Restore, Furniture for A Not Too Comfortable Future
Collaborating with a Researcher in Residence Delfina Fantini Van Ditmar, MA students at the RCA and The Design Museum X Shanti Bell, 2022
This project was a collaboration between a design researcher called Delfina Fantini Van Ditmar who was completing her residency at The Design Museum. I alongside six others were brought on the project to research, experiment, and produce ways that fashion and architecture can work together to tackle the issues surrounding climate change. We worked closely with a team of architects based in Argentina who had designed a house for the future in which we needed to offer suggestions of what the furniture within this house could be. The main feature of the house was that it had no floor and the ground was earth and soil. With the fashion industry being a large contributor to inflicting a negative impact on the planet it is important as new designers to search for solutions and ways to reuse the waste produced by the fashion industry.
Within this project, I worked with a fellow RCA MA fashion student, Savvas Alexander, and together we explored two different outcomes. One is a hybrid wall chair, cushion, and physical support called PINCH. It was made by combining two disused t-shirts and stuffing them with shredding garments. We were interested in the work we were created to visually hint at the human and how if the planet continues to be destroyed what would the future of living look like, and where would we find comfort, human interaction, and support. The other iteration explored displaying memory, generational history, and preservation. We developed this technique of vacuum forming discarded garments within these forms of cladding which could then form multi-purpose chairs, walls, hammocks, beds, and tables. The visual presence of garments within each of the pieces offers a constant reminder of what has been used (worn) and how it has been reused. Savvas and I are currently in the process of exploring how we can start producing PINCH chairs to sell in the coming months.
This project was a collaboration between a design researcher called Delfina Fantini Van Ditmar who was completing her residency at The Design Museum. I alongside six others were brought on the project to research, experiment, and produce ways that fashion and architecture can work together to tackle the issues surrounding climate change. We worked closely with a team of architects based in Argentina who had designed a house for the future in which we needed to offer suggestions of what the furniture within this house could be. The main feature of the house was that it had no floor and the ground was earth and soil. With the fashion industry being a large contributor to inflicting a negative impact on the planet it is important as new designers to search for solutions and ways to reuse the waste produced by the fashion industry.
Within this project, I worked with a fellow RCA MA fashion student, Savvas Alexander, and together we explored two different outcomes. One is a hybrid wall chair, cushion, and physical support called PINCH. It was made by combining two disused t-shirts and stuffing them with shredding garments. We were interested in the work we were created to visually hint at the human and how if the planet continues to be destroyed what would the future of living look like, and where would we find comfort, human interaction, and support. The other iteration explored displaying memory, generational history, and preservation. We developed this technique of vacuum forming discarded garments within these forms of cladding which could then form multi-purpose chairs, walls, hammocks, beds, and tables. The visual presence of garments within each of the pieces offers a constant reminder of what has been used (worn) and how it has been reused. Savvas and I are currently in the process of exploring how we can start producing PINCH chairs to sell in the coming months.
