Is it possible to create fashion out of dialysis hoses and broken fishing nets?
Personal story told through collection
Fashion student Christina Leube has used inoperable dialysis hoses that are inside clad with gold wire and built into her clothes to tell a personal story about identity and what happens to it when something unforeseen happens.
Whether you like it or not, life intertwines and becomes part of your identity. My mother has been on dialysis for years, which means that she has had to be dialysised in hospital three times a week, four hours at a time. Her whole life has changed, but my own identity has also been affected by her illness," says Christina.
Most people in our time are working to strengthen their identity. They strive to show off whether it's on social media or in the city. But suddenly not being able to control one's fate and how it affects became an exciting starting point.
Symbolic materials and details
In addition to the dialysis hoses, leather plays an important role in the collection and should symbolize the body and identity in which we are born, while colored multi-layered chiffon fabric should symbolize all layers that help shape one's identity. An important detail is magnifications of her own fingerprints applied to the garments and thus literally testifying about herself.
The patients and also the staff in her mother's ward at the hospital have followed how the project has developed.
"They have been very positive about it and look forward to seeing the end result. Using the hoses in this context has also made me look at them with new eyes, as something beautiful instead of just associating them with the disease.
Boardwalk awakened climate panic
For fashion student Yanis Dorey, it was instead a boardwalk in France this summer that became the entrance to a dystopian collection about the radical shift we must make to meet the climate challenges of the future. "Hundreds of pieces of plastic from fishing nets were scattered all over the beach," he said. It was full of people sunbathing and bathing, but it was as if no one saw the plastic debris constantly washed up with the waves. I started collecting the pieces and pretty soon got a whole bag together," says Yanis Dorey.
Since he started working on the collection, he has found out that 46% of all plastic in the sea comes from broken fishing nets and that the sight he encountered on the beach in France occurs on all beaches there.
"We see and hear all the time about everything that is bad for the environment, but we don't do anything about it because we don't want to give up our everyday luxury. I wanted to highlight that in my collection. Luxury materials like silk have been turned into junk by destroying it in various ways. And the debris, i.e. the pieces from the broken fishing nets, has been fused together and made beautiful and luxurious. The challenge has been to really create a harsh and brutal feeling, not to treat the material too "kindly". I want people to react!
Three looks representing each stage of a climate disaster
The collection consists of three looks. The first takes inspiration from men's tailoring and classic fisherman's trousers and represents our current behaviour – we know that our lifestyle harms the climate but we do nothing about it. In the second look, our behavior has created a climate catastrophe and we have completely lost control. The final look is about how we can survive and protect ourselves from the nightmare of the previous look, picking up its silhouette from fishermen's rain jackets.
"It has been very exciting to test new materials and techniques in this course. I was particularly interested in the patination in which we had a workshop. The craft itself has always been important to me and there are a lot of rules about how to do it. In the workshop, I learned to combine the rules with a more free creation, e.g. that I worked a lot to destroy what was nice and turn it into garbage.
