The brand turning DIY fashion into a cookbook ADIFF wants to make the fashion industry more ethic and accessible for all
"While attending Parsons, my professors always said that if you were a good designer, chances are you’re also a good cook. We started thinking more about the similarities between the fashion industry and the food industry during our quarantine time. When you put the two side-by-side, it’s interesting to see how much they overlap: fast fashion parallelling fast food, contemporary fashion similar to restaurants, and high fashion with Michelin star cuisine. However, at the end of the day, the cheapest and healthiest option is to buy the groceries and cook for yourself when it comes to food. Like fashion, the cheapest, most ethical, and most sustainable option would be to learn how to make the garments for yourself. The main hangup is: most people know how to cook, but the craft of creating and caring for your own garments has been lost."
Mixing and matching the wardrobe pieces for a complete look at times resonates with a recipe. Angela Luna and Loulwa Al Saad, the co-founders of ADIFF, an initiative that promotes upcycling, and social justice, have already designed a ‘cookbook’ that gives away clothing patterns for those who want to redesign their existing clothes. The ingredients of the Open Source Fashion Cookbook are a snack pocket, blanket jacket, even a bucket hat realized from a broken umbrella, and other patterns that can be assembled into a unique piece at the end. By giving freedom to the book’s reader to design a piece of cloth, ADIFF also promotes the importance of sustainability and suggests an alternative to those who cannot afford to purchase new garments. With the rising interest in sustainability, can literature and step-by-step educational schemes become an accelerator towards solving the current critical situation in regards to waste generated by the fashion industry?
Fashion systems might fall into a cookbook in the near future, where it’s not the brands who set the trends but individuals suggesting their own. Doing from scratch gives the freedom of expression and techniques acquired throughout the process, and hence, makes DIY participants resilient towards the mass markets and fast fashion, in specific. Starting from assembling home items from IKEA, followed by old-jeans/new-shorts, there lies a number of possibilities to re-imagining and re-creating worn-out pieces into fresh and practical designs. Upcycling is not a newly emerged term but a process that has been exercised by our grand-grandparents, but it is in the current period that its scale bears more importance. According to the Business Research Company’s report - Ethical Fashion Market Global Report 2020-30-, every second a truckload of clothes is being sent either to landfills or burned, making fashion one of the most polluted and waste generating industries. The sustainable market is expected to grow to $9.81 billion in 2025 as opposed to $6.35 billion in 2019. Meanwhile, considering the aftereffect of the pandemic which led to €140 billion to €160 billion worth of excess inventory from Spring/Summer 2020 collections, the mindset shift from fast to ethical is right around the corner.
"The industry (fashion) is connected on the surface to these global issues, but not in product, mission, or system. It’s also sad and ironic to see how most garment workers from POC communities are the ones being most affected by climate change and other environmental and human rights issues which the fashion industry further contributes to when in reality, those communities are the ones who practised sustainability long before it was rebranded and became a marketing buzzword in the western world,” states Angela Luna.
