On Friday last week Pli was invited to deliver a 10 minute presentation at the Upcycling Textiles Symposium held Chelsea College of Art & Design. The day was run by TED (Textile Environment Design) and it aimed to encourage the London textile and fashion community to embrace sustainable thinking.

Tim and I attended the first session of the day. First up was a talk form Marie O’Mahony who co-authored Techno Textiles: Revolutionary Fabrics for Fashion and Design - books 1 and 2 plus many other textile based publications. Her talk was very interesting and walked us through some amazing concepts and case studies including some “living” fabric which had been grown from fungi and bacteria.

Then we moved on the the Pecha Kucha session and I was one of the presenters here. This fast paced presentation style gave a great overview of some current examples of sustainable/recycled/reused textile products and clothing lines. Of note was Orsola De Castro’s section about her label ‘From Somewhere’. Her business started around customising knitwear but has grown into a major label by utilising, as she puts it, virgin recycled material. This material is off-cuts and end-of-rolls from large textile mills. These materials are essentially new/virgin but would otherwise be scrap, so using them is a excellent diversion of waste and gives the clothes a great point of difference. The key points I found most useful were around the scalability issues of recycled material sourcing and ethical practices. Both these areas are crucial to Pli’s future growth.

The other sections were delivered by slightly smaller scale businesses around the textile industry. My presentation on the Reee chair was really the odd one out, being about product development, and I provided another view on recycled materials in consumer products. Pecha Kucha is a great format to speak to–and 20 seconds per slide really kept me on my toes. I started by outlining the history of the Reee chair project starting with the initial concept of the project between the recycled electronics source and Christopher. Then I moved through the development process including initial concepts from Sprout and various technical developments during the prototype process. Following that I talked about the final manufacturing development and marketing of the chair up until this point. The presentation seem to be well received and most importantly I enjoyed myself.

Our first textile symposium experience was short but sweet. Unfortunately we had to get to another meeting in the afternoon so we couldn’t stay for the rest of the day’s sessions — I am sure we would have got a lot from them.

Thanks to Chelsea for organising an interesting seminar!