A Vancouver college’s fashion partnership became a whole lot more, with a little help from its students and Value Village.
The Visual College of Art and Design (VCAD) in Vancouver partnered with Eco Fashion Week this year and had the chance to work with Value Village. The well-known thrifting store does an 81 pound fashion challenge and wanted to get a school involved this year.
Every year the average North American throws out 81 pounds of clothing and textiles. Because of this staggering number Value Village started the challenge where designers create a brand new upcycled collection from 81 pounds of gently-used fabrics.
VCAD students learned just how to get rid of textile waste and how to reuse clothing before it went to the landfill.
“We went to Value Village with our team of design students and mentors and ended up collecting 81 pounds of textiles and then reworked those textiles into a new collection,” explained Natasha Campbell, head of Applied Arts at VCAD.
“Reworked meaning we didn’t just take a pair of pants and just pin them in. We literally took pants apart, made it into a top, jacket or dress. It was a full kind of change in construction from concept to compilation.”
The students created the new and improved collection and showcased it during Eco Fashion Week in Vancouver on April 9-14.
Campbell said she didn’t think her students really understood the importance of the challenge at the beginning, but soon realized just how much clothing people throw away.
“When they started getting into creating a cohesive collection we’d have to go back to Value Village to find more pieces, then we would weigh the pieces to see how heavy they were. That was when reality really kicked in for the students.”
The challenge used to be called the 68 pound challenge, but in the last couple of years the average person threw out an additional 13 pounds of clothing than before, so the challenge had to be renamed. Campbell believes people throw out more clothing because fashion now doesn’t have the rules it used to.
The fashion industry doesn’t go by winter, fall, spring and summer rules anymore but instead it goes by something called Fast Fashion.
“If you go into Zara, every week it’s like a different store and because of that we tend to be so obsessed with something new that we consume so much and we forget what we have.”
With the way fashion is going Campbell hopes that people will begin to thrift instead.
“Value Village is an amazing store. A lot of people need to explore it and I think that Value Village is coming into its own fashion front now, as being seen as a place to find fashion.”
Looking ahead VCAD understands that students are really interested in the way fashion is going, so that’s why there will be a new course offered at the college about fashion sustainability.
Campbell said the course should be up and running for students this fall.
