Carole Collet & Textile Futures

Central Saint Martins is famous in regards to high fashion and couture, having shepherded countless avant-garde luminaries such as Hussein Chalayan, John Galliano, Christopher Kane, Stella McCartney, Phoebe Philo, Zac Posen, Gareth Pugh, Riccardo Tisci, Matthew Williamson, and the late Alexander McQueen. This list of names gives us a sense of the scope of design styles and legacies — from modern, romantic, classical and business-oriented — which have impacted on international fashion developments and evolution. It comes as no surprise that the textile department of Central Saint Martins is as equally forward-looking, risk-taking, and innovative as their counterparts in the fashion wings.

Textile Futures is a unique institution which, building on the rich history of textiles industry, authorship and innovation in England has recently expanded the field beyond mere textiles to include material, political and economic inquiry into convergent textiles fields such as architecture, biology, nanotechnologies and more. Carole Collet is at the head of this institution wherein students are actively re-thinking the future of the material world, looking beyond existing technologies, industries and practices to anticipate future needs, desires, and challenges.

One of the first things students at Textile Futures do upon beginning their studies is to be sent out in the woods on a survivalist excursion. During this foray into nature, they must build their own tents and hence, experience “the consequences of bad design” as states Carole in a recent Fashioning Technology Interview. These consequences are: no or poor sleep of, which we know the consequences first-hand. It is a simple lesson in the embodied experience of design in the material world and its impact on the lived every day. Removed from everyday conveniences — shelter, heat, hot water, easy availability of food, transportation and more — we, as humans, are quickly vulnerable-ized and design has the ability to change this.

Textiles are everywhere you look. We already live in a pliable and high-tech world of sartorial, architectural, industrial, and automotive textile design. Even when textiles do not present themselves in their “fibrous” form they are present in various substrates that range for engineering to bio-medical to food cultures. Textiles is a mutable field that can shape-change in the most unlikely of spaces, scales and forms. One of the recent textiles inventions to come out of the Department of Chemical Engineering, Imperial College London, “Fabrican“, is a spray-on, vacuum sealed (hence sterile) textile which is being tested for bio-medical applications such as on-skin medicine delivery. Soon, we will see much more of this “ad-hoc” and receptive forms of high-tech textiles materials and applications and Textile Futures is one of the places where this is being actively plotted.

Research being developed at Textiles Futures is looking into future-forward post-humanist and zero-resource (i.e apocalyptic post-human existence) scenarios to anticipate what we may need / want in 50 + years to come. MA textile students are asked to probe the far-future and look for biological, ecological, and technological solutions within textiles, nano technologies, food and life sciences to provide these solutions.

Amy Congdon: Biological Atelier:

Congdon asks: “What role will textile design play in the creation of biological products of the future?”
With her “Biological Atelier” the designer looks at “developments in the fields of biotechnology and synthetic biology” to project a bespoke vision of biological/textile atelier. Congdon sees a changing role in the designer where craft skills and materials will be harnessed for “luxury biological textiles”, that is to say “designer bio-textiles”. She looks at new technologies such as bioinkjet printing (a process of 3-D printing of living cells) to imagine how these technologies might be used in the hands of designers. For example, she researched digital embroidery applications presently used in implants to consider “the new role for embroidery and textile design in our biological future.” Also of interest in a 2082 speculative future are: ethical ivory accessories, or fantastical furs which would be grown “to order”.

Natsai Audrey Chieza: Design Fictions:

Chieza asks: “How can the textile discipline critically engage the public with emerging biotechnologies and the life sciences?” Chieza’s premise for research is anchored in the power of narrative to “provoke dialogue into ethical implications of technological processes of the life science industry and the appropriation of life.” By raising critical questions over the understanding of cultural and environmental trends in biotech Chieza wishes to make us “reconsider the role of the designer” to embed him/her within the manufacturing changes which will take place with this booming biotechnological revolution. Looking at technologies such as: flocking, laser cutting and moulding and the uses of materials such as: silicone, liquid plastics, wax as well as bacterial culture, Chieza creates a fictionalized material sketch of what these new designed biotech artifacts will look like. She says: “Combining laboratory protocol with the visual and tactile sensibility that textile design cultures resulted in a truly multidisciplinary approach to crafting.” Looking at DIY biology, home cultured parasitic organisms, and the ominous market for genetic products, Chieza wishes to alert us to the radical changes in 21st century materials and manufacturing and to situate the designer within those changes in order to makes sense of ethical, political, economic and evolutionary ramifications.”

Laura Martinez: Digicrafted Series:

Martinez asks: “How can traditional textile craft soften the digital aesthetic of Rapid Manufactured textiles?” Through her “Digicrafted Series” Martinez is looking at Rapid Manufacturing (RM) technologies and its impact on how we may “consume, design and manufacture products.” Advocating for a post-engineering perspective, Martinez is interested in bridging “the gap between RM textiles and traditional textile design.” Her “new visual language” challenges and softens the digital aesthetic of 3-D printed textiles. Using RM materials and traditional fabrics, the designer produced a collection of innovative hybrid textiles combining laser-sintered nylon with light and delicate materials such as silk and feathers. In this way, Martinez seeks to blur the discrepancies between the digital and the hand-made and states that she was particular inspired in her project by recent exhibitions: Li Edelkoort “Post Fossil: excavating 21st century creation” + Max Fraser “Lab Craft: digital adventures in contemporary craft.”

Priyanka Gaitonde: Nano Fiction:

Gaitonde asks: “Can nanotechnology be encountered through a poetic exploration of its concepts and future scenarios?” Gaitonde’s “Nano Fiction” looks at nanotechnology’s potential to transform AI, smart materials, space travel, medical treatments, extended life spans and robotics. However, potentially substantial risks for social, cultural and material life, Gaitonde argues, require immediate inquiry and careful reflection. Outlining the discrepancy between what people believe about nanotech and what the public has encountered first-hand, Gaitonde chose to develop a “Nano Cookbook” — featuring a compilation of fictional recipes — as a visual aid to communicating the potential design opportunities and pitfalls of nanotech. Notes the designer: “By keeping links to real research and projecting its applications of the future I am finding a synthesis between science and magic by both demystifying and fantasising.”

Most of the above descriptions are a paraphrasing of the designer’s intentions. However, to add a critical note, I would advocate that there is a strong pull towards a “sales-pitch” rhetoric which, though immensely seductive, refuses to anchor the research in specific and tangible realities. Perhaps its use is just this: to make us dream a little. After all, who has ever experienced the taste of a wine as described on the label. Sometimes we need to invent a vision of the future we want as opposed to being parsimonious about defining it to an exactitude. And at times, we don’t even have words for what we are making! But asking questions now — and I fail to believe that *designers* have access to the whole answer (we need also ask poets, artists, and of course engineers, biologists, lawyers, environmentalists, ethics counselors, and individuals to contribute, which they must) – designers are non-the-less in the enviable position of being able to present these visions ins ways which capture our collective imaginations.

Further read: Carole Collet Interview on Fashioning Technology.

This series of blog posts are an analysis of the works recently presented at the V2_ Institute for the Unstable Media Text_Lab “Clothing without Cloth” event I curated which included: Emily Crane (UK), Carole Collet (UK), Christien Meindertsma (NL), Grado Zero Espace (IT), Pauline van Dongen (NL) and Freedom of Creation (NL).