FashionLab #6
LIVE in
decay
amsterdam
Imagine a world where the shade of your blue jeans would not signify a trend but would actually tell a story about you: about the years you have lived, the places you’ve seen, about the way you take care of what matters to you. Or at least about that day you skipped school to run into the sea.
Conceptual researcher and designer, Josien Verwoerd
Josien’s work focuses on sustainable alternatives and aims to make the destructive sides of the denim industry tangible by replicating its harmful dyeing methods and treatments with “dirty” resources we can all find at home. By provoking a physical reaction in the viewer, she invites the audience to deeply consider and absorb the dirty truth behind the clothes we wear. What is our own role in this process, how are we all connected, and hence complicit? And how can we work together to change the perspective on something taboo towards something beautiful and powerful? By exploring possible natural alternatives like moulds, rust, and even bodily fluids, she confronts the poignant reality of a polluting fashion industry with beauty, and hope, in natural decay.
Backstory
My music teacher at high school, Hans Kwakkel, would tell us the story of how he and his friends in the sixties would secretly skip a day of school to catch a train to the coast – and run into the sea wearing their clothes. They would rub the sand and salt water into their new, dark blue jeans to make the colour fade. They wanted to look like the Rolling Stones.
Today, our blue jeans are put into machines with rolling stones, treated with harmful chemicals, sandpapered, and destroyed by hazardous manual labour. It makes them some of the most harmful products in fashion. Not only are most chemical indigo dyeing methods a particularly polluting process, but then we also use tons of water and energy to grind the deep blue colour down and destroy the jeans before they are ever worn. We still want jeans that look like we owned them for years. Except we buy ‘new’ ones every fashion season.
Looking into alternative and natural ways of colouring denim, I also wanted to explore natural ways to wear them down. Experimenting with rust, moulds, compost, urine, and saliva, I found all methods had one important thing in common: they take time. Bleaching jeans by composting lemons takes about three months, as opposed to the almost immediate effects of chemical bleaching agents. This slowing down of the treatment process forces one to consider the impact of the industrial processes that have become so normal in the denim industry today, to consider the costs of the faded jeans we so desire, to consider our clothes.
