore the concept of ‘local textiles’ where I hope to combine my knowledge of sustainable textile print and dye processes with my interest in new forms of design and community activity that promote ‘home-grown’ knowledge and skills and encourage well-being.

While we live in a globalised world, where most of our clothing, textiles and objects are made abroad, and we are disconnected to the making of most of the products in our lives, how can we re-connect? The idea of ‘local’ has gained prominence in most urban cities with Slow food, farmers markets, the sprouting of an urban agriculture movement and the re-emergence of independent retailers and companies, who offer us trust, loyalty and a sense of community. But what does this mean for textiles?

Historically, all our textiles and garments were made locally or by ourselves. If they were made locally, the distance between the producers and the users of textiles was minimal. If we made our own textiles, we were closely connected to the growing, collecting and creating of materials and plants that were used to produce textiles. Both these scenarios meant we had a more intimate relationship and they created a vastly different dynamic to the fast, shallow relationship we have to our garments today.

Using Harvest Textiles location in East Brunswick, I will explore what a local textile could be. What does a Melbourne cloth look like? What colour is it? Who made it? Where has the raw materials come from?

Utilising a range of techniques and ideas, such as natural dyeing using local Melbourne native plants, sustainable printing techniques and creative upcycling, I will attempt to develop a taxonomy of ‘local textiles’ for Harvest Textiles.

Caring Economics

A new type of economic system that prioritises the two most important aspects of our lives as human beings - the care we give to each other and the natural system of the planet.

So simple and so obvious.

Radical transparency

Last month, deep in the bowls of Sweden's first nuclear testing room, 25 meters under a University campus in Stockholm, a group of coders and web developers met for a Green Hackathon.

There is a wealth of data on the internet about environmental impacts and lifecycle assessments which show the impacts of the production and manufacturing of products across global supply chains, but this information needs more creative and transparent ways of being communicated. For this hackathon, the 'hackers' met for 24 hours and worked in teams all through the night to come up with new web platforms, apps and tools.

Leonardo Bonnani from Sourcemap, launched the event with his description of 'radical transparency' and how Sourcemap aims to offer everyone the tools for revealing data about environmental impacts in a clear, open-source way.

While most of the data that Sourcemap reveals is about carbon impacts, water use or waste outputs, we began a conversation about social impacts and how these could be more transparent and available.

Using available data from the United Nations, Leo and his colleague Bianca chose to focus on child labour for this 'hack'. The countries with the highest rates of child labour, in the supply chain of coffee, were then made visible on the Sourcemap site, using a simple magenta dot - the higher the rate of child labour, the larger the dot (see top image). This is a simple but powerful tool for communicating the social impacts of the production of commodities and products.

Obviously, this tool could be used 'radically', to uncover or reveal activities that some organisations may not want to be revealed, and Bonnani reports that some of the recent maps that people have created are clearly from people who have access to confidential or restricted data. But it is also increasingly being used by brands and companies as an internal tool for communicating their supply chain to all their stakeholders.

It was also revealed last month at the RITE Group conference in London, that Marks & Spencers has partnered with Historic Futures, who offer a similar service to companies, and M & S will be attempting to reveal the impacts of every single one of their non-food items!

The idea of making complex information easily understood, is one of the big challenges for sustainability, and is often where designers can have a role to play. Graphic visualisations of complex data is the aim of the website and recent book Information is beautiful

and the Guardian even has a Data blog, that reveals recent statistics in a easily digestible way.

This idea of the social impacts of the fashion industry, has sent me on a big research spree but Im also seeing a little mini visualisation of the social/emotional impacts of one of the pieces of clothing that I own. More on this soon!

Local Colour Project in Melbourne

For anyone who lives in the land of Oz, I'll be an Artist-in-Resident at Harvest Textiles in Melbourne in January for a week, working on my local textiles and colour project, where I'll be developing a taxonomy of local Melbourne colours for textiles from native plants.

I've been thinking for a while now about how to continue working with natural dye techniques for textiles, with a project that combines my other interest in the local - how to 'harvest' the knowledge of people who know their local area intimately, in this case the knowledge of indigenous Australian plants and their use as dyes for textiles. I'll be working with the Plant Craft Cottage Group based in the Melbourne Botanical Gardens and will be based at Harvest Tetxiles Workroom, boiling dye baths and drawing plants. I'm also very aware of the knowledge that indigenous Australians based around Melbourne would have had in the past and am going to try to do some research on that too.

Im also running a 2 day workshop called Melbourne Cloth, where we will learn how to dye fabric using hese plants and maybe even some basic printing techniques.

More info here.

Stitch hacking

The most interesting thing I saw at TENT London last week (aside from my fellow bricoleur Naomi Paul's divine pendant lights!) was a textile installation by product designer Henny van Nistelrooy, who is part of the JAMM Collective. All the designers were given off cuts from the Scottish wool company BUTE fabrics, and Henny created a series of textile covered screens, that were hung in mid air.

"Each of the fabric frames were created by unthreading the original textile weave to make a series of graphic shapes in the material".

So, he took a textile waste stream, hung it elegantly in some frames, and simply unpicked or 'hacked' the weave structures to create new textile structures. Simple and beautiful, and great to see a product dedsigner is is to in to textiles!

On the theme of hacking, the wonderful Amy Twigger Holroyd, who is now a fellow PhD candidate like me (at Birmingham City looking at fashion rights) has an exhibition on throughout October at Prick Your Finger, called Stitch Hacked.

As Amy says, "My 'stitch-hacking' technique allows me to create structural patterns within an existing piece of knitting, laddering and re-forming the stitches. I use this technique to insert personal information, such as my name, within the fabric of second-hand garments, and explore the idea of ownership."

Again, a simple but effective way of 'hacking'. Hacking ( term I believe originated from the computer hackers of the 1980's) is not about anarchists who flip the system and create a new one. The computer hackers worked within the system (in their context computer coding) learning how it works and changing it from within.

A nice analogy then for thes examples of stitch and weave re-structuring.

Making & Belonging

I visited the British Museum recently to see the exhibition on Aboriginal baskets, or dillybags as we sometimes call them. I spent some time working amongst Aboriginal communities up in far north Queensland and near Darwin in the late 1990's, and I have always felt an affinity with their culture, their crafts and their sense of disempowerment amongst a dominant, alien culture.

The water carrier, seen above, is one of the most beautiful objects I have seen - not only is it expertly constructed with what looks like one piece of sea kelp, but the idea that as humans we used to have to carry water, often long distances and to have to treat it as such a valuable resource, is difficult to actually comprehend until you see what a water carrier looks like - you can imagine holding it, what the kelp feels like, how long someone would have had to carry it for each trip to the water hole.

The baskets were also so joyous to see, the colours from natural plant dyes, the shapes and textures of the weaving and threading and the ingenuity with scarce material resources. But, what I had forgotten about with these bags was their power - as objects in themselves but also as carriers of symbolic meaning.

As the curator writes in the catalogue, "Aboriginal people ...were mostly mobile, moving from place to place within their territories. They made and used comparatively few objects: their riches were and still are intellectual, philosophical and religious".

It is this notion of these baskets being carriers of such rich cultural meaning that I am awed by. From what I understand, they were made by one person, but within a community of others, and amongst the ecology of their own land, that they have inherited. It is this collective making and use that makes them so powerful.

"The baskets hold our families, our stories, our knowledge, our language, our law and even our men's and women's power...for us the basket is a symbol of the things that we have, that we know and that we can share".

I will ponder more on the idea of 'collective making' in my next post on the Power of Making exhibition I saw at the V & A last week.