Focus on Ethical Fashion at Gyeonggi Museum
By Cathy Rose A. Garcia
Staff Reporter
Can fashion be ethical?
This is the question posed by the new fashion-meets-art exhibition ``Fashion Ethics: Wear Good'' at Gyeonggi Museum of Modern Art in Ansan, Gyeonggi Province.
While fashion has always been associated with extravagance and luxury, the exhibition explores a new paradigm shift towards ``ethical fashion.''
Ethical fashion has been gaining ground in Europe. London Fashion Week's "Estethica" section promotes the best in British eco-sustainable, fair trade and ethical styles while alternative fashion fair "White in Milan" has created a new eco-fashion space called SloWhite.
As ethical fashion slowly gains momentum in Korea, the exhibition provides a peek into how Korean and foreign designers are adopting the new principles.
Most of the styles make use of materials that are recycled, eco-friendly, organic, or obtained through fair trade. But up-and-coming British designer Mark Liu goes a step further, creating designs with the concept of ``zero waste.''
In an interview with The Korea Times, Liu noted how 15 percent of the fabric used to make a garment is wasted from pattern cutting and sewing. For inspiration, he looked towards traditional Eastern designs such as the Japanese kimono and the Indian sari, which make use of the entire fabric in its design.
``I tried to hybridize these Eastern designs with Western ones. I wanted to create something brand-new, a new way of thinking in Western design where you design a piece of clothing to deliberately waste zero fabric,'' he said.
Using a single piece of fabric, Liu uses what he describes as a ``jigsaw puzzle pattern,'' wherein all the pieces are put together in the final garment. He showed off several pretty black dresses with petal pattern designs. Even the material he uses is ``reclaimed,'' meaning it has been discarded and given away by textile companies.
Liu currently only creates these designs by commission, but he may be doing a ``zero waste'' collection in India soon. ``It is still going to be a high fashion collection. But after that, there's nothing stopping us from making jeans or T-shirts commercially,'' he said.
Fair Trade Designs
From afar, you might think the chic metallic tote bags are nothing special. But upon closer scrutiny, you will find that they are made of hundreds of pieces of aluminum can tabs. These are part of Paris-based Brazilian designer Ana Paula Freitas' ``fair trade'' collection of trendy handbags, clutches and accessories.
Freitas said the bags and accessories are all handmade by workers at a Brazilian women's labor cooperative. Consumers are not just buying the product, but are also helping to improve the lives of the workers.
``I developed a new, more fashionable collection with the cooperative. We work together. A lot of work goes into this because each tab is incorporated one by one. To make a tote bag like this, it takes 3 days and uses 1,000 tabs,'' Freitas said in an interview with The Korea times.
Other designers and artists have found ingenious and practical ways of incorporating the principles of ethical fashion.
The London-based design team of Orsola de Castro and Fillippo Ricci uses consumer-waste fabrics, swatches and production off-cuts to create high-end women's wear for their brand ``From Somewhere.''
Hong Sung-wan's men's wear collection uses only fair trade cotton fabric from Nepal, Bangladesh and India. Lee Kyumbie designed women's footwear using recycled packaging and banners, such as a fun pair of boots covered in a ramyeon-packaging design.
Hong Kong's Movana Chen has been creating clothes by knitting shredded strips of glossy magazine paper since 2004.
``For this exhibition here, I used Korean magazines. The inspiration comes from the media and how the media gives us messages. It tells us what to buy, what to wear. But it also focuses on two-way communication. We don't understand the meaning of the (Korean) text, but you can see the colors, and it's another way of communicating with a different culture,'' Chen said.
While ethical fashion is gaining ground mostly in Europe and United States, hopes are high that ethical fashion will spread throughout the world, including Asia.
``In Europe, people are very open to these kinds of things, like recycling and fair trade. In 2000, there was not so much of it but now it is everywhere,'' Freitas said.
The ``Fashion Ethics: Wear Good'' exhibition runs through Oct. 4. Visit www.gmoma.org or call (031) 481-7007~9.