Explore the Fashion Footprints exhibition

The Centre for Contemporary Art and the Natural World is organising a unique exhibition this summer to explore fashion’s complex cycle and the industry’s challenges for the days ahead. You can be a part of this exciting project too as the Centre is hosting an open call for designers and creatives working in the field of sustainability. Eleni Sardi writes.

The exhibition ‘Fashion Footprints: Sustainable Approaches’ is the result of the collaboration of four recent graduates of the MA Fashion and the Environment at the London College of Fashion. The aim of the project is to unravel the complex world of fashion from the cotton field to our own wardrobe with a new perspective that addresses the different issues of sustainability.

Fashion Footprints will be focused on eight themes: materials, production, use, end of life, consumption, localism, speed and connection to producers offering a complete overview of a fashion product’s lifecycle and realistic solutions to the challenges posed by our insatiable need for a constant fashion fix.

Showcasing garments, projects and concepts, the exhibition will give visitors an insight into how their every day actions can collectively build a more sustainable future.

Ranging from pioneering pieces that display a zero waste premise, to hand-me-down and cherished garments that identify with quality and speed of consumption, the clothes – accompanied by film and photography – will help everyone uncover a world unknown and teach how each of us as a consumer can help lessen the burden fashion places on the world’s resources.

The exhibition will open at Centre for Contemporary Art and the Natural World project space in Exeter and will subsequently begin a national tour in 2011 around fashion and textile institutions in the UK.  The exhibition is supported by an experimental fashion show and series of workshops and events, such as Wash Day, promoting traditional washing techniques and Dinner to Dye For, an exciting fusion of natural dyeing and food.

If you’d like to be involved in Fashion Footprints, you can submit your work if you are a designer, visual artist or simply a creative working in the field of sustainable textiles and fashion.