How can textiles be made more sustainably? Slow Fashion Season launched this year as a forum to exchange knowledge, build skills, and present exciting initiatives and creative production techniques aimed at more sustainable, conscientious use, and production of fibres and apparel.
Slow Fashion Season is an initiative of a new Research Excellence Cluster, Circular Textiles, Sustainable Fibre, Slow Fashion, supported by the Office of the Vice-President, Research and Innovation, and comprised of faculty, staff and students who are tackling the complex problems of textile waste and consumption with alternative fibre systems and materials.
New research cluster: circular textiles, sustainable fibre, slow fashion
The breadth of research, creation, and knowledge-exchange activities informs the cluster’s name: Circular Textiles includes research in technologies and creative production for recycling and re-fabricating textile waste; Sustainable Fibre addresses textile making traditions, the resurgence of traditional ecological knowledge, and the alignment of food and fibre systems; and Slow Fashion aims to inspire action towards changed consumption habits and reduced clothing waste. The emerging cluster is bringing together scholars and non-academic partners to work on the complex problems of sustainability in textiles and clothing.
“To try to arrive at a more sustainable version of fashion is [to] simply slow down all of those processes — slow down the processes of consumption, slow down the processes of production and make them more localized to the places where the clothing is actually used.”
- Germaine Koh, Assistant Professor, Department of Art History, Visual Art & Theory.
Workshops, a student design competition, a Hatch Art Gallery exhibition, and a Slow Fashion Show
Throughout Slow Fashion season, students were invited to create their own sustainable outfits, taking part in hands-on workshops to repair or reinvent their clothes. A collaboration with the SEEDS Sustainability program facilitated a student competition for sustainable garment production. Students were invited to design and create a casual, workwear, or ceremonial garment using sustainably sourced or reused fibres. The top 3 garments in each category were featured in the Slow Fashion Season Fashion Show alongside items from professional designers.
“The Slow Fashion Season Fashion Show was a fantastic display of alternatives to the wastefulness of the fast-fashion industry, while also providing budding student designers the opportunity to have their work displayed on the same stage as leading professionals in sustainable garment design.”
- Josh Travers, Circular Economy Applied Research Coordinator, SEEDS Sustainability Program.
Slow Fashion season culminated in a Public Exhibition 21-27 March at Hatch Art Gallery and Fashion Show 27 March at the Museum of Anthropology. The events featured inspiring slow fashion designers, student finalists, and textile research, raising awareness of the environmental impacts of fast fashion while celebrating creative, low-waste, and locally rooted solutions.
Research cluster members' research includes technological and creative experimentation, cultural research looking at Indigenous and traditional fibre traditions, and methods for reducing, processing and re-using textile waste.
Learn more about Slow Fashion Season and the Circular Textiles, Sustainable Fibre, Slow Fashion research cluster.