Recession chic is all about recycling or reinventing what you've got, writes Catherine Cleary.
THERE COMES A time when you realise you use the word hip to describe yourself only in the context of describing your latest ache. And then you realise you are bewildered by fashion. The daily default setting is jeans and a top, with the fanciness of the top varying to suit the occasion.
Maybe this is why the recent Swap-o-rama-rama in the Science Gallery at Trinity College felt a bit intimidating. (Even the name, with its extra "rama", seemed to have all the more-is-more connotations beloved of Fashion Types who can carry off the three belts and seven necklaces layered look.) The event promised 150 people all bringing clothes to swap, and experts to help customise, accessorise, light up or alter your swap bin finds.
This was not my first clothes swap, but previous events involved several female friends, some bags of unwanted clothes, generous helpings of white wine and finger food. The result? Happy women heading home with a bag of free clothes and a warm glow from all the Chablis-fuelled compliments about how a particular item was made for them.
A much more public and sober event, the Dublin Swap-o-rama-rama was brought to the Science Gallery by its programme manager, Liz Allen. The brainchild of New Yorker Wendy Tremayne (a former public relations executive who lists naked yoga instructing among her former professions), the clothes swap seemed a perfect event to run alongside the museum's impressive Technothreads fashion exhibition.
A trickle of women of all generations arrived to deposit clothes in deep wallpaper-covered cardboard boxes. Next door there was a row of sewing machines, boxes of buttons and trimmings, and an infinite variety of possibilities. A frumpy denim skirt with a handkerchief hem provided the first experiment.
NCAD textiles student Ciara Feeney took a look at the skirt and recommended lopping an inch off the bottom. There was a struggle to get the sewing machine working. The first test stitch snarled up and looked like an angry cluster of insects. A change to another machine with the wrong shade of thread got things moving and in minutes the skirt was shorter, with a straight hem.
In another corner of the room, designer Kate Goldsworthy was doing things with glue and an iron. Goldsworthy makes beautiful textiles out of normally ugly products, such as polyester and plastics, and lectures at the Chelsea College of Art and Design in London. She melts down polyester and turns the resulting goo into jewel- coloured batik-style designs. She uses a laser to cut plastic pill packaging into flower shapes to create ethereal hanging panels. She talks about reclaiming and recycling polyester shirts.
She fingered the frumpy denim skirt and guessed rightly that it is not made of 100 per cent cotton.
Goldsworthy works with materials not usually associated with green designers. "Synthetics can't just be ignored," she says. "They're so much part of our lives. We use them once and then we bury them in landfill." If only people would look after their clothes and keep them for longer, she says, it would be better than our current habit of treating clothes as almost instantly disposable items.
What does she see our granddaughters doing for a quick fashion fix? "There is talk of people having a printing machine in their homes and being able to print their clothes and then recycle them back into the system."
But back in this decade, she painted glue on to the waistband of the frumpy skirt through a stencil, then dried it with a hairdryer. We stuck fabric foil (like baking foil, only thinner) over the dried glue and used a hot iron to press it under Teflon baking sheets to prevent it burning. A few minutes later, a chevron of silver pattern was printed on to the denim. It was much admired, and therewas the sense of satisfaction, of doing something never tried before. Two children came along and asked me for buttons to glue on to their home-made robots.
Downstairs, neuroscience PhD student Seán Kilbride held up a white T-shirt to persuade a visitor to burst into song. "This is me," Kilbride says, showing her a plain white T-shirt with a rectangle of green lines, "singing Elvis's Don't be Cruel." The other one with the purple lines is his rendition of Willie Nelson's Night Life.
Kilbride was recording voice patterns on a laptop and printing them on the T-shirts. Despite his cajoling, the woman did not want to sing. "We could record your laugh," he says plaintively.
Cue a moment of hesitation as we all realised that now she had to produce spontaneous laughter on demand. But after a few seconds she laughed at the absurdity of it all and hey presto, the recording was done. "That's your laugh from there to there," Kilbride says, pointing at the screen. The lines showed dramatic peaks and troughs. Later, there were more giggles at the idea of linear messages that could be recorded on to T-shirts for the secret satisfaction of the wearer: special messages to the boss were some of the more printable ideas.
In the end I did nothing more controversial than sing a few bars of Somewhere Over the Rainbow (the lullaby of choice round our house) quietly into the laptop's microphone and a purple printout was ironed on to my plain grey T-shirt.
Through his work as a mediator in the gallery, where he is one of the friendly crew of students and postgrads, Kilbride has discovered a desire to get out of the lab a bit. "It has made me see how much I'd like to work with people," he says. "Scientists in general should talk to people more." And sing more Willie Nelson? "Definitely."
At a nearby desk, computer science first-years Shaun Gray and Stephen Murphy were putting the finishing touches to an LED light on a denim bag that looked as if it arrived as a pair of jeans. Gray explained the principles of how the light runs from a simple battery.
Curling the pins of the LED light into a shapely curve on the waistband of the now thoroughly customised denim skirt was post-doctorate student Lucy Dunne. Currently studying computer science at UCD, she will return to the US to teach a university course on wearable technology to fashion students in Minnesota next year.
Dunne has invented what sounds like an eminently saleable product as part of her PhD in apparel design: a "vest that monitors your seated posture while you're working on a computer". The vest will prompt a pop-up window on your screen if your spine slumps out of the correct position. The invention, which is patented, would have to be used carefully, she explained. It could be construed as something of a corporate strait jacket if employers or insurers started insisting that their computer-bound workers started wearing them.
What did she call it? "I'm against cute little names for projects," she says with a wry grin, "but it did get a few nicknames along the way. People like puns, so it was called Spinal Top by somebody. I prefer to call it a wearable posture monitor."
Against the exhibition's backdrop of glossy white mannequins wearing outrageous futuristic outfits, she outlined a number of connections between science and fashion. "There is the sportswear side, such as jackets that respond to body temperature, and the biomedical world where a bra could monitor heart rhythm or other health indicators. These ideas sounded space-agey in the 1960s. And there were exhibits like this back then. Is it going to happen? "In certain areas it's likely to happen, things such as pervasive medical monitoring. That's the kind of thing that will save a lot of money in the future."
But there remain translation problems between fashion and science, she says. They are two worlds which appeal differently to different genders. "Even here, you have the boys down here doing the technology and girls upstairs sewing."
Back home, I tried on my customised foil-printed denim skirt with its own red LED in the waistband. Despite our best efforts, a traffic warden's skirt would beat it in the glamour stakes. However, too much work has gone into it for me to throw it away. It will have to be reinvented as a cushion cover some day. But thanks to several other rummages in the swap bins, my wardrobe is sporting two new dresses.
And there's always my personalised Somewhere Over the Rainbow T-shirt.
WORDS CATHERINE CLEARY
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