Black Dress

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BACKGROUND As with all industrial products, fashion is problematic from an environmental perspective, impacting detrimentally on the environment through all stages of the product life cycle. In recent years, designer awareness of this problem has increased and they have sought ways to transform practices, employing design methodologies that emerge from the fields of Design for Sustainability and Corporate Social Responsibility. Fashion's role as an expression of cultural and social value means that alongside the material improvement of garment sustainability, there is the potential for fashion design to be used with an activist intent to contribute to public debate. CONTRIBUTION The Spirit of the Black Dress is a fashion exhibition in the Melbourne Fashion Festival that sought to leverage the archetype of the little black dress as a device to draw attention to contemporary approaches to sustainable fashion. The work selected for this exhibition employs two different methodologies. The first is consideration of end of life disassembly and reuse of the garment through minimal stitching and careful draping of a single length of fabric comprised of many pieces. The second methodology of sustainability is upcycling of fabric remnants, which draws attention to the fabric waste that occurs as a byproduct of conventional manufacturing techniques. These strategies are proposed as solutions within the context of the eveningwear genre where garments have short life spans, often being worn only once. SIGNIFICANCE The work uses the familiar archetype of the black dress as a device to engage designers, students and the public in sustainable fashion design, and was featured on ABCs Art Nation. The work is significant because it deploys sustainable design strategies appropriate to the particular product lifecycle and patterns of use of the eveningwear genre as well as for its exploration of design for sustainability within the context of bespoke methods of production.