‘Wear & Care’ Community Forum
On Thursday 16th November, as part of our PlaceLab ‘Wear & Care’ Research Project, we held an interactive Community Forum, in The Hanger on RMIT’s Brunswick campus, home to the School of Fashion & Textiles, exploring local insights, ideas, and practices around fashion “rewilding” and “taming” in Brunswick and beyond.
Our PlaceLab Brunswick team brought together RMIT fashion & textiles academics with community, industry, and local government representatives to share knowledge, experiences and practices across garment mending, second-hand clothing sales, upcycling, re-manufacturing, re-design and much more.
Attendees and speakers at the ‘Wear & Care’ Community Forum.
Image: Vanessa Duque.
Attendees and speakers at the ‘Wear & Care’ Community Forum.
Image: Vanessa Duque.
We opened the Forum conversation by welcoming RMIT’s Professor Alice Payne, Dean of the School of Fashion & Textiles and key knowledge expert in environmental and social sustainability issues in this space, to set the scene. Alice shared an introduction to the Anthropocene, our current era in which human actions significantly impact our planet, and how this time is intertwined with concepts of “rewilding” and “taming”.
‘Taming and rewilding really comes from two narratives of how we can think about our relationships with our technologies and our relationship with the living world.’
– Professor Alice Payne
We then heard from a collection of local knowledge experts in conversation throughout the morning. This included our five key speakers: Jennifer Thorman (Studio Manager at Second Stitch), Miriam Borcherdt (PhD candidate at RMIT’s School of Fashion & Textiles), Cathy Allizi (a volunteer at the Multicultural Women’s Sewing Group), Kirsta Hawkins (founder and CEO of Mutual Muse) and Luke Phillips (owner of upcycling enterprise Into Carry).
Attendees and speakers at the ‘Wear & Care’ Community Forum at The Hanger, RMIT Brunswick campus. Images: Vanessa Duque and RMIT PlaceLab.
Our speakers and audience members shared a range of local practices that intersect with both narratives of “rewilding” and “taming” in fashion and joined in an engaging dialogue about the evolving local response to new and shifting systems of fashion. This conversation was wonderfully facilitated by RMIT’s Dr Harriette Richards, a lecturer in Fashion Enterprise and co-founder of the Critical Fashion Studies Podcast.
‘We’re very much thinking about the implications of the practices that we’re sharing today within research, and how research is also informing practices in the community.’
– Dr Harriette Richards
The event also featured a showcase of PhD candidate research work from RMIT’s School of Fashion & Textiles, that embodied some of the unique intersections with narratives of “rewilding” and “taming” in a fashion context. The showcase included work by the following researchers:
Julia English with an exploration of upcycling, repair and local reuse practices and collaborations between local businesses,
Miriam Borcherdt with an investigation into scalable circular design through re-manufacturing practices,
Alicja Kuzmycz with an examination into consumer behaviour to inform design strategies for increased wear,
Remie Cibis with an investigation into how garments are understood as images by visually editing fashion garments, and
Ritika Vohra with an exploration into the creative narratives and languages of perception and transcendence through textile-based creative practice.
Showcase of PhD candidate research from RMIT’s School of Fashion of Textiles at the ‘Wear & Care’ Community Forum. Images: Vanessa Duque and RMIT PlaceLab.
Attendees displayed a range of printed materials and repair kit provisions as part of a knowledge sharing collection compiled on the day. There was also an opportunity to vote on the final resource we create as part of our ‘Wear & Care’ Activation Kit, to be released in December, joining a collection of outputs and resources emerging out of the ‘Wear & Care’ Research Project.
Attendees voting on the final resource for our ‘Wear & Care’ Activation Kit. Image: RMIT PlaceLab.