reFashion/transform
Presented by National Trust of Australia (Victoria)
DETAILS
Free, no booking required
Tasma Terrace
6 Parliament Place, East Melbourne VIC, Australia
DATES
Thu 14 May 11am – 4pm
Fri 15 May 11am – 4pm
Sat 16 May 11am – 4pm
Thu 21 May 11am – 4pm
Fri 22 May 11am – 4pm
Sat 23 May 11am – 4pm
reFashion/transform investigates the possibilities that emerge when waste is reimagined as resource, casting discarded materials into new forms and meanings. Against the backdrop of pervasive garment waste, the exhibition foregrounds practices of transformation, adaptation and reuse within both historical and contemporary contexts.
Visitors encounter an exhibition imagined as a room, an interior of reconfigured objects arranged into a domestic space, such as a living room filled with furnishings, fashion and decorative treatments. A group of creatives explores what happens when materials shed their former uses to become entirely new entities: discarded clothing is liquefied, reconstituted or reimagined as furniture, art or new materials.
Historical artefacts from the National Trust of Australia (Victoria) collection anchor these contemporary practices within a long trajectory of resourcefulness – jackets remade from sailors’ trousers, 1850s furniture fashioned from cotton pulp, and crazy quilts from textile remnants. In dialogue with these histories, the exhibition showcases practitioners across fashion, furniture design, science, history and the visual arts.
Participants
Amanda Nichols
Amanda Nichols is a designer and founder of Replica Project. Her training in film and haute couture informs a multi-layered practice interrogating the complex connections between costume and fashion. She received the prestigious Australian Fashion Foundation award in 2019, the Australian Fashion Week Next-Gen award in 2021 and the Victorian Premier’s Design Award in 2022.
Denise Sprynskyj and Peter Boyd / S!X
Formed in 1994, S!X have pioneered a thoughtful and research based response to tailoring using refashioning and recycling techniques. Both Denise Sprynskyj and Peter Boyd are leaders in design education at RMIT.
FUTURE re MADE
FUTURE re MADE crafts ethical, Melbourne/Naarm-made furniture using post-industrial waste, producing tables, sideboards, and custom designs with a modern mid-century aesthetic. Designed to assemble without fixtures, the pieces prioritise longevity. Creative director Polly Cadden leads a practice where waste becomes the foundation for considered and enduring design.
Daphne Mohajer va Pesaran and Jake Nakashima Edwards / DNJ Paper
DNJ Paper is an award-winning research and design studio that employs a range of techniques, both traditional and non-traditional, to create paper clothing, accessories and objects. Their pieces are considered works in progress, never fully ‘finished’, and are designed to evolve over time.
Dr Lorinda Cramer
Dr Lorinda Cramer is a social and cultural historian exploring the gendered dimensions of dress and textiles, the worn and material histories of Australian wool, and historical examples of sustainable fashion and waste.
Erin Lewis-Fitzgerald
Repair artist Erin Lewis-Fitzgerald champions visible mending and creative darning as both craft and philosophy. Author of Modern Mending and practicing since 2009, her work transforms damaged textiles into objects that wear their history with intention.
Hyeonjeong Weon
Emerging textile designer Hyeonjeong Weon explores notions of comfort and home through her dressing of furniture with once fashionable discarded garments, creating slipcovers that evoke a bodily embrace.
Richard Atiken
Historian Richard Aitken is a Melbourne/Naarm-based historian, architect, curator and poeticist. Author of books on garden history, he edited The Oxford Companion of Australian Gardens. His work as a poeticist explores connection through object, history and place.
Leeyong Soo
Sustainable style advocate Leeyong Soo has been publicly campaigning for the making and remaking of clothes, sharing her skills through content creation to empower others to adopt an ethos of DIY.
VTM Fashion
Emerging designer and seamstress Valerie Miller draws on historical techniques as a framework for sustainability, using methods that maximise material use and minimise textile waste. Her work centres on longevity, producing garments shaped by vintage aesthetics and built to last lifetimes.
Elizabeth Anya-Petrivna
Elizabeth Anya-Petrivna is a Senior Curator and Historian at the National Trust of Australia (Victoria). Her work focuses on interiors, domestic life and nineteenth-century dress and handcraft. She has curated exhibitions exploring the biographical wardrobe and history of wear.