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Artistic Research Post-Consumer Textiles

In Spring 2021, New Order of Fashion started an extensive Artistic Research project on post-consumer textiles with two talented designers, Matthew Needham and Stina Randestad.

Creating new fibers or new garments from post-consumer textiles is often marketed as a simple solution for a wasteful industry, but practice has proven otherwise and much more complicated due to the variety in materials and multiplicity of its designs and constructions. Therefore the goal of this project was to deepen and share the knowledge by way of experiment.

Under the guidance of our creative team and Artistic Research mentor, dr Pauline van Dongen, both talents engaged in desk research, interviews and material research enabling them as well as New Order of Fashion to develop new insights about materials, processes and designs.

The insights obtained during the process have been thoroughly documented and will offer the industry and colleagues such as other design talents, fashion professionals, scientists, teachers and students relevant knowledge and inspiration to advance their experiments with post consumer textiles.

Developing and sharing knowledge to promote sustainable change in the fashion industry is one of the key missions of NOoF . NOoF talents play a vital role in this. Extensive design research in the NOoF LAB or at the facilities of partners enables them to develop new materials, processes and designs.

NOoF asked Stina Randestad and Matthew Needham to research the elements and reshaping potential of recycled post-consumer textiles within their material scope as a designer. The outcomes will subsequently be used as a starting point for a design conceptualization that offers in its turn an innovative and creative full circle solution for the post-consumer textile problem.

Both studies and results, supported by the Creative Industries Fund NL, were shown during Dutch Design Week.