It brought together educators, industry experts, academics and selected students to explore how fashion can be taught to inspire responsibility for the rights of the workers making our clothes.
On the 2nd & 3rd of March I had the amazing and nerve racking experience of presenting a Pecha-Kucha style presentation (I know double wording there): "Can El Salvador Sustain and Develop Home-grown Design?", with 20 images played for 20 seconds each I spoke surprisingly eloquently about my thesis and Lunamano.
This is when speaking about Lunamano begun to be external, that is, out of my head and notebooks onto people. The responses were great and encouraging, like-minded people came over to our stand in the market place day to speak about how and what the materials were, what was the next step? How this project begun? and how they could help. After such a response the product design phase has officially begun and soon I'll be after collaborations with fellow designers, to utilize the materials Lunamano has made and turn them into products.
Other highlights of the event included key note speakers Otto von Busch and Kate Fletcher, both of them truly inspiring. Otto's work explores how fashion can be re-engineered by consumers for a more self-empowered, bottoms-up approach, in his presentation juxtaposing the rituals of religion against the rituals of fashion. He was cut short due to timing issues but the audience was 100% engaged, "no!, don't stop" we all cheered.
As for Kate Fletcher's Local Wisdom it made me think about scale, and how big is enough? This project celebrates the abundance of experience, ingenuity and freethinking that comes from local people and their relationships with their own garments, for instance, we heard the story of two sisters who have shared a dress between them for over 30 years. This is the kind of sustainability we don't hear about in the industry or in the catwalk shows.
It is stories like this that inspire Lunamano. Micro.
