Flex

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BACKGROUND As with all industrial products, clothing is problematic from both environmental and social perspectives, impacting environmentally through production, use and disposal while carrying a high social cost through its reliance on manual labour by a globalized workforce. What sets fashion apart from other industries is its heightened role as an expression of cultural and social value. Notions of novelty and change define fashion, enabling it to be culturally relevant. However, the manifestation of this change in material form entails a rate of production, consumption and disposal that our planet cannot sustain. These issues were explored in the didactic exhibition ‘Fast Fashion: The Dark Side of Fashion’, an exhibition from the Museum of Arts and Crafts in Hamburg (MKG) presented in Melbourne in collaboration with DBU Deutsche Bundesstiftung Umwelt and the Goethe-Institut. CONTRIBUTION The Slow Fashion Studio was presented in response to the Fast Fashion exhibition. The works offered alternatives to the way fashion is produced, consumed and experienced. Georgia McCorkill was one of nine contributing designers. Her work "Flex" comprised three dresses that employ bespoke methods to fashion hand pleated heat set fabric into delicate eveningwear. The idea explored through these dresses is the role and potential of "old technology" within creative practice, informed by conversations with the last (precariously) remaining artisan textile pleater in Melbourne. When such locally-based manufacturing trades disappear, subsumed by the scale of global production systems, small or micro designers lose access to a diversity of tools and resources with which to fuel their creativity. SIGNIFICANCE The slow fashion studio was exhibited as a local component of an international exhibition. The exhibition was reviewed by sustainable fashion writer Clare Press in The Age on 19 July 2017. Georgia was interviewed about the work on RMIT University's Art Design and Media Podcast.