Anita Hirlekar
Icelandic designer Anita Hirlekar creates a poetic but modern collection through hand crafted fabrics and traditional nuno felting.
Worn Again
Dana Cohen is the name behind Worn Again, an innovative and design driven collection made from upcycled textiles. Cohen transforms old garments into new one-of-a-kind designs, showing that something of beauty can be created from something discarded. Her collection beautifully features the knitted garments that went into the making of the new design, mostly knits with bold bright colorations such a Argyles and stripes, classic sweater shapes disintegrate into felted and woven deconstruction of pure shredded fibers. Transitioning from the conservative and understated to the avant-garde in a single design, the silhouettes also transform from fluid and form fitting to sculptural and architectural in nature. Shredded and felted fibers have a fresh brilliance that brings each piece to life completely recontextualizing waste as valuable resource in the process.
A graduate of Shankar College of Engineering and Design, Cohen first came up with the idea for her collection during a study abroad at the Amsterdam Fashion Institute, where she was looking for ways to create from existing materials. After realizing the scale of unused textiles in her studio, she decided she wanted to challenge the perception of recycled products as unattractive. Cohen understood through the process that she touched people’s past, as she turned it into a future. Originally inspired by a Jackson Pollock painting, she decided that each color combination would reference one of his paintings, leading to the abstract nature of the finished patterns.
Winning the Fini Leitersdorf Excellence Award for Creativity and Originality in Fashion, and the Rozen Award for Design and Sustainable Technologies for 2015, Cohen is now focused on how she can take her bespoke concept to scale, as she works to find ways in which recycled textile waste could be incorporated into mass production. Considering around 17,000 tons of textiles are thrown away each year in Israel alone (according to Adam Teva V’Din), the recontextualization of waste as resource, could go a long way to easing the enormous burden the fashion industry places on the ecology of our planet.
According to Cohen, “I found a way to create a new cycle of life to used knits by shredding them and using them to create new textiles. I like the idea that the unique color of the recycled textiles consist of many different knits, each with their own history. By knitting new knits and integrating them in the new fabric, I could illustrate the transformation from old to new.” The “Worn Again” collection is not only about transforming old and knits into new, unique pieces; Cohen’s work also represents the influence of our past on our present. “Each garment symbolizes the possibility of creating beauty out of something we thought had already ended”. You can see some of Dana’s work in the material library of the Design Museum Holon.
More Info: http://shenkarfashion2015.com/Dana-Cohen
