PLASTIC? FANTASTIC!

Great design comes from making connections, taking advantage of the opportunities afforded by new technology and applying those opportunities to problems in a creative and often unexpected way.

Issey Miyake is a great designer. His work consistently challenges existing paradigms and crosses boundaries between disciplines. His work demonstrates that in reality, there are no boundaries, that inspiration can be found everywhere.

So what do plastic bottles and high fashion have in common?

Most plastics in use today are made using petrochemicals, which in turn are made from petroleum, which in turn is made from crude oil, a finite and irreplaceable resource.

Billions of plastic containers are used and discarded every year, most go to landfill where they will remain intact for millennia. The plastics they are made from are virtually indestructible, the archeological artifacts that define the late twentieth and early twenty first centuries will largely be made from petrochemical based plastics.

Someone once said, it may have been Plato, I don’t know, I wasn’t there, that ‘necessity is the mother of invention’. The need to recycle plastics is one necessity which has given rise to a number of interesting innovations.

Plastics are, by their nature, malleable. Plastics can be formed into almost anything you can imagine, including yarn to manufacture fabrics. Many synthetic fabrics are themselves made from petrochemicals so a fabric which is itself made from recycled plastic results in a double saving in material resources. 

Miyake’s 132 5 clothing collection is made from chemically recycled polyester offcuts and bottles which are transformed into a new polyester fibre. The results are stunning. The pieces are presented as flat, almost origami like artifacts, highly apt given Miyake’s Japanese heritage, which take on the three dimensional shape of the garment as they are unfolded. The precise positions of the pleats and folds necessary to create the desired shape are determined by another innovation, an experimental computer program developed to create complex three dimensional shapes from a flat piece of paper.

A gifted and visionary designer has taken an emerging material technology and spent four years refining it. Combining the resulting process with a hitherto experimental piece of software designed for theoretical research enabled the creation of something refreshingly exciting and new.

Haute couture made from recycled plastic bottles? Absolutely fabulous!

Peter Symes, Structural Design Director

Thanks for the pictures : www.slowandsteadywinstherace.com, www.beautyandthedirt.com, www.shdnsm.com