Innovative Textile Recycling And Upcycling Technologies For a Critical and Circular Design Practice:
From Stadium to Body

Slowness as a Radical Choice - 45/51 is not an answer — but a proposition

This module presents the thesis of building a sustainable fashion business model. The project proposes a suggestion in which the redesign of reclaimed materials—football scarves—is used to demonstrate a sustainable approach to product development and (fashion) design. The garments produced through the project were sold in multiple units over an extended period, indicating that the pilot project was indeed operational and commercially viable.

Market Relevance

The market for sustainable fashion is expanding rapidly, and circular business models are projected to unlock substantial economic value on a global scale.

The target group: Generation Z demonstrates heightened sensitivity to environmental impacts and demands greater transparency from brands. Research indicates that this demographic is more inclined than previous generations to purchase second-hand and redesigned clothing.

Uniqueness and exclusivity: Studies show that consumers are drawn to unique designs and limited editions, which constitutes a natural advantage of upcycling individual football scarves, as no two garments are identical.

Design-led strategy: For commercial success, the concept should prioritise aesthetics and style before ethical considerations. Sustainability is often perceived by consumers as an added benefit, whereas purchasing decisions are primarily driven by visual appeal and price competitiveness.

Emotional Design and Storytelling

One of the model’s strongest attributes lies in the connection between the material and the wearer.

Emotional durability: Clothing frequently functions as an extension of personal identity. Football scarves carry strong associations with memory, belonging, and personal history; by incorporating these materials, garments gain heightened emotional value. Emotional design has been shown to increase the likelihood that consumers retain and care for garments over extended periods.

Garment biographies: The products can be understood as assemblages of past, present, and future. Existing literature suggests that preserving traces of a material’s previous life (such as club colours or logos) is an effective strategy for constructing a distinctive brand identity that resonates with consumers’ own narratives.

Challenges and Recommendations

Stigma and perceived quality: Social stigma surrounding reused materials persists, with some consumers associating them with inferior quality or hygiene concerns. It is therefore essential to communicate high levels of craftsmanship and professional finishing.

Production complexity: Upcycling at an industrial scale presents challenges due to the irregularity of raw materials. In the event of scaling up, digital tools such as 3D pattern design may be employed to standardise the transformation from scarves to garments and ensure consistent fit. At present, the model deliberately operates at a small scale, relying on handcrafted production, resulting in highly unique expressions that can contribute to status-building and brand differentiation.

Certification and transparency: To avoid accusations of greenwashing, full transparency across the supply chain is necessary, potentially supported by relevant certifications.

Conclusion

The business concept behind 45/51 rests on a strong foundation. It addresses the urgent need for circular solutions within the fashion industry, engages an environmentally conscious target group (Generation Z), and leverages emotional attachment through the reuse of supporter culture. For long-term success, the design must stand independently as a compelling fashion product, while production processes should be professionalised to counteract stigma associated with reused materials.

Reflections and Motivations

Resistance as a Method

The fashion industry constitutes one of the world’s most extensive and influential global systems. It shapes cultural identity, social belonging, and economic activity across borders, while simultaneously ranking among the most environmentally damaging and structurally problematic industries of our time. This duality—between creative force and systemic destruction—forms the point of departure for this project.

To work with fashion today entails more than aesthetic ambition; it entails ethical responsibility. The industry is characterised by overproduction, accelerated consumption, labour exploitation, and a linear economic model grounded in the principle of take–make–waste. Navigating such a system is challenging, both professionally and personally. Consequently, this project did not emerge from immediate motivation, but rather from resistance: a fundamental ambivalence towards the desire to work within fashion. On the one hand, I experienced an almost overwhelming surplus of creative ideas seeking expression through tactile, embodied practices—through placing, draping, and constructing on the human body; through exploring the constraints and possibilities of materials; through repositioning symbols to generate new forms of meaning; and through playful experimentation with associations and expression. On the other hand, I questioned how I could allow myself to participate in, and contribute to, an industry that in its current form is so globally destructive, on multiple levels.

Furthermore, my educational trajectory had gradually subdued my playful, rebellious, and experimental impulses, replacing them with rigid notions of “right” and “wrong,” pushing me into a narrow framework and muting colour, deviation, and curiosity.

Resistance to both the industry and the institution thus became a necessary starting point. It compelled a deeper reflection on what it means to be a designer in a time defined by climate crisis, resource scarcity, and growing social inequality. It demanded the courage to act against strict norms concerning what is considered beautiful, possible, or acceptable, at a stage where curiosity and experimentation are essential to my personal development and creative process. The central question has not been how to continue as before, but how fashion might be redefined—as practice, system, and value—and how dominant pedagogical and technical conventions might be challenged to recognise irregularity, imperfection, and “home-made” expressions as legitimate and meaningful design language.

Fashion and clothing are often used interchangeably, yet they represent distinct—though overlapping—phenomena. Clothing refers to functional objects: garments that cover the body, provide protection from climate, and enable everyday life. Fashion, by contrast, operates as a social and cultural language. It communicates identity, belonging, resistance, and aspirational values.

What makes fashion particularly compelling is its universality. All individuals participate in the fashion system, either consciously or unconsciously. Even the claim of indifference toward fashion constitutes a choice that communicates attitude and position. Within my own theoretical understanding, every silhouette, cut, button, colour—indeed every material and formal decision—communicates something about the wearer. In this sense, everyone, at all times, has at least one foot inside the fashion system.

Traditionally, a distinction is drawn between the fashion industry—often associated with high fashion—and the clothing industry, which produces everyday garments and mass fashion. In practice, however, these boundaries are blurred. The same structural mechanisms—production, distribution, marketing, and consumption—operate across both domains. Consequently, critique and efforts toward change must be directed at the system as a whole, rather than at isolated segments within it.

Where we would like to stay

Model: The Routledge Handbook of Archaeology and Plastics (2024)

Collaberation with Holtzweiler

Photographs from the archive.

After the brand’s lifespan as a pilot project and a conceptual sketch for a sustainable market model, and expression of a desired paradigm shift within strategies, ideologies, and modes of production, had moved on- the label received inquiries from several external actors.

A proposed collaboration with the Oslo based T-shirt printing consept 10/10 was declined, as the brand’s trial phase had been concluded and could not be sustained alongside continued academic studies. However, a collaboration with Holzweiler was realized. This request demonstrated the potential that existed within the project and pointed toward pathways that could have been further developed.

Scarves represent a unique product category. During this period, they were strongly associated with vibrant colours and branding around collective identity, such as motorsports, football, ice hockey, and other national or team-based sports. The use of already-established visual concepts (that the sport-scarfs had established) amplify these associations — while redirecting them to communicate and promote an independent brand or (sub)cultural identity — was a clever move.

This strategy was explored by Holzweiler, however, they ended up with surplus materials. Within this project-based collaboration, 45/51`s role vas focused on design, conceptualization, and visual development for the brand and store.

Collaborative Creations & Visibility with Vulnerability

Other assignments involved collaborations with, or stage outfits for, artists. The pieces were particularly embraced by music performers. Perhaps it’s about belonging to a certain underground scene, or dressing in bold colors and textiles that stand out and attract attention — about being the first to deliver a trend. Artists such as Lars Vaular, Girl In Red, and many others wore, borrowed, or had custom outfits designed and made. Collaborations with prominent figures can fully realize a concept or completely transform an image.

Visibility is both the greatest joy and desire, and the biggest curse, for a small, newly established, underground fashion brand. Major fashion houses have agents constantly scouting for the latest trends, which almost always emerge from smaller subcultures in society.

It is no secret that large, established fashion houses or commercial players directly copy, appropriate, and replace ideas from smaller startups. This is a repetitive pattern and, to some extent, part of their strategy. The journey of a phenomenon or form of expression from subculture to commercial/mainstream markets is a complex and fascinating field, though it falls outside the scope of this module.

It came as a huge surprise when this project was directly copied by the major fashion brand Weekday — owned by H&M Group — one of the largest fast-fashion houses in the world, and precisely the type of industry the brand seeks to challenge. The irony and obviousness of this situation are striking, and it sparked a discussion.

After an overwhelming media storm on the topic, I was put in direct contact with the brand. Over the phone, I spoke with the head of their “limited edition drop,” who denied the claims. However, no further production or promotion of their re-designed football scarf collection was made.

The media response 45/51 received was massive. Several interviews were conducted, including with D2 and Melk & Honning, and there was an extreme response on Instagram, with people criticizing the fashion giant Weekday. This also speaks to the strong loyalty and connection young people feel toward brands they trust — brands with transparent concepts they can relate to. Younger audiences want change, but the major fashion houses remain powerful.

Discussing The Business Modell Through A Theoretical Aproch

Try to internalized the fact that your plastic fleece jacket will outlive you and your grandchildren, sitting in a landfill for 500 years, how would that change what you buy tomorrow?

The business Idea: This thesis will showcase the business modul of 45/51 - a sustainable upcyclebrand. It will be dicussed falling on theory from academic papers on garment ontology, psychological studies on object biographies, and s documents on European Union waste regulations. To try to build a fortress of evidence around the Business Module Idea. As we will se, this upcycling football scarves project - isn't just about sewing. It sits right at the intersection of emotional durability, value retention, and this massive wave of regulatory pressure that ishitting the entire industry. It is not possible do discus a solution like 45/51 without really understanding the scale of the problem it's trying to solve.

What is the state of the fashion industry right now? To put it bluntly, it is grim, It's a disaster. To be honest the current model is not only completely broken, its also absolutely crushing the environment. The linear model. The take, make, waste model. Taking resources from the ground, oil for synthetics, water and land for cotton. Making a garment, a customer buys it, wears it maybe seven to ten times on average. And then they throw it away. It goes in a straight line from the earth to the landfill. The story ends there. We've all seen the documentaries, we've seen the pictures of clothes piled up in deserts. Globally, the fashion industry generates approximately 92 million tons of textile waste every single year. Hard to even visualize. That's not just a pile of clothes, that is a geological feature. That is a mountain range of discarded polyester. Out of all the material used to produce clothing globally, the percentage of clothing actually recycled into new clothing-it’s less than 1%. It sounds impossible. I see recycling bins for clothes everywhere. Everyone's donating their old stuff. But this is an illusion - most of what people think is recycling, like donating to a charity shop or putting it in those bins, often just ends up shipped overseas to the global south, where it floods local markets, it destroys local textile industries, and eventually it lands in a landfill or is burned in an open pit. The loop isn't closed just because you don’t hold it anymore, it's barely even curved. So we are essentially mining the planet just to create trash that we export somewhere else, and meanwhile, we are turning out carbon emissions. Roughly 10% of global carbon emissions comes from this one sector. It is more than international flights and maritime shipping combined. 45/51 is fundamentally about taking existing material and keeping it in use. The model is swimming against a very strong, very toxic current. And the why is clear - the planet literally cannot handle the current system. We are shifting or we're trying to shift to the idea of a circular economy.

recycling and upcycling

Two completely different things. The work by Rath & Morthi and others, draw a really sharp line within this - starting with the physics of the fiber itself. In the mechanical recycling process the scarf would get shredded. Literally torn apart by machines with massive rotating teeth, physically cutting the fibers, shortening the staple length. Thats why recycled textiles are often downcycled, turned into mattress stuffing, insulation, or rough blankets - a downgrade. Taking a complex design product and turning it into simple, low-value padding (but highly usable, practical and intentional for its purpose). 45/51 is proposing upcycling. Upcycling is defined as transforming waste materials into products of higher value or quality than the original. A key phrase - higher value. A design-led intervention, taking a discarded football scarf, which might be sitting in a bin or gathering dust, essentially worthless, and applying creativity and labor to give it a new purpose. Retaining the embodied energy of the product and transporting it, the energy trapped or embodied inside the object would - if shredding it - turn it into stuffing, loseing that structural memory, losing the energy, but when carefully cut and sew it into a jacket, almost all of that initial energy investment is intact. Extending the warranty on that energy, giving it a second life, slowing the loop. The key concept. Football scarves are often synthetic acrylic or polyester - essentially plastic taking decades, sometimes centuries, to break down in a landfill.

Lisa Williams from Patagonia said, the most environmentally sustainable jacket is the one that's already in your closet. Powerful and simple. 45/51 is essentially taking that logic and extending it. It's saying, the most sustainable jacket is the one made from the scarf that was already in someone else's closet. On a environmentally and technically level the concept absolutely checks out. It's high-value upcycling, not low-value downcycling. But this brings up a massive challenge. The garment ontologies. Using second hand material - the designer is not imposing a design onto the material, they are responding to what the material already is. Biglan calls this process creating material inventories. Instead of a warehouse of identical fabric rolls, the 45/51 business model involves acquiring, sorting, and inventorying the material based on its qualities. This means looking through a pile of scarves and sorting them out, a huge extra load of work - but creatively, it's also a huge opportunity.

Object biography: Football scarves. football fans are tribal, they represents their team, their city, their memories, their identity. It's not just a piece of cloth. This is very interesting for the brand's value proposition. Through the concept of object biography. The idea that objects gather stories over time.

A mass-produced t-shirt from a fast fashion chain has no/little biography. It was made in a factory, shipped in a container, and bought on a rack. It is anonymous. It has no soul. But a second hand football scarf has seen things. In academic terms, this is refer to as emotional durability and topophilia - which usually refers to a love of a place like loving your hometown. But here it connects to the stadium, city, tribe. A football scarf is inherently charged with emotion and location. So when take that scarf and turn it into a jacket or a bag, it is not just selling a recycled product, it is selling memories, subculture and riot associations - a huge competitive advantage.

The global policy review regarding the EU shows a massive push from policy - this is forcing a change. The biggest one is the EPR, Extended Producer Responsibility. Brands will be financially responsible for the end-life of their clothes. They'll have to pay a fee for every single garment they put on the market, a fee that covers the cost of its eventual disposal. Waste is becoming a liability on the balance sheet, and that changes everything. A business like 4551, which literally exists to absorb waste and turn it into value, becomes a potential partner.

A waste management solution that looks like a fashion brand. Providing a service in line with the broader EU strategy for sustainable and circular textiles, which has the stated goal to take fast fashion out of fashion by 2030. France is leading the way with their anti-waste law, which actually bans the destruction of unsold goods. You can't just burn the unsold items anymore, you have to do something with them. And 45/51 could represent a solution in a growing industry change. The fact that the EU and other governments are legislating for this exact type of circularity proves that this isn't a niche concept, this is the direction for the entire continent.

How does 45/51 avoid being part of the problem? The challenge is to not just to sell a product, but to change the mindset of the wearer. The goal isn't just to replace one fast fashion jacket with one upcycled jacket, it's to shift the consumer from a disposable culture to a cherishing culture. It goes back to object biography. If you love the story of the product, if you know it was made from a collective you connect with - you keep it for 10 years. You repair it or re-redesign it. 45/51 is selling longevity, not just upcycling. How can 4551 be more than a brand? How could it be an education in value? This suggest that sustainability labels that emphasize efficiency and recycle work, but the story works better. The brand needs to communicate that by buying this, you are opting out of the fast fashion cycle. You are joining a different tribe, not just the football tribe, but the circular tribe, an underground culture of redirection.

Emotional attachment is a key factor in a garment’s lifespan because it creates what is known as emotional durability—the likelihood that a user will keep, value, and continue using a product over time rather than discarding it. While physical durability allows a garment to last materially, emotional durability determines whether it is worth keeping in the first place.

The impact of emotional attachment on a garment’s life cycle can be understood through several connected processes.

Preventing premature disposal
In today’s fashion system, many garments are discarded long before they are physically worn out. This is often driven by planned style obsolescence, where clothing loses its symbolic value as trends change.
Emotional attachment works as a counterforce to this process. When consumers form a strong connection to a garment, they are less likely to discard it simply because it is “out of fashion.” Disposing of clothing can be seen as the result of a weakened relationship between the owner and the object. A strong emotional bond helps maintain this relationship and significantly extends the garment’s period of use.

Memories, meaning, and identity
Clothing often functions as an extension of the wearer’s identity and can be understood as a form of “non-human kin.” Through use, garments become connected to personal memories and life events.
Items linked to specific places, people, or experiences—such as football scarves within this concept—tend to be kept even when they are no longer worn regularly. According to Donald Norman’s theory of emotional design, the deepest form of attachment occurs at the reflective level, where users engage with a garment’s symbolic meaning and the stories it represents. This type of attachment is more stable than aesthetic appeal and is crucial for long-term use.

Care, maintenance, and repair
Garments that hold emotional value are generally treated with greater care. Consumers are more likely to wash them gently, repair them when damaged, and store them properly. Repair and customization can further strengthen attachment by making a garment more personal and unique. Rather than reducing value, visible mending can increase emotional significance and lower the likelihood of disposal.

Environmental benefits of longer use
Extending the lifespan of clothing is widely recognized as one of the most effective ways to reduce fashion’s environmental impact. Increasing a garment’s use by just three months can reduce its carbon, water, and waste footprint by 5–10 percent. Emotional attachment supports a shift away from frequent consumption of low-cost fast fashion toward fewer, higher-quality garments designed to be used and valued over time.

By incorporating storytelling, memory, and cultural meaning into design, fashion can create garments that outlive changing trends and become lasting parts of the wearer’s wardrobe.

Alongside its environmental impact, the fashion industry is marked by severe social inequalities. Many garment factories—particularly in low- and middle-income countries—operate under poor safety conditions. Tragic events such as the Rana Plaza collapse in Bangladesh in 2013, which killed more than 1,100 workers, exposed the life-threatening risks faced by garment workers on a daily basis.

Low wages remain a persistent issue, with many workers earning far below a living wage. Child labor continues to occur both in garment manufacturing and in raw material production, such as cotton harvesting. Forced labor has also been documented in specific regions, most notably in Xinjiang, China.

Gender inequality is deeply embedded in the industry. In countries such as Bangladesh, over 90 percent of garment workers are women, many from rural backgrounds. These workers often face lower wages than men, limited opportunities for advancement, and exposure to verbal or physical harassment. In addition, many workers lack basic labor rights, including the right to unionize, reasonable working hours, and formal employment contracts. Shifts of up to 16 hours are not uncommon.

Systemic drivers
The sources identify the fast fashion model as a central driver of these escalating problems. This model is built on continuous growth, extremely rapid production cycles—sometimes up to 20 collections per year—and low prices that encourage overconsumption and a disposable mindset. As a result, overproduction is widespread: approximately 25 percent of all garments produced are never sold. This highlights the fundamental inefficiency and unsustainability of the current system.

Learning from history and reflections while working on this project

(If you dont know what to read - read this part)

The frantic energy of the fashion industry. It is a race, not the fun kind. It's this desperate high-speed sprint to produce newness at a scale that is frankly terrifying. An industry that is responsible for up to 10% of global CO2 emissions. It's the second largest consumer of water on the planet. And yet the entire economic engine relies on us to get bored of what we're wearing right now and buying something else immediately.

We all know fast fashion is a problem. But clothing, clothes, in itself is not that. Most of human history, clothing was not an environmental catastrophe. It was slow. Very slow, and biodegradable. Looking at indigenous societies or, pre-industrial civilizations, clothing was made from natural fibers, small scale, it had minimal footprint. The shift, the moment the graph goes vertical is the Industrial Revolution. 1742, is the establishment of the first cotton mills in England. And then 1851, the Singer sewing patent. This created the capacity for volume. Suddenly, the priority shifts from durability and protection to speed and profit. And what strikes me is that we spent the next century and a half stepping on the gas. It wasn't until 1987 that we even got a formal definition of sustainable development. That is a massive gap where we were just flying completely blind. And in that blind spot, we completely changed the materials we use. We went from relying on the surface of the earth, cotton, wool, linen, to relying on extraction from below the earth. Synthetics.

I grew up thinking fleece was the ultimate eco-hack. You take a plastic bottle, you melt it down, you get a warm jacket. When Malden Mills, which later became Polartec, introduced fleece in 1981, it was revolutionary. It was lightweight, it didn't smell like wet sheep when it rained. And it was a vegan alternative to wool. But unfortunately its a dark story - t’s not just that it's plastic, it's what it does in the wash.

The microplastic issue. Every single time you wash a synthetic fleece jacket, it sheds fibers. Up to 250,000 synthetic fibers per wash. And these are things you can't see, but they pass right through wastewater treatment filters and hit straight for the ocean. These fibers are oleophilic. They love oil. So they act like little magnets. Little magnets for other pollutants like pesticides or industrial runoff. They bind with toxins, then plankton eat the fibers, fish eat the plankton and eventually we eat the fish. So we're effectively creating a delivery system for concentrated toxins using our jackets as the vehicle. Which is a heavy trade-off for a piece of clothing we might wear for what, two seasons.

Now, contrasting that with the material fleece was designed to replace, wool. Wool is functionally the opposite of all this. It's all about the carbon cycle. Wool is 50% carbon, but that carbon comes from the atmosphere through the grass the sheep eats. When the sheep grows the wool, it's sequestering carbon. And then at the end of its life - because it's a protein keratin - it just decomposes. It returns that carbon to the soil. The Merino was basically a state secret in Spain until 1789. They had a total monopoly on fine wool. Then King Charles IV gifts six of them to the Dutch Republic. They move to the Cape of Good Hope, and eventually, this entrepreneur, John MacArthur, takes them to Australia. That one genetic lineage is why Australia dominates the wool market today. It's a 200-year-old economic strategy. Kara-kul sheeps in Uzbekistan where raised there since 1400 BC. These are systems that have worked for millennia without creating a toxic waste crisis.

Speaking of ancient systems - the biblical prohibition in Leviticus and Deuteronomy. The shaatnez prohibition says Thou shalt not wear a garment of diverse sorts, as of wool and linen together. For a long time, I thought that was just a arbitrary religious rule. But looking at modern recycling technology, it feels almost prophetic. It's a chemical nightmare. It's one of the biggest reasons we can't recycle clothes. Because we blend everything. If you have a shirt that's 60% cotton and 40% polyester, you have two materials that need totally different recycling processes. You can't melt the cotton, and you can't compost the polyester. Then the whole garment usually ends up in a landfill. Which leads us right to the scale of that landfill problem.

We are hypocrites.

Studies show that consumers overwhelmingly identify as green. We tell surveyors we care about the planet. Of course we do. But when we're standing in a store or scrolling Instagram, that intention just evaporates. We prioritize price, style, and the dopamine hit of newness over sustainability. Mostly controlled by habit. And that brings us right back to the laundry. We mentioned that the maintenance phase is a disaster. The research indicates that for many garments, the energy and water used to wash and dry them over their lifetime exceeds the energy used to make them in the first place. Because we wash things that aren't dirty. We have this cultural obsession with hygiene that's morphed into a fear of wearing things twice. There was an experiment; the no-wash sweatshirt by Earlyn Fletcher. They designed a shirt to be worn for six months without washing. It wasn't just a regular cotton shirt. They designed it with wipe-clean surfaces in the splash zones. They put loose weaves and vents in the underarms for airflow. The point was to design a garment that doesn't require the washing machine. Stella McCartney and H&M also pushed this with labels, telling people to wash less, at lower temps, and Hype Denim, which has a no-wash club for people who wear their raw denim for months to get unique fade patterns. Turning not washing your clothes into a status symbol.

The other lost case is fixing. We just don't fix things anymore. We've lost the skill set. Data shows most consumers can't sew a button. It's cheaper to buy a new one than to pay someone to fix a zipper. That's the economic reality. But there are attempts to bridge this. The most powerful change is psychological. Emotional longevity. It's the idea that if you actually care about the item, you'll keep it alive. Right. If you have a real connection to a garment, the wear and tear becomes part of its story, not a defect - as Ive touched on earlier. That cheap top is a disposable wrapper. The 20-year-old shirt is a possession. The most radical example of this in the notes was Sheena Matheiken's Uniform Project. This was a brilliant piece of performance art. She wore the exact same black dress for 365 days straight. She would accessorize it differently, wear it backwards, add layers, but the base garment was always identical. It totally dismantles the idea that we need constant variety to be fashionable. It forces you to be creative rather than just consumptive.

We're moving from a linear model to a circular one, but technology like recycling polyester, it's not silver bullet. We can't just innovate our way out of this with better machines if we keep consuming at this rate. We have to actually change our relationship with the object.

Try to internalized the fact that your plastic fleece jacket will outlive you and your grandchildren, sitting in a landfill for 500 years, how would that change what you buy tomorrow?

THE DRESS

Here is a refined and academically fluent English version, while still keeping the design-oriented tone:

The dress is made from reclaimed materials that would otherwise have ended up in landfill, non-biodegradable due to their acrylic and plastic fiber content.

Because of its material composition, the garment is extremely stretchy and can be worn by bodies of many shapes and sizes.

The sides are constructed as a design feature inspired by shoelaces, using repurposed ice hockey laces — notably long and themselves reclaimed materials.

Through this construction, the dress becomes size-inclusive and adaptable. It is assembled in such a way that it can be reversed and worn with the opposite side facing front. When turned inside out, it transforms into a red dress, owing to the red compositions of the football scarves incorporated into the design. In this way, the garment is versatile, capable of being worn in multiple ways and by multiple people.

This represents only one possible technique that may contribute to more sustainable practices. A perfect model has yet to be developed, but solutions must emerge in multiple forms, across different levels, and through the efforts of many actors. This is a contribution — one among many — toward rethinking material use and design responsibility.

A project conceptualized, developed, and completed by Anniken Øvrebø

Innovative Textile Recycling And Upcycling Technologies For a Critical and Circular Design Practice: From Stadium to Body