Cotton fabrics are used as partitions, bamboo poles are used as display racks, no pungent printing materials are used... Abandoned textiles are turned into well-known products on the Internet, and the recycled clothes catch people’s eyes again. Recently, a special fashion exhibition frequently appeared on WeChat Moments in the past two days. On the afternoon of November 23, the 2020 “CARE for FUTURE” Sustainable Fashion Exhibition and International Academic Week, hosted by the Shanghai International College of Fashion and Innovation of DHU under the guidance of the Shanghai Municipal Commission of Economy and Informatization, opened at the Shanghai Creative Park (Address: No. 161, Lane 996, Hongqiao Road).
(Site of the exhibition)
At the exhibition site, pieces of plain white cloth, bamboo poles and a projector were used together. The lights were projected on the plain white cloth through the projector. The resulting various colors and images made people feel like they were in a dream-like world. The designer took inspiration from the ancient Chinese architectural component- plinth, and used the concave parts made of stone as the base of the display rack, which is stable and sturdy, and minimizes the damage to the exhibition area. Bamboo is one of the raw materials for making clothes hangers in ancient times. Meanwhile, the clothesline bamboo poles randomly placed in the old alleys in Shanghai are also reminiscent of the past. “What we want to do is to use bamboo poles as the exhibition tool and reusable fabrics as content to highlight the environmental protection theme of ‘sustainability’, and reconstruct the infinite imagination between cloth and bamboo,” said Zheng Nianming, the designer of this exhibition, a foreign teacher from DHU said.
(Site of the exhibition)
In the exhibition, the team from DHU used digital design and production techniques such as garment full molding, 3D printing, and digital printing in product design to explore ways to reduce the carbon footprint in the fashion industry; the exhibits under the brand name of ICICLE and Klee Klee aimed to mitigate the environmental effects of the product manufacturing process, and promote the awareness of protecting nature by producing non-dyed products; the sustainable fashion pioneer brand “Reclothing Bank” applied recycled materials such as RPET to fashion products, and Langer Chen launched the environmentally friendly “all-weather clothing” series through the innovative combination of recycled materials and functional textiles.
(Site of the exhibition)
“In today’s fashion industry, 73% of the ready-made clothes are eventually landfilled or incinerated. The low recycling rate is a major challenge for the industry. Upgrading and recycling has become an important way for the fashion industry to provide fashion products with a regeneration cycle. It is the first time for the Chinese academic members to systematically sort out the sustainable fashion system. Starting from the concept of fashionable education, they combine all links such as culture, design and materials, propose sustainable fashion solutions related to reflection, reduction, recycling, etc., and establish linkages between sustainable fashion education and brand innovation, so as to contribute Chinese wisdom and solutions to the construction of a global sustainable fashion ecosystem” said Dr. Li Jun, dean of the Shanghai International College of Fashion and Innovation of DHU.
(Site of the exhibition)
It is learned that the exhibition and seminar is an international cooperation and exchange project in the fashion industry supported by the Shanghai Municipal Commission of Economy and Informatization. On the platform of the Foreign Experts Program of the Ministry of Science and Technology, it achieved the cooperation between China’s fashion industry and the University of Edinburgh, Amsterdam Fashion Academy and LASALLE College of the Arts in terms of sustainable fashion teaching and research.
