Design Thinking: Changing approaches to creating fashion

The overconsumption model of fashion has driven designers to mass producing clothing at an alarming rate, eliminating processes for innovative thinking and human connection that are essential for successful sustainable design. The challenge of shifting the industry by way of design means breaking the cycle of create-make-waste and finding alternative pathways to provide consumers what they need, and maybe even assessing if the product needs to be made in the first place. Taking away the fashion element of a garment, clothing is a basic need for all human beings. How can we rethink the systems of design and creation to provide this basic need in a sustainable way, while also introducing elements of fashion and giving people the joy of being creative and expressing themselves? And further, what exactly are the tenets of sustainable design and the ways in which designers can support this movement?
To answer these questions, I turned to the NYU Gallatin School of Individualized Study, which is a creative hub for understanding multifaceted disciplines such as sustainable fashion design. I spoke with Sally Yërin Oh, a graduate student at Gallatin, about her recent collection that debuted in the Gallatin Arts Festival, 100% This 1000% That, and her intention is to “utilize the intersection of art, design, activism, and entrepreneurship to create positive social change.”
Sally got her BFA in Apparel Design at the Rhode Island School of Design, after which she came to New York City to pursue a career in the fashion industry. While working for numerous fashion labels and notable designers, however, she was hit with the reality of the inner workings of the industry. The exploitation of unpaid interns and the Chinese immigrant labor behind the New York City garment industry, to name a few. These experiences made her step away from fashion and return to graduate school to look at ways to instill positive social change through design. Her recent showcase is the culmination of these efforts.

The show, held on April 12th, was inspired by cultural ties to food and deconstructing ideas of the design process. Growing up as a first-generation immigrant in Texas, Sally wanted to explore identities of culture that she faced in her bicultural upbringing. Using art as a medium, her goal was to break down boundaries and make these topics of culture more accessible and easily digestible to the audience. She was particularly interested in the way eating with someone and inviting them to your dinner table is an expression of trust and an act of intimately sharing your culture with someone else.

When it came to the design process for the collection, she decided to take a unique approach. Sally was inspired by designers like Rei Kawabubo who use objects and unconventional patternmaking to convey their aesthetic. Sally explains that if you’re paying attention to the fashion trends, it is easy to design a conventionally beautiful garment. It’s a lot harder to think outside of the box and find new ways to create an innovative design. For this reason, she made objects inspired by the collection, like dumplings, and then found a way to combine them together in a garment. By first creating objects and then finding ways to fit them together, this allowed for more expressive freedom and unique pieces for her collection.

This method is the basis of sustainable design thinking, finding new models to create clothing. Instead of going to the fabric store and picking out the colors that speak to you or the fabric that fits into your vision for the line, sustainable designers might start with the material and then make a concept out of that. For example, at the new Eileen Fisher Tiny Factory, they are tasked with designing new garments out of what they’ve collected back from their customers. What happens when designers are given worn or stained garments and asked to create something new? This Tiny Factory is an interesting experiment to see designers will respond when they are forced to think about the full lifecycle of a garment, to think of it as a piece that may come back to them in the future to be reworked into a new product.
Sally highlighted the sustainability of a quality made garment during our conversation, touting brands like Levi’s that create products that last through multiple generations and inspire consumers to mend and repurpose them. Hopeful for the future, she is inspired by the ways in which NYU has challenged her ideas on how she approaches the design process. While studying Political Art Theory at Steinhardt to better understand the social impact of art, she challenged herself to make representative, innovative work. After Gallatin, she hopes to start her own business, but insists that it never be a mass market operation and everyone involved would need to be paid fairly.

Even with all of this excitement though, there are some areas Sally pointed out where there are critical pieces keeping designers from fully embracing sustainable design practices. Firstly, education both at the design school level and having tools for designers to make better sourcing and technical design choices. Secondly, designers will have to change their mindset. If you’re starting with a design concept and then trying to apply sustainable choices to that, it can be frustrating as a designer to realize that they can’t use the materials or dyes that they’d like to use to accomplish their creative vision. Instead, sustainable design is about constraints. You’re starting with a problem that you want to solve, not necessarily a creative vision.

It’s inspiring to see a new generation of designers rise up who are focusing on solving these problems and are bringing the art form back to fashion design as well as creating new models for what design looks like. It will be great to see the impact on the industry as a whole as this movement continues to grow.

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