Cora Bellotto – Love Endings while scrap fabric keeps living
The pieces are made out from these recovered materials together with other offcuts coming from textile samples or damaged fabrics hand-weaved in brand new cloths.
The first fashion capsule (Love Endings) will be presented in Hong Kong fashion week in January 2016.
The positioning of the fashion capsule aims to belong to a luxury market segment or niche, considering the high quality of vintage fabrics and the craftsmanship involved in hand-weaving technique.
The project wishes to claim the importance of upcycling solutions, standing up against fast-fashion market. A slow design process is promoted, instead, due to constrains of existing second-hand clothing and hand-made reconstructed woven fabrics.
Description of the process for the case study (green solution)
The design process starts with collecting vintage materials (markets, friends, second-hand shops, etc) and other textile waste (sewing labs, textile companies...). In this phase, a good network of suppliers would be helpful.
At this stage of the project, the needed equipment is quite basic: a few sewing machines and a loom.
Effects/Results
Old / unused fabrics and clothing come to new life, material waste is reduced.
Enablers/Incentives
The project received donations and contributions in the collecting stage from fabric companies and individuals (dresses from ended marriages, trousseaus pieces)
Furthermore, the participation to awards, such as the EcoChic Design Award provide opportunities to developing the business.
For her The EcoChic Design Award 2015/16 collection, Cora was inspired by the items that remain after heartbreak and their potential to be part of new love stories through a new life. She combined the up-cycling and reconstruction design techniques to secondhand wedding dresses, production offcuts and bed sheets, which she sourced from her own collection and her friends and family.
Barriers/challenges and Lessons learnt
Hand-weaving takes a long time to be made. In the future would be interesting to create synergies with companies in order to consider the possibility to work on industrial looms.
A big challenge will be also releated with sellings due to limited edition pieces and one-off pieces.
