TED's TEN at Fashion Colloquia

Becky Earley was at the Fashion Colloquia at LCF this morning presenting TED's TEN to an audience of students, designers and journalists.

The Colloquia is an event organised by four institutions including Parson NY, LCF and The Domus Academy, Italy to explore the fundamental issues around fashion as all the international fashion weeks take place this month.

Becky finished her presentation by asking the audience to contribute to a questionnaire being developed as part of the MISTRA Future Fashion project by the Copenhagen Business School - What questions would you like to ask fashion designers about sustainability? Do you want to know how other designers think about sustainability?

If you would like to contribute email us at ted@chelsea.arts.ac.uk and your contribution may become part of this exciting research project.

New website coming soon

We are hard at work on getting the new TED website up and running. It is only a few weeks away now but here is a sneak peak of our new look!

There will be all the latest news and updates on our activities and a great archive section of TED projects going back to 1996, all beautifully shown with images and our writing. Our resource section will include our well developed Resource Sheets and a whole new area dedicated to TED's TEN, our set of design strategies for fashion/textile designers, which we are now helping several large fashion brands to use as starting points for sustainable innovation, within Sweden and the US.

TED Wins Research Bid

We are very excited to announce that TED is part of successful bid for a large research project titled Future Fashion , funded by MISTRA, a Swedish government organisation. The TED project is one of eight individual / interconnected projects, and our research will specifically address the question 'How can sustainable design processes be created and embedded within companies and gain the participation of consumers?'.

The project will see TED work with a consortium of different partners including SV, Chalmers University, Copenhagen Business School, and H&M on exploring TED's ten sustainable design strategies for textiles. We will be working with CelluNova, a new cellulose fibre made using wood from the old paper making industries in Sweden.

The project will launch here at Chelsea in June, and TED will begin researching, documenting, promoting and disseminating soon after, through a new website – www.textiletoolbox.com. More info to follow shortly!

Clara Vuletich was at the Ethical Fashion Forum's Excellence in Ethical Fashion Training Day last week as an 'expert' in sourcing sustainable materials. Clara saw several different independent fashion companies and designers who were looking for advice and guidance.

It turned out that the most helpful advice Clara could give was a copy of TED's TEN Design Strategies. There is often an assumption in the ethical fashion world that fashion and textile designer's already have the design skills needed, and all they need guidance with is issues such as marketing, sourcing and finding the right production supply chain. However, here at TED we would argue that the complexity of sustainability requires designers to work with a range of interconnected design strategies that can leverage real innovation and change and that are not just limited to the 'hard' aspects such as materials and processes.

This may include awareness and understanding of how service design approaches could be helpful, or how to design in the potential for upcycling at the end of the garment's life. This is where our TED's TEN comes in.

While TED has been developing this set of design strategies for several years now, there have been other recent attempts to offer strategies or 'toolkits' for designers to navigate sustainability. There is a set of values for slow fashion developed by Slow Fashion Forward in Sweden, and the Slowlab with Alistair Fuad-Luke have developed a set of strategies to design 'slowly'. Finally, there is a Toolkit for Designers who want to learn how to be Social Innovators from Ezio Manzini's organisation DESIS.

Most of these , are quite broad and conceptual and not specifically related to a textile and fashion context. We believe TED's TEN fills this gap.

Kay Politowicz has been in Italy at the Museo del Tessuto, a textile museum in Prato speaking at a conference on the creative use of textile archives. The conference was the final event in the Eurotex ID project, which aimed to enhance the European textile identity.

The first stage of the project has seen the digitising of textile archives from Prato and several museums in Spain, providing details of the local, specific production processes and techniques of each piece. The next stage involved fashion design students who were allowed access to the textile archives and through a series of creative workshops, were encouraged to re-interpret the samples for new designs.The student's designs were also on show at the event.

Kay's presentation to the symposium audience showcased TED's Design Stories, which visualises TED's TEN Design Strategies for sustainability.

This project is a great example of a way to encourage designer's to find inspiration and new ways of thinking and making through historical archive pieces, and ties in with one of TED's Design Strategy, 'Look Back to Look Forward'.