WATER POLLUTION DESIGN
Fast Fashions Effects on Water
Climate change is an issue I have been passionate on for the past few years. For this project, I wanted to bridge fashion with climate change so I focused on how fast fashion affects water. Based on my research I created 6 designs that encapsulate the problems fast fashion creates in our earth's bodies of water. The purpose of my designs is to communicate and raise awareness and concern for how fast fashion is harming the environment. Hopefully if given the chance to conceptualize these designs when people see them they'll think twice before buying from fast fashion companies.
Reaserch
During my research, I discovered the extreme impacts of the fast fashion industry on water. Fast fashion is responsible for 20% of the words water waste. Fast fashion often features cheaper fabrics, which causes a problematic amount of microplastics to enter the ocean. Fast fashion also is responsible for polluting water as they often use the open ocean as a dumping ground for all the oils and other toxins used to dye and treat clothes. The plastic and wasteful packaging many companies under the fast fashion umbrella use is also detrimental as they often end up back into the water. These findings are what shaped my final designs.
Designs
Double click to see just the photos
This was my color swatch paper to determine wich blues I wanted to use for my ombre.
This was my first try doing the ombre....didn't go as planned
The holes in the pants of this design are meant to represent the lakes, drained by fast fashion companies. The ombre blue design represents how water is being sucked out of the oceans and used for cheap fabrics, which is what the gray on the neck symbolizes, the microfabrics from synthetics.
Working with Ombre!
A large portion of these designs required me to learn how to blend and ombre colors with markers, a skill of which I hadn't yet learned before. Through the help of my teacher, I learned how to layer and build up colors to get the effect I wanted. In this design, I was going for a faded ombre dip-dye look so that it looked like the water was being sucked up, out of the pants. I learned that I had to put down a base layer of my lightest color and then work my way up until I got to my darkest. I also learned that making quick strokes helped me achieve that faded dip-dye look. Doing this design also helped me understand how to identify colors that go well together and can transition well into one another.
Mood+Look Boards
The mood and look boards are what I made initially based on my research to help me gather ideas for my final designs.
This design represents the algae that blooms in water as a part of the eutrophication process, another negative result of the fast fashion industry. The green parts of the skirt are scrapes of synthetics and cheap fabrics. The blue skirt underneath is meant to resemble affected bodies of water.
This dress is made of packaging from fast fashion industries. The blue mesh layered on-top symbolizes how fast-fashion packaging is polluting our waters.
The colorful bursts on the dress represents the oil spills that fast fashion shipment boats and untreated water create. The cap with the high-neck piece represents how the oil is suffocating aquatic animals. The mermaid-tail dress is displaying how ocean animals are suffering and being suffocated by these spills. The straggly-looking feathers on the cap show how often birds get stuck and then die in these spills.
I chose colors and a design that resembles the body and tail of the fish. However the colors were meant to show how the fish is rotting, and its tail is falling apart. The fish is being entangled in strings of synthetic fabrics. Unfortunately, this isn't an uncommon occurrence thanks to the popularity of fast fashion, they often dump scrapes into the ocean. The high neckline here yet again shows how suffocating the pollution from fast fashion is.
Often fast fashion facilities have farms that mass-produce materials such as cotton cheaply. As a result, fertilizer from these farms ends up polluting the ocean and causing algae blooms. The top half of the dress symbolizes the fertilizer travelling down, until it turns into the algae bloom.