Square Me ²

fashion collection based on zero waste pattern making, presented at Ljubljana Fashion Week

solo project, part of Bachelor’s thesis, Mentor: prof. Elena Fajt

August 2016, Ljubljana, Slovenia

Nowadays, clothes and clothing styles are considered from various aspects. It is not only the wearability and aesthetics of clothes that is important but also the story behind them: how, where, and why they have been designed and manufactured. My aim is to design clothes that reflect one’s personal aesthetic and, at the same time, to draw attention to the story of their design and manufacture based on sustainability principles.

In the theoretical part of my paper, I researched some general principles of sustainability and, in more detail, sustainability in fashion design is presented in short. I focused on the main aspect, which I took into account in my final collection. This is a zero-waste fashion design. I studied zero waste principles in a broader sense and also their specific application in the fashion industry. I presented the ways of zero waste designing of clothes, some modern designers and their solutions in zero-waste fashion designing. In addition, I studied the examples of clothes from history in which square or rectangular cutting patterns were used, thus meeting one of the sustainability criteria, i.e. the zero waste principle.

In the practical part, collection based on the sustainability principle of zero waste fashion design is presented. Square me² is a collection of clothes designed and manufactured of several cutting patterns of square and/or rectangular shapes. Each individual piece is made of one cutting pattern of square or rectangular shape. Consequently, there is no waste of fabric that is usually part of cutting patterns in the fabric. Inspiration was found in a geometric shape – a square. I designed and further developed the collection by designing individual pieces on a dress form- by draping fabric on the dress form. By use of this designing technique, clothes were produced in which a simple cutting pattern was developed into a complex and different final silhouette of clothes.