Source4Style Simplifies Sourcing, Naturally

Summer Rayne Oakes and Benita Singh launched Source4Style, an online marketplace for independent fashion designers, in October 2010 (see Kimberly Burgas’ August 2010 post). They launched version 2.0 this past week. If the original website proved that sustainable sourcing is possible, the new version does so with style and ease. It’s slick and sumptuous and features an expanded selection of materials (fabric, yarn, buttons, zippers, lace, and trim), ample editorial content, and a robust trends section.

Oakes and Singh founded the website in response to what they saw as the “acute issue” of sourcing sustainable materials. Sustainable sourcing means weighing particulars like color, hand, and drape against social and environmental considerations like wealth distribution and the carbon footprint. These broad considerations require careful vetting and substantial investment, especially when designers source globally, as most do. It’s a rewarding process, but it’s also high risk, meaning that costs are high and returns aren’t guaranteed. Often, sustainability comes at a price.

“For too long,” Singh explained, “designers have had the limited and arduous option of trade shows for sourcing.” Trade shows are multi-day events that take place in cities around the world. Las Vegas. Paris. Tashkent. They’re intense and exciting, but require huge investments of time and money for everyone involved. Oakes cites the statistics: designers spend on average 84% of their time sourcing, and suppliers spend 43% of their marketing budgets on trade shows. These costs trickle down and subtract from resources invested in other aspects of building a collection, like design.

For Oakes and Singh, technology is the obvious solution. On Source4Style, users browse materials and order swatches without spending a cent and members connect directly to suppliers around the world. The site isn’t angling to replace the trade show experience. It simply provides an opportunity for designers and suppliers to re-allocate their time and money, investing in sustainability rather than the status quo.

Sustainability is what counts for Oakes and Singh. “We feel that’s where the industry is trending, and quite personally, that’s what matters to us,” explained Oakes. The pair has been careful to tailor the site accordingly. Designers can perform what Oakes calls “meaningful searches,” based on color, fiber, fabric type, and worldview. One designer might focus on vertical integration. Another might promote women’s cooperatives. A third might advocate for craft preservation, and a forth might champion fair trade. As Oakes explains, the site allows designers to “decide which aspect of sustainability is important to them and what kind of story they’re going to share with their consumer.”

Source4Style doesn’t cheapen sustainability. It simply cuts costs associated with sourcing sustainable material. It supports a production process in which materials and information flow hand-in-hand. It advances a transparent system in which tangible products are imbued with intangible values. And most importantly, it inspires a climate in which fashion becomes an expression of ‘we’ rather than an ‘I.’

“Trends happen every season,” Oakes explained, “but movements are something more systemic.” As the first trends-driven platform for sustainable sourcing, Source4Style ensures that sustainability will remain relevant with every changing season.  It strikes a balance between seasonal and systemic change, and achieves both, naturally.

Summer Rayne Oakes and Benita Singh have been close friends and collaborators since 2004.  They launched Source4Style in 2010 and have remained invested in the project ever since.

Mae Colburn is a freelance textile researcher based in New York City.

A reflection on Absence: Thanos Kyriakides

by Francesca Granata 

Blind Adam, Photos by Yiorgos Mavropoulos

Thanos Kyriakides started Blind Adam in 2007, with the intent of exploring the more poetic and artistic qualities of fashion. His work consists, for the most part, of creating ghostly exoskeleton of garments. Rendered in black wool acrylic thread, his pieces are reminiscent of photographic negatives, thus reading as a meditation on absence and loss. They also speak to the forgotten craft of clothes-making, as they carefully follow the place where the seams would have been, thus reading as a reference to garment construction and pattern-making. Previously to his work with Blind Adam, Thanos worked predominantly as a stylist for magazine editorial, where the careful construction of a perfect vision is paramount. Thus, his current work, in its very quiet and tactile quality—the thread used to construct the ghostly garment refer to the Braille system for the blind—seems an obvious departure from such work.

I met Thanos while in Greece this summer to give a talk about the grotesque in contemporary fashion, in conjunction with Vassilis Zidanakis’s exhibition “Arghhh Monsters in Fashion” at the Benaki Museum in Athens. I was so intrigued by his work that I later checked in with the artist via e-mail….

You started Blind Adam in 2007. What prompted your transition from working in editorial and magazines to doing this more experimental work?

After 17 years in fashion, it was about time for me to find a way to express more esoteric feelings and go beyond the limits of fashion, in order to orient myself towards a more artistic direction.

Your work now has as much more to do with a tactile quality than it does with a visual one, as well as being very time consuming. Could you describe your process, and the way in which you construct your pieces?

Yes, that's true. The process has two stages: it starts by taking double acrylic wool thread, which is the material I always use, and making knots along its length. The result is something that is reminiscent of a chaplet or a "connect the dots" game. After having made miles of this, I pass onto the construction of a piece by assembling the hand-knotted threads.

If I understand your work correctly, you use wool thread to create an exoskeleton of a garment, as the thread follows the lines of where the garment’s seams would have been. In some ways, your work reads like the ghost of a garment, where all the cloth has left and only the silhouette of seams remains. As a result, your work suggests, at least to me, an absence—the absence of the body, but also of the cloth, which is meant to represent that body. Would you agree? This certain feeling of melancholia, past and memory is perhaps most obvious in your pieces that make references to historical pieces, such as the jacket with epaulettes.

Exactly! One could say that it is the bare of the bare minimum or a metaphor, but of course the structural form of the clothes is present in a ghostly way. This is especially true of the pieces that represent the garment’s skeletons. There is a strong reference to the "Emperor's New Clothes" tale.

I was also wondering why you chose such a limited palette (of black and white)? Again, perhaps I am projecting, but your pieces also remind me of shadows.

Yes indeed, a shadowy, ghostly effect was intended. Aside from that, black on white gives the desirable graphic contrast, reminding of a sketch with black pen on white paper, that becomes 3D.

I was wondering if you could speak about your recent string installations. Did you mean to create a map of the room? I know your work often has to do with measuring distance through the use of equidistant knot on the thread you use. Is the installation a continuation of this?

The installation is called "Incommunicado" and my intention was to create a symbolic tower of Babel. The piece was adjusted according to the room's dimensions as I intended for the installation to have a claustrophobic spider-web effect. What I forgot to mention earlier is that the knotted thread that I use, also refers to the Braille system for the blind so you could say that it represents a form of language. The meaning of this piece is that human conversation has a minimum point of contact and then spreads to undetermined directions until it meets again for a split second and so on, creating thus a communicating maze.

Finally, I was wondering if a shift from a medium that is more closely related to image/distance and vision, such as fashion photography, to one that involves tactility, making and a more intimate/close connection to the object, is something that came about as a result in your change in vision? And if so, how?

Yes, it certainly affected this transition but not in a compelling way. With this project I wanted to combine various influences, references, ideas, esoteric needs and of course to set questions on fundamental issues that have been always puzzling humanity.

Andrea Diodati "Friend of the Flowers"

Andrea Diodati, Friends of the Flowers, An Absurdist Tableau

We had been meaning to continue on our artist/designer series, and we couldn't think of a better way than to feature Andrea Diodati's work. An inspiring young artist/designer whose work has been featured in Artforum, Andrea has worked with some of our favorites, including Susan Cianciolo and Pascale Gatzen.

In her own words:

electric love light seeks to unite feeling and object in a bespoke design practice that challenges contemporary notions of production. Handmade by artist, Andrea Diodati, each piece explores the history of materiality through local sourcing at thrift stores and flea markets. The quiet joys of an anonymously crocheted doily are relived on the body in fashions that tell our common material history.

Friend of the Flowers explores woman and plant's relationship in a mystical array of sound, movement, prose and petals. Sometimes we, humans, forget that there are other living beings on earth. Friend of the Flowers depicts a place beyond time and space, where flowers are held in deep reverence. From mourning over their wilted petals, to taking a flower as lover, to discussing the feeling of sun kisses, to loosing ourselves in the wind, woman and plant unite in this absurdist active tableaux that showcase electric love light' s Spring 2011 collection.

Andrea Diodati is an exhibited artist and designer, whose work has been shown in Tokyo, Toronto, New York and Montreal.  Her projects focus on experimenting and questioning the norms of fashion. Whether she is practicing automatic sewing in the trance of performance, organizing meditations outside, making fashion video mythologies, Diodati loves to push the paradigm of fashion forward.

Protesting in the Right Clothes

by Francesca Granata

The second issue of Fashion Projects, which focused on collaborations and collective, was partially dedicated to the topic of clothing and protest—a topic that has currently come to the forefront in conjunction with Occupy Wall Street, as well as in the context of my graduate teaching. Clothing, of course, has traditionally held an important function as a vehicle for protest, something that comes to the fore, most obviously, through the history of European carnivals.

In recent years, perhaps one of the most striking uses of clothes by protest movements was represented by the now defunct "Tute Bianche," which had been formed in Italy in 1994 in response to the Milan mayor’s attempt to shut down the “Leoncavallo,” one of the city’s biggest squatted social centers. Their donning white overalls was, in fact, an ironic take on the mayor’s quote: “From now on, squatters will be nothing more than ghosts wandering about the city.” And it soon came to symbolize the invisibility of those excluded from capitalism.

The anti-globalization movement that began in Seattle and moved to European capitals also brought the by now well-known black bloc, but also the less known Pink movement. “Supporters of self-proclaimed frivolous tactic,” those belonging to the pink movement were armed with fans, sequins, wigs, pink paint and balloons, thus embracing a carnivalesque aesthetic. As a result of their colorful attire, they were often able to bypass security forces, particularly, in 2000, the protest in Prague on occasion of the International Monetary Fund and World Bank meeting, where they made themselves known for the first time. (Lidia Ravviso, “Clashing Hues: European Protest Movements and Costume," Fashion Projects 2).

And of course, clothes took on a central element at Occupy Wall Street both insofar as functionality is concerned—as with the need for certain kinds of weather specific clothes as well as the fact that a system for laundering clothing together with blankets and a free clothes swap developed, at least prior to their recent displacement from Zuccotti Park. The protesters' clothes came to symbolize a range of meanings at time conflicting, and as has been amply documented, there was no aesthetic cohesion among the protesters or uniform of dissent. Rather, the garments worn spanned from business casual to carnivalesque costumes with anarchists’ garbs and weather-resistant clothing in-between.

Interesting discussions arose in the course of my graduate seminar, as we discussed Robert Stam's work on Tropicalia, the carnivalesque and 1960s Brazilian protest movements. The question that came up was what the most effective garb to protest in might be. Since it was in the context of a fashion studies class, the notion of whether clothing was, in fact, relevant to protest was quickly resolved! However, the debate heated up in relation to whether protesters (functionality aside) should be wearing the more “credible” costumes of business casual even suits or outré` carnivalesque costumes. The importance of the suit to OWS was explored in the work of Suits for Wall Street, an artists’ group that, as the name suggests, provided suits to the protesters under the moniker of “ Subversive Business Outfits as Tactical Camouflage.”

Another interesting point brought up was the nostalgic reference to the 1960s, not only in the protesters’ clothing but, in among other things, their facial hair. Although the 1960s protest movement certainly appears more glamorous and humorous, it is hard to access any kind of 1960s untainted from the lens of nostalgia, even (or perhaps more so) in the cases in which student protest movements gave way to violent protest.

Ultimately, paraphrasing Stam, it is important for any protest movement not to throw out the baby of pleasure with the bathwater of imperialism or in this case neoliberal economic policies.

Francesca Granata

Knitters at Zuccotti Park. Photos Courtesy of Mae Colburn

For further readings on clothing and protest, please visit Wornthrough and particularly the piece on the topic by Tove Hermanson.

Interview with Rebecca Burgess about her Vision for a Thriving Local Textile Economy

By Mae Colburn

Rebecca Burgess: What a Fibershed is, is taking responsibility for the biological context of your clothes. I’m interested in the revitalization of my community’s economy and green jobs, but I’m also interested in reconnecting to the plant and animal communities that are responsible for our clothes.  It’s quite a beautiful narrative, if we could support it.

It’s a beautiful narrative, and an imperative, according to Rebecca Burgess.  Burgess’ blog chronicles Fibershed-related events, projects, and the Fibershed Challenge: her quest to live for one year in clothes made from fibers sourced within a geographical region no larger than 150 miles from her front door. Her book, Harvesting Color, explains the dye potential of 36 plants, including pokeweed, elderberries, indigo, and coyote brush. Her restoration education curriculum gives children the opportunity to “investigate macro-environmental issues of our day” and “create solutions within their own landscape.”  Finally, the Fibershed Marketplace website, to be launched later this month, will provide resources for those interested in starting their own Fibershed Project.

Somehow, Burgess also finds time to work on her 45-acre organic farm in Northern California, where she grows and harvests over 4,500 natural dye plants.  She often does phone interviews from the farm: “I put my headset in, do my work, and answer calls.”  Burgess works hard, fueled both by sheer enthusiasm and by a distinct sense of urgency.  Her vision for a “thriving local textile economy” answers to a growing concern about the environmental, social, and economic impacts of the clothing industry.  Likewise, the Fibershed model serves as both a functional and symbolic antidote to the prevailing system.  Burgess’ commitment to local fiber reminds us of the physical labor involved in creating a garment from – as she puts it – “fiber to skin,” and forces us to reconsider the relationship between our bodies and our clothes.

RB: These little realities about living and working with plants and animals – it creates a difference in your body.  I know this because I observed the changes in myself.  You really learn how to work.  It’s like systems theory; you can get a system to start producing good results if you get the pendulum swinging in the right direction.  My body is different now; I’m sunburnt most of the time (even though I wear a lot of sunblock), but I’m strong, and I can endure long hours, and I have a much greater sense of confidence in what I can do physically because I see the product of my labor.

Tomorrow I’m driving up to the Capay Valley, where I have 2,000 indigo plants that I’m going to harvest.  I’m going to be harvesting from nine to nine at night, and I’ll have six or seven days like that in the summer.  Then once I harvest the indigo, I have to dry it all, stomp it, separate the stems, bag it, bring it back to the facility that I’m renting.  This summer has been a lot of maintenance; I have to do a lot of gopher trapping at the farm.  I’ve been dealing with irrigation problems, pressure valves, dripping stuff that’s not dripping the right way.  I’m getting tired, but I’m building capacity.

MC: Do you see this as a creative outlet as well as a manual, physical experience?

RB: Creativity is definitely expressed through the body, and I get to use my whole body while I’m farming.  I’m lifting.  I’m carrying.  I’m dragging.  I’m walking around.  I’m bending up and down.  All of that is a form of self-expression because you’re making all these small decisions for yourself.  You’re applying your own ideas and concepts second-to-second.  It sounds like mundane stuff, but oddly enough for the modern person, this is new terrain – at least for me – to have a total flow out on a land base, being out on 45 acres of organic farm, working.

MC: Do you see yourself as part of a movement of people interested in local textiles?

RB: I see myself as part of a continuum, a historical continuum, around textiles in this area.  In my region, a lot of retirees started raising sheep and alpaca, but not a lot of people were raising fiber for money.  When ‘fibershed’ became a useful word for people, and the community at large, some of those who’d been doing it a long time started to become recognized in a new way, and to feel the power behind what they were doing.

MC: On your website, you state that your mission is to “go beyond the one-year wardrobe and create a thriving local textile economy.”  What do you see this thriving local economy looking like?

RB: A thriving local textile economy would include current and existent land-owners working with young people, putting second housing on their land – for example, green modular trailers with solar panels.  If farmworker housing were a top priority, we could start training people who don’t yet have the skills, but have the energy [to begin farming].  The really important thing is continuity, and the only way to cultivate continuity is to put young people in proximity to people who have the skills.

But on a macro level, from a very specific supply chain perspective, we need to be able to take our wool, alpaca, mohair, then cotton, and eventually bast fibers (linen, hemp), and mill them at small-scale milling facilities that can be run off of solar technology.  There hasn’t been farm-based milling equipment designed for fibers except for wool, and there’s very little farm-based milling equipment for wool even, but for cotton it’s almost nonexistent, and for bast fibers – I have to put a call out there to anyone who understands how to engineer bast-fiber processing equipment and can scale it down to a farm size.

Pre-industrial revolution, we were relying on massive manpower, indentured servants, slaves.  Now we’re in a new era.  If we go back to a human-powered economy, this can’t be about indentured servants and slaves.  It has to be about cooperatively owned businesses, about people working for the common good – that’s how we’re going to inspire people to get involved in this.  We need equipment that honors our humanity; we’re not going to be slaves to technology, but we’re also not going to be slaves to each other.  We need this new human-scale technology combined with continuity of the generations.  We already have world-class fibers.  We have no lack of fiber, but there’s no processing equipment in my region, so all of those pieces – how to get the wool off the sheep, how to wash it, how to card it, how to blend it, spin it – all of this needs serious improvement.  To me, it’s about enhancing human infrastructure, technological infrastructure, and communication.  We’re talking about a revitalization of the whole economy when we talk about the revitalization of a Fibershed.

MC: Do you have any recommendations for people interested in learning more or starting a similar project?

RB: The website that we’re going to launch in the next week and a half will have a reading list and the protocol that we followed.  We started a one-year challenge, so we had a prototype wardrobe.  I started a Kickstarter campaign.  How did I organize farmers and artisans?  I used Google Docs.  I used Doodle Calendar.  I did community-building projects where instead of charging for workshops, I gave free classes for artisans and farmers, to bring them together.  You need to be able to build a network.  You also have to be in good health, because it takes a sound mind and body to create these networks and keep them alive.  It’s kind of like running a marathon in the beginning.

Mae Colburn is an independent textile researcher and writer and professional seamstress based in Santa Fe, New Mexico.

Rebecca Burgess is an ecological restoration educator, curricula developer, author, and textile artist and a fifth-generation resident of the watershed where she works in Northern California.