On October 28th 2021, Nina and I presented our paper: 'Weaving Experience Into Memory': A cross disciplinary project investigating the intersection of Art and Design at IFFTI 2021 at The Pearl Academy, India that was held virtually this year to the pandemic.
The annual conference is organised each year by The International Foundation of Fashion Technology Institutes and this year the conference was hosted by The Pearl Academy of India.
The abstract of the paper ran as follows:
‘Weaving Experience Into Memory’: A cross disciplinary project investigating the intersection of Art and Design.
This paper outlines the initial stage of a collaborative research project that began with an artwork, its development into a fabric print design, the creation of a single test garment, and eventually a small collection of related wearable items presented in the form of a public exhibition in District 7 of Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam.
The project that is the subject of this paper sought to explore several issues: can an artist and a fashion designer work efficiently and effectively together given the seemingly disparate nature of the two fields? What technical resources are available within the local industry here in Ho Chi Minh City?, and how could these resources be employed in order to reduce material wastage as well as manufacturing time and costs? In addition to this, could the project serve as a case study to inspire students?
In order to explore these questions the paper will detail the collaborative process beginning with the conceptual methods used in the initial artwork creation involving walking, observation, the collecting of data, the draft stages and the final digital art print. This will then be followed by a description of the test printing of various fabrics, natural and man-made, the sourcing of local digital fabric printing companies and the creation of an initial test garment. Following the description of this initial testing phase, the paper will then seek to describe the design and construction of the subsequent garments and wearable items for presentation and finally the curation of the public exhibition along with the compiling of the accompanying catalogue.
As the collaborative process is unpacked, the paper will address issues such as sustainability, fabric wastage, 3D virtual prototyping technology and short-run fabric printing technology. The majority of these new developments seek to eliminate the wastage inherent in traditional iteration processes, for example, extended lead times and high sample numbers. The team consciously attempted to adopt a zero waste policy and exhibition items such as the parasol and the wooden information hangers were clad with any useable remnants of surplus printed fabric left over from the garment fabrication.
The resulting exhibition, forming part of the ‘Vietnam Festival of Creativity and Design 2020’, presented the entire creative process with reproductions of notebook pages, paper patterns, fabric samples, garments, footwear, a parasol and a video monitor screening computer simulated apparel designs and a 3D virtual fashion show with avatars wearing multiple variations of the designs on display.
Keywords: Maker culture, cross-disciplinary design, 3D virtual prototyping technology, apparel simulation
A recording of the paper presentation can be viewed here.
The IFFTI 2021 Conference website can be found here.
The full paper can be obtained upon request.