Clothes for Chairs Exhibition

Clothes for Chairs is a group exhibition inviting fashion, textile, and design practitioners to reimagine discarded garments as functional seating.

Each participant is provided with a reclaimed chair frame and asked to approach it as they would a body — measuring, draping, weaving, knitting, reconstructing, or mending to create a new textile outcome. Through these processes, waste materials are transformed into fitted surfaces, structures, and skins, bringing the chair back into use. The resulting works sit between garment, upholstery, and object.

Bringing together Melbourne-based designers and artists working across fashion, textile art, and material research, the exhibition explores how garment-based thinking can extend beyond the human form. Many of the practitioners work with post-consumer clothing, production offcuts, and hand-based techniques, situating the project within broader conversations around reuse, labour, and material value.

Visitors encounter a series of reworked chair frames presented as individual works, each reflecting the material language and methodology of its maker. Some pieces foreground repair and reconstruction; others explore tension, structure, or surface. Together, they consider what it means to apply the logic of clothing to objects — and how acts of dressing, mending, and making can shift an object from waste to use.

Clothes for Chairs is presented by Future Archive as part of an ongoing investigation into textile waste, garment afterlives, and circular material systems.