Students at Anglia Ruskin University (ARU) are making waves with their innovative, eco-friendly fashion creations made from end-of-life sails.
As part of the Fashion Design degree course, students examine the social, cultural and environmental issues within fashion, and ARU’s Cambridge School of Art has teamed up with not-for-profit organisation Clean Sailors for the course’s Sustainable Design and Innovation Practice module.
The first-year module focuses on subjects such as minimal waste and upcycling to tackle environmental concerns within the industry, and students were tasked with producing zero-waste clothes made from recycled, end-of-life fabrics.
Clean Sailors runs a global upcycling and recycling scheme called ReSail by Clean Sailors to give a new life to old sails and this year provided a 30-year-old mainsail and a large spinnaker for ARU students to recreate into garments.
After months of hard work in ARU’s fashion studios, Asmeet Kaur Wadhwa has been named the winner of a prize awarded by Clean Sailors, for the most inspiring and innovative use of the sail, for her cagoule jacket.
Holly Manvell, founder of Clean Sailors, said: “Whilst spent sails may no longer be any good for sailing, they retain inherent value as a textile. This partnership is really poignant for me, personally, as the mainsail was my grandfather’s – it had taken him across the Bay of Biscay, Azores and down to Cape Town before losing its integrity as a mainsail.
“Protest through fashion has a powerful history. I spent my late teens in fashion industry and at the time designers such as Henry Holland and Katharine Hamnett were using slogans across garments to raise awareness of political issues, a movement of which Vivienne Westwood was really the queen of.
“So, it’s a beautiful full-circle moment whereby a family mainsail has been used by students in the renowned Cambridge School of Art to explore sailcloth as a textile and through zero-waste patterns. It’s been so exciting seeing what these budding fashion designers have created.”
Sarah Graham, Lecturer in Fashion Design at Anglia Ruskin University (ARU), said:
“Fashion is a trillion-dollar market globally, with a host of environmental challenges of its own. In this course we provide students with sustainable creative practices, for example zero-waste design techniques, and through our use of seemingly ‘waste’ textiles, we aim to encourage an innovative way of thinking about the future of fashion design.
“Having previously worked with recycling tents into clothing, we were looking for a new perspective on sustainable fashion and textiles. Sail fabric as a textile resource is even more hard wearing than the fabrics we have previously worked with, and we were interested to see how this versatile and underused fabric could feed into our student’s sustainable practice and make clothes more durable.
“We reached out to Clean Sailors after seeing their ReSail platform and how they were connecting the sailing community with project partners to upcycle sails into a range of lifestyle products. We were delighted when Holly replied with such enthusiasm and support for our project.”
