Yearly Archives: 2011

Happy New Year!

2008

Hong Kong, Photo by Chris Lee (cblee), flickr.com

With 2012 already here in Hong Kong, here’s a look back at ten of our more popular posts from 2011:

Although we may not post as often as we’d like to, Mary and I are committed to responsible fashion education under a creative commons license. Unfortunately, our full time jobs keep us from devoting our full attention to our passion. We are both working to make Social Alterations a worthwhile endeavor that is both intellectually stimulating and financially sustainable. Thank you for all your support over the years! From me in Hong Kong and Mary in Vancouver, we wish you a truly heartfelt happy new year!
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Vancouver, Photo by Richard G (EDeadPixel), flickr.com

LEARN // California College of the Arts partners with Permacouture Institute for public education series on slow fashion and textiles

Sasha Duerr, founder of Permacouture Institute and author of The Handbook of Natural Plant Dyes: Personalize Your Craft with Organic Colors from Acorns, Blackberries, Coffee, and Other Everyday Ingredients, will be teaching a series of courses and workshops at California College of the Arts devoted to slow fashion/textiles and natural dyeing this upcoming winter/spring 2012 session:

FORAGING FOR FASHION

PERMACOUTURE: SLOW FASHION & TEXTILE WORKSHOP FOR TEACHERS

SLOW TEXTILES: INTRODUCTION TO FIBER & DYE GARDENING

SLOW TEXTILES: THE PLANT DYER’S PALETTE

Click here for information on course details, schedules and fees.

READ // Fashion & Sustainability: Design for Change, by Kate Fletcher and Lynda Grose

Kate Fletcher, author of Sustainable Fashion and Textiles: Design Journeys, and Lynda Grose, assistant professor at California College of the Arts, have a new book coming out in April 2012, Fashion & Sustainability: Design for Change.

With a forward by Paul Hawken, the book is divided into three parts:

PART 1: TRANSFORMING FASHION PRODUCTS

Materials / Processes / Distribution / Consumer care / Disposal

PART 2: TRANSFORMING FASHION SYSTEMS

Local / Speed / Needs / Adaptability / Services and sharing / Hygiene and laundering / Optimised lifetimes / Biomimicry / Engaged / Distribution

PART 3: TRANSFORMING FASHION PRACTICE

The designer

 

Educators, add this book to your required/suggested reading lists!

Click here for more information.

Source, Naturally: Source4Style launches new online platform

Source4Style (S4S) version 2.0 has officially launched, hosting more than 1,300 materials from over 23 countries.

“Our goal is to provide the most cutting-edge tools to facilitate commerce between two groups that are currently disconnected in the global market – the leading sustainable suppliers and the designers looking for them” (Benita Singh, S4S co-founder)

We’re thrilled to see a section on the site devoted to education. The Academy is just one of many new features now available, alongside curations and trendsheets.

Not just for sourcing fabrics, the new platform will soon include yarns, buttons, zippers, lace and trim.

The first 25 Social Alterations readers who purchase an annual Premium Level membership before February 15th, 2011, will receive 1 month free. Just input the promotional code 25SAS4S at the checkout.

Click here to learn more.

Social Alterations maps responsible apparel with Google Earth

Back in September, with support from Tides Canada, the Google Earth Outreach team selected Social Alterations to join nearly 50 social justice and environmental security organizations from across Canada for a three-day intensive workshop.

The specialized training provided insight on how to harness Google Earth and Google Maps to deliver cutting edge education on social justice and environmental security issues.

At the end of the week, Dr. David Suzuki joined Google Earth Outreach founder Rebecca Moore as guest speaker in an intimate reception to mark the official launch of Google Earth Outreach in Canada.

In his speech, Dr. Suzuki highlighted the important role Google Earth can play in securing social justice and environmental protection and celebrated the Google Earth Outreach team on all that they have accomplished so far.

To be chosen to join the crème de la crème in Canada’s non-profit and social enterprising sector was an honour, and one we have not taken lightly.

So far we’ve successfully integrated Google Earth into some of our in-class guest lectures:

  • we’ve connected cotton production to human security for Political Science students at Simon Fraser University using a case-study analysis of the Aral Sea crisis with the aid of historic satellite imagery, and
  • taken the Textile Arts students at Capilano University through a virtual tour of our t-shirt travels programming using Google Earth and mapping tools.

While we’re not ready to launch the online component of our Google Earth education platform just yet, we’d like to thank Tides Canada and Google Earth Outreach for supporting the work we do through Social Alterations.

We can’t wait to share with you what we’ve been working on, so stay tuned!

Photo credit: Tides Canada Facebook page, “Google Earth Outreach Launch with Tides Canada” album, 7 of 25. 

Get schooled in ‘Economic Complexity’ with MIT and Harvard

Licensed through the Creative Commons, The Atlas of Economic Complexity: Mapping Paths to Prosperity is a collaborative project that builds visualizations on import/export trade flow of products and goods. Once the visualization is built, learners can scroll their mouse over each category for further details.

Click here to read up on the research methodology used.

With green marking ‘garments’ let’s check out a tree map of Cambodia for exports in 2009 (click on the image to be taken to the interactive map):

Visualizations can also be built in stacked area charts and product space visualizations. Here’s a product space map of Hong Kong exports for 2009 (remember, green represents garments!):

 

Style and Status: Imperial Costumes from Ottoman Turkey

Some people are adamant that fashion is not art. This online exhibit proves them wrong.

Silk textile with gilt thread embroidery, 16th Century. Arthur M. Sackler Gallery, © The New York Times, Dec. 5, 2005.

The Freer Gallery of Art and the Arthur M. Sackler Gallery at the Smithsonian Museum of Asian Art have created an online exhibit that features highlights from their 2005 exhibit entitled Style and Status: Imperial Costumes from Ottoman Turkey. The online exhibit is beautifully curated with interactive close ups of the costumes that are so detailed you can actually see the fabric grain. What’s so special about the Ottoman Empire? According to the press release in 2005:

“Three weaves were dominant: velvet (kadife), featuring a three-dimensional surface with some areas of pile and some of metal thread; brocade (kemha) and cloths of gold and silver thread (seraser)—the most expensive and luxurious. In the mid-16th century, Ottoman taste increasingly favored large, bold designs, such as medallions, stylized tiger stripes, and a triplespot design known as “çintamani” (literally, “auspicious jewel”). By repeatedly combining the similar motifs in different scales and patterns, the Ottomans were among the first to use recurrent motifs to create a dramatic and distinct visual language—a quintessentially “Ottoman brand”—that became identifiable with the empire’s centralized political strength and growing economic power—its style and status.”

If you are an educator and would like to incorporate this amazing online resource into your lessons, you can get some ideas from the resource for educators with a 4-part classroom activity that accompanies the exhibit.

Now…go explore!

Online exhibit: Style and Status: Imperial Costumes from Ottoman Turkey

Other online exhibits: The Freer Gallery of Art and the Arthur M. Sackler Gallery at the Smithsonian Museum of Asian Art

Educator’s resource: Asian Art Connections: A Resource for Educators. Style and Status: Imperial Costumes from Ottoman Turkey

Anti-Slavery International targets European Parliament through Cotton Crimes campaign

Anti-Slavery International has recently relaunched their Cotton Crimes campaign with a new video.

“It is our hope that, through our short video, we will reach out, inform and encourage people to act in the interests of the children of Uzbekistan.” (Samuel Cooper, Anti-Slavery International)

http://youtu.be/Hntampr_k7M

Anti-Slavery International is calling on the European Parliament to remove preferential trade tariffs with Uzbekistan. Click here for more information and to sign the petition.

Over 60 international retailers have joined forces to boycott Uzbek cotton, publicly stating their commitment to the eradication of forced child labour through the Responsible Sourcing Network, an As You Sow initiative.

Click below to learn more about what’s happening inUzbekistanand to follow our ongoing coverage:

LEARN // Social Alterations / A Closer Look / Uzbekistan

Wage Ladder, new online tool benchmarks living wages for garment workers

The Fairwear Foundation (FWF) has just launched Wage Ladder, an online tool and resource to assist brands, factories, trade unions and NGOs in their efforts as they work towards establishing and mainstreaming living wages for garment workers.

What exactly is a ‘living wage’? Click here to learn about recent developments on a living wage  from Nadira Lamrad.

Wage Ladder is currently programmed with data from Bangladesh, Bulgaria, China, India, Macedonia, Portugal, Romania, Thailand, Tunisia, Turkey, Ukraine and Vietnam, but for all other countries, users may enter their own data into the system.

“While global garment supply chains generate enormous wealth, improving wages, has proven a challenge. Progress has stalled in discussions about what, exactly, constitutes a living wage. Sidestepping these discussions, FWF has developed a web-based tool that will help garment brands and factories to gradually improve workers’ wages.” (FWF)

Here’s a screenshot of Wage Ladder in action taken from the FWF Wage Ladder User Guide:

Fashioning the Future Award winners announced, London

On November 10th, the Centre for Sustainable Fashion (CSF), at London College of Fashion, announced the winners of this year’s Fashioning the Future Awards — themed UNIQUE.

Congratulations to Ashley Brock (United States), Sara Emilie Terp Hansen (Denmark), Evelyn Lebis (Sweden), Christian Frank Muller (Germany) Alice Payne (Australia), and Lara Torres (Portugal).

Here is a taste of just two of the award winning entries (now added to the ‘Projects for Change’ collection on the left):

“Man sinking to the floor” from “An impossible wardrobe for the invisible,” by Lara Torres, is “a video installation showcasing water soluble clothing in order to comment upon the transient and disposable nature of fashion.” (CSF) Click here to view the entire series of performances.

“Lara Torres present’s the recordings/documentation of seven performances in a video screening. These videos are based in the creation of temporary clothes that are produced with the aim of being destroyed. They refer to the los[s] of the object and the documentation of this loss. The action of effacing the clothes leaves a trace (the seams) translating a strong relation with memory and forgetfulness.” (Lara Torres, An impossible wardrobe for the invisible: vimeo)


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ThinkLifecycle, by Alice Payne, is “a widely applicable content management system joining new and existing industry practices in order for companies to evolve towards a sustainable fashion industry.” (CSF)

“The ThinkLifecycle CMS grew from the need for sustainability to be a central concern within the mass market design process, rather than a tacked-on extra. Mass market fashion is affordable, accessible and democratic. However, it is based on a linear model of production where resources are extracted en masse, manufactured into garments and then sold to consumers, who rapidly dispose of them to purchase new product.” (ThinkLifecycle)

 

Congratulations to all the winners, finalists, organizers and participants!

 

Source: the CSF

Photo Credit: Alex Maguire, via the CSF