BE AWEAR
3D WOVEN GRAPHIC CAMPAIGN
CONCEPT & RESEARCH, WOVEN LETTERS, BRANDING, POSTER DESIGN, CAMPAIGN VIDEO
The campaign ‘Be Awear’ was designed in response to the university brief ‘Designing for Social Impact’ for The REAL foundation. This enterprise aims to elevate ‘design for the greater good’ beyond charity and towards a socially sustainable and economically viable model. They believe the goal of social entrepreneurship is to empower individuals, new enterprises and economies through socially beneficial business ideas. Their triple bottom line being- “people, planet & profit” (Emily Pilloton Design Revolution, 2009). The brief outlined was to identify a community or a particular problem within a community that would benefit from social change- designing with a deep consideration of people and resources that may be impacted.
My topic selected surrounded the ethical and environmental issues regarding the production of fast fashion made in high labour factories in developing countries. I aimed to start a conversation surrounding the waste produced from this industry in Australia and its affect on the environment. Through creative solutions I hoped to effectively encourage individuals to take responsibility for their own consumer purchases.
PROJECT BACKGROUND
Fast fashion involves today’s production of low-cost clothing collections that mimic current luxury fashion trends made in high labor factories in developing countries. It is an embodiment of unsustainability but lead by today consumerist trends and individuals need to define personal identity through fashion and style. With the increased influx of fast fashion detrimental environmental effects has occurred in landfill wastage. A number of waste composition studies in Australia indicated in 2014 that unrecovered textile waste accounts for approximately 4% of the content of our landfills. This equals to 12.5million kilograms of textiles. This wastage contributes to the formation of leachate as it decomposes which has the potential to contaminate groundwater. It also produces methane gas- a major cause of greenhouse gases and a significant contributor to global warming.
Today recovering textiles waste is a multi- billion dollar global industry that performs a vital social and environmental function. Out of all the textile waste produced 60% of items are recovered by charities and reused, 15% can be torn into industrial wiper clothes and 25% is unusable and sent to landfill. A large contribution of this is from mass produced fast fashion clothing from corporate retailers driven essentially by profit and ever changing trends. These clothes are designed under planned obsolescence and made to last 10 wears.
Every individual today can create socially sustainable changes by being conscious about what they consume. Small conscious decisions including upcycling & reusing and buying quality over mass-produced trends all helps in the process of empowering individuals, new enterprises and economies to a sustainable future.
DESIGN
The final design deliverables includes a social campaign in Sydney highlighting the environmental wastage costs of fast fashion and showing visual perspective of what 12.5 million kgs of clothing looks like. This included hand made coiled typography made of second hand materials which otherwise would have been disposed of. I aimed to show visual perspective of how many jackets and t-shirts equal to 12.5 million kilograms- that being 12.5 million-denim jacket and 50 million t-shirts. Expanding on the tshirts I calculated this amount of t-shirts would take up the surface of area of 3 times that of Sydney. This was all put into visual diagrams and incorporated into an informative poster series. An informative campaign video was also produced combining these facts, creative processes and sustainable methods consumers can take which do not adhere to fast fashion trends.
Overall the design aesthetics were centred on playful, colourful and experimental styles with second- hand clothing, yet put together in an informing way. Conceptually all design aspects were compelled to captivate make consumers and make them respond and rethink their consumption into fast fashion trends.