GREEN THIMBLE
Climate change has become an imminent threat to human life, however consumerism is only growing and our society is responding with little change. Through speculative clothing and photography, I explore the next step in the evolution of the human appearance. In response to a threat this big, every factor of our current destructive lifestyles will be forced to change for us to survive peacefully. Clothing is a global commodity and with population growth ever increasing, what we wear has a huge impact. I explore fashion that benefits the environment through the act of being worn - putting this global need for clothing to good use, and the scale of impacts into perspective. With a lot of research reducing the damaging effects of creating clothes, I aimed to take this further through their implication and existence in the world. Live clothing - material integrating living plants into their function to make the city greener, sequestering Carbon Dioxide and air impurities as they are worn and transported. This project presents ideas of a dark future where we need to reduce green house gasses by any means necessary to survive. Subsequently, this makes the city greener through using asexually reproducing plants which will essentially spread seeds as the garment is worn and will thrive in unused and forgotten places. This ultimately forces the city to partake in this mass sequestering. Secondly, I explored a line of reflective fashion that strives to reflect the suns energy. This is in reaction to a future where the Artics ice albedo has depleted to such a level where we are forced to artificially reflect the suns energy to reduce global warming. This creates an idea that works closely in relation with population growth and mass marketing, to create a reflective surface big enough to prevent this feedback loop. This project focuses in on a global problem, and explores fashion that would act for change if used on a global scale, redesigning the human appearance as it is forced to evolve manually in such a short time.
