‘Overlooked Materiality; Fashion’s Unintentional Monuments’: Materiality, Make, Memory and Sustainability. A Critical Fashion Perspective from an Upcycler

Cassar, Rachael

‘Overlooked Materiality; Fashion’s Unintentional Monuments’: Materiality, Make, Memory and Sustainability. A Critical Fashion Perspective from an Upcycler

Cassar, Rachael

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Publication Type:: Thesis
Issue Date:: 2024

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Field	Value	Language
dc.contributor.author	Cassar, Rachael
dc.date.accessioned	2024-04-23T01:06:09Z
dc.date.available	2024-04-23T01:06:09Z
dc.date.issued	2024
dc.identifier.uri	http://hdl.handle.net/10453/178237
dc.description	University of Technology Sydney. Faculty of Design, Architecture and Building.	en_US.UTF-8
dc.description.abstract	This investigation elaborates on material culture knowledge and fashion. It negotiates the timely issue of sustainable fashion while providing ways to understand, explore and reform historic materials. Clothing practices from early modern to contemporary times have employed adaptive reuse of textiles, allowing recombination and redesign of existing materials and garments. Despite the increasing interest in upcycling associated with the bourgeoning field of sustainable fashion, our knowledge of the actual processes and practices of upcycling remains limited. The emphasis of existing research is toward clear and linear transformation processes within industrialised systems, emphasising final reformed, commercialised outcomes. Such a focus locates upcycling within a consumerist framework that commodifies process and method, highlighting materials’ economic value within fashion industry’s structures and systems. This study adopts an alternative approach by investigating how meaning emerges from embodied encounters with clothing and objects from a specific 1870-1930s historic archive belonging to a deceased person. The study documents and analyses the material encounters of an upcycling process and the complex way it informs and shapes the redesign of garments. The research adopts a material culture perspective in combination with practice based, object-oriented research, that generates meaning from past histories, traces of making and use, revealed in both the original and reformed object. This engagement unlocks a practice that deals with a material's past experience such as deceased human traces and attributes of aging, cultivating sensitivity towards dimensions of materials typically overlooked and devalued. This research contributes valuable new knowledge about material encounters that can encourage sustainable design relationships; delivers an approach for designing with historical materialities; expands theoretical discourse on materiality and cloth; to provide a deeper understanding of the practice of upcycling and the intimate materiality of wear.	en_US.UTF-8
dc.format	Thesis (PhD)
dc.language.iso	en_US	en_US.UTF-8
dc.relation	https://opus.lib.uts.edu.au/bitstream/10453/178237/1/thesis.pdf
dc.rights	info:eu-repo/semantics/openAccess
dc.rights	The author owns the copyright in this thesis including all reproduction and reuse rights for the work. The work may not be altered without the permission of the copyright owner. Attribution is essential when quoting or paraphrasing from this thesis.
dc.rights	© 2024 Rachael Cassar
dc.rights	au.edu.uts.lib/cph
dc.title	‘Overlooked Materiality; Fashion’s Unintentional Monuments’: Materiality, Make, Memory and Sustainability. A Critical Fashion Perspective from an Upcycler	en_US.UTF-8
dc.type	Thesis
utslib.copyright.status	open_access	*

Abstract:

This investigation elaborates on material culture knowledge and fashion. It negotiates the timely issue of sustainable fashion while providing ways to understand, explore and reform historic materials. Clothing practices from early modern to contemporary times have employed adaptive reuse of textiles, allowing recombination and redesign of existing materials and garments. Despite the increasing interest in upcycling associated with the bourgeoning field of sustainable fashion, our knowledge of the actual processes and practices of upcycling remains limited. The emphasis of existing research is toward clear and linear transformation processes within industrialised systems, emphasising final reformed, commercialised outcomes. Such a focus locates upcycling within a consumerist framework that commodifies process and method, highlighting materials’ economic value within fashion industry’s structures and systems. This study adopts an alternative approach by investigating how meaning emerges from embodied encounters with clothing and objects from a specific 1870-1930s historic archive belonging to a deceased person. The study documents and analyses the material encounters of an upcycling process and the complex way it informs and shapes the redesign of garments. The research adopts a material culture perspective in combination with practice based, object-oriented research, that generates meaning from past histories, traces of making and use, revealed in both the original and reformed object. This engagement unlocks a practice that deals with a material's past experience such as deceased human traces and attributes of aging, cultivating sensitivity towards dimensions of materials typically overlooked and devalued. This research contributes valuable new knowledge about material encounters that can encourage sustainable design relationships; delivers an approach for designing with historical materialities; expands theoretical discourse on materiality and cloth; to provide a deeper understanding of the practice of upcycling and the intimate materiality of wear.

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http://hdl.handle.net/10453/178237