2023 M/FW Underground Runway x Collarts was a voluntary project for Collarts students to create accessories for the show. This accessory project required us to design a sustainability ethos, Collarts’ mantra. The materials used by us students included dead stock and preexisting materials that were found at Collarts or in our homes. For this project, I was assigned to design legwarmers for the show.

Inspired by the race wear aesthetic of the runway show I knew I wanted to work with denim as a fabric base. I wanted to showcase the beauty of the wrong and right sides of denim which- if manipulated in a certain way can be dramatic and grungy. The rigidity and raw textures that denim, as a fabric encapsulates, were in line with the design brief.

Both leg warmers I created for the show opened and styled for Jam the Label an Australian adaptive clothing brand created for people with disabilities for their Capsule 01 collection.

Inspired by Zero Waste Daniel, (ZWD) ReRoll technique, the base of both leg warmers involved creating a completely new sheet of fabric out of denim scraps I found at COLLARTS (Look 2) or out of pre-loved jeans (Look 1). I created a sheet that had a trapezoid shape to create a flared silhouette. To maximise the texture I ensured to fray and distress all of the raw edges

Nothing could describe the emotion I felt seeing my work on a runway for the first time.

LOOK 1

For Look 1, I used 2 pairs of denim jeans. I cut both of the jeans into short to keep the garments’ functionality and used the lower panels to create the legwarmers. I cut the panels into long strips and sewed them wrong sides together to create a distressed texture that resembles tree bark.

Look 2 of this project was creatively challenging as this was my first time playing with patchwork to create a sheet of fabric out of the scraps I had. Some areas involved patchworking small and intricate pieces creating complex patterns throughout the leg panel.

Both legwarmers were equally as rewarding as they were fun to make.