What is the role of a fashion designer today? Thinking purely about gorgeous clothes is so last season. Gone are the days when designers could consider only a collection, how it will sell and what the customer might be looking for.
Forward-thinkers are already beginning to take more holistic view and adopt a living systems approach. They’re asking questions such as, Can we make like Nature makes? How might fashion create nutrients instead of waste? How can we use biomimicry in sustainable ways? Program living systems to produce bespoke products? And, how can we build a truly regenerative system in place of the current degenerative one?
“We won't have a choice in the future. We will all have to include sustainability in everything we do,” says this week’s guest Carole Collet - a bio designer, professor of textile futures and the director of LVMH’s Maison/0 incubator for emerging talent focused on regenerative luxury.
Carole was raised in Burgundy, France, to respect Nature. Her mother worked in a flower shop, her father in a greenhouse. In 1991, she was in London studying for her Masters in textiles when she had a revelation: “It’s in biology that the answers will be.” Traditionally, textile design education focuses on weaving, knitting or maybe printing. “It's very craft based,” says Carole says, “and I love craft; I think it’s justified. But at Masters level, I felt like it was too restrictive.” She went on to set up the first Material Futures program at Central Saint Martins “to explore what textiles could be”.
A philosophical conversation that extends way beyond fashion, encouraging us to ask the big questions about what sort of world we want to build - and our responsibilities in doing so.
We might begin, suggests Carole, by challenging our anthropocentrism, and ask, "What does a bee want? How about a fish?"
Thought-provoking!
ABOUT CAROLE COLLET
Carole Collet a professor of Design for Sustainable Futures at Central Saint Martins in London, and Co-Director of Living Systems Lab Research Group based there.
Way before fashion started flirting with biotech, Collet introduced biology into the design curriculum, founding UAL’s MA Textile Futures program back in 2000 (then called Material Futures).
Today, she also heads up the LVMH-backed Maison Zero, an incubator of sustainable intelligence designed "to provoke practices and challenge our collective futures”.
Photography Vero Manrique
WHAT DOES A BEE WANT? Have you ever thought to ask? Language barriers notwithstanding, presuming they’d say: flowers, fruit, nectar, reliable seasons. Nice bit of sunshine. Plenty of water to drink. Hold off on the exteme weather. And the murderous glyphosate.
Those that know might also buzz, not having to be trucked in to pesticide-drenched California, by the 100K load, to pollinate intensively farmed crops in crazy big farms where local bees have long since died out.
IDK, use your imagination. Put yourselves in their wings.
When you do that as a designer, says Carole, you look at your role - and responsibility - in a totally new way. Suddenly you are designing with Nature in mind; for Nature to thrive. The opposite is not so appealing. Designers in today’s broadly degenerative system, warns Carole, “are effectively trained to kill” since the conventional ways in which we farm and manufacture trash the planet, and harm other species…
MAISON/O is he Central Saint Martins LVMH creative platform for regenerative luxury. Its “main goal is to harness the power of collaboration between talents from different backgrounds to design a better, more sustainable future. From addressing global warming to protecting biodiversity, this partnership will inspire and encourage students in their projects through creative education.” Discover here.
The MAISON ZERO GREEN TRAIL highlights the best nature-positive graduating projects across design disciplines. Like using DUST FROM THE LONDON UNDERGROUND to make tiles for the Underground, as Jeffrey Miller’s 2023 project did. Materials included naturally forming London clay excavated during tunnel boring and iron oxide-rich dust from train wheels grinding against steel tracks… Mind blown. Or CHARLOTTE WERTH’s bacteria printing machine - coming soon to the podcast!
LIVING SYSTEMS APPROACH “Living systems derive their fundamental design principles from the way in which nature has operated and evolved for billions of years. Another way of describing them are complex adaptive systems. They can be seen and experienced in nature, but also in the way in which we have designed constructs in the world around us. Cities are complex adaptive systems. Most national health services are complex adaptive systems.
Read The Club of Rome’s approach here.
Strawberry Noir, part of the Biolace series (2012) Carole Collet.
BIOLACE (2012) Carole Collet’s most widely exhibited project, Biolace suggests an alternative, sustainable means of fabricating textiles by reprogramming and harnessing the developmental biology of plants, specifically morphogenesis.
“Biodesign, according to Collet, is particularly relevant now. ‘With systems in nature, there is no waste; everything is interdependent and interconnected,” she says. “We need to learn from that.” Recently, the designer has focused on using mycelium—mushroom roots—to embellish cloth, bypassing oil-based substances. Among the results have been a reinterpretation of traditional tie-dye techniques, called Tie-Grow, and a method for permanently pleating fabric. Building on her 2012 speculative project Biolace, which explored plants’ capacity to produce material and food, she’s turned to tissue-engineering techniques as a means of controlling the development of plant roots, weaving fabric as they grow. A current study imagines plant-grown fur as the basis of new textiles.’ Via Metropolis magazine.
SIR JOHN SULSTON was a British biologist who, in 2002, won a Nobel Prize for his work on the cell lineage and genome of the Caenorhabditis elegans worm.
“Would you eat a vitamin-rich black strawberry from a plant that has also produced your little black dress? ”
THERE IS NO WASTE IN NATURE Why don’t we think of fashion (so-called) waste as a nutrient? Carole explains how fallen leaves add to the nutrients in the soil at the base of a tree, and provide homes and food for other species from insects to fungi. Hardly waste! Or, consider coral spawn - billions are released, only a few will turn back into new corals - the rest is food for countless fish and sea creatures. (For more on this topic, try Episode 105, Clare visited the Great Barrier Reef to experience this annual spawning.)
DANIEL CHRISTIAN WAHL is the author of Designing Regenerative Cultures. He says, “Sustainability alone is not an adequate goal. The word sustainability itself is inadequate, as it does not tell us what we are actually trying to sustain…A regenerative human culture is healthy, resilient and adaptable; it cares for the planet and it cares for life in the awareness that this is the most effective way to create a thriving future for all of humanity. The concept of resilience is closely related to health, as it describes the ability to recover basic vital functions and bounce back from any kind of temporary breakdown or crisis. When we aim for sustainability from a systemic perspective, we are trying to sustain the pattern that connects and strengthens the whole system. Sustainability is first and foremost about systemic health and resilience at different scales, from local, to regional and global.” More here.
DISOBEDIENT THINKING or intellectual disobedience is essentially creativity. Challenging the formulaic. Disrupting norms. More of that please.
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