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(re)Fashion Factory

Part 1 Project 2011
Anna Drakes
Liverpool John Moores University Liverpool | UK
Liverpool City Centre has been rejuvenated due to the completion of a new inner city shopping complex, Liverpool One. Architecture is commercial, promoting fast paced consumerism. Developments such as these, on which the city begins to become defined, promote material and commercial values which are antithetical to those on which a city should be based, sustainable living.

The desperate need for a sustainable future faces constant opposition from out current systems where fast paced consumerism drives the economy. To address this we must create industry that is outside the cycle of globalisation, an industry based on the values of ecology over profit. In the future we must make goods:
that last,
that are beautiful,
that are recycled,
that are recyclable.

(re)Fashion Factory is a business for the future, a local industrial cycle.

A high percentage of clothing purchased every year in the UK ends up in landfill. Clothing which is sorted for recycling, on the whole, is sold cheaply in third world countries. This mistaken act of kindness can actually have a detrimental effect on the recipients as it is damaging for the countries’ own local textile industry. (re)Fashion Factory offers an alternative ending for discarded clothing, the reinvented Lancashire cotton industry, which in the 18th Century was a pivotal catalyst to the success of Liverpool as a global gateway for trade. Discarded clothing will be used as a raw material; this will be broken down and re-woven into fabric in the mills of Lancashire. This recycled fabric will then be transported to Liverpool, via the Manchester Ship Canal where, at the (re)Fashion Factory it will be designed and made into beautiful and desirable garments. Through using an industry that is fundamentally a cyclical process, a sustainable long-term business plan can be achieved.

Fashion could play an important role in making sustainability desirable as it has a great influential power over society, dictating what one must wear and in some cases how one must act.

Anna Drakes

Tutor(s)
Ms Gladys Masey-Martinez
2011
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