Welcome to our school Project, Fashion and the Environment

We founded repairwhatyouwear.com to provide a free resource to teach mending skills and behind this was our desire to support education. Finally we have our new Fashion and the Environment project for schools ready and you can access the supporting resources and the match to your UK curriculum below. Having worked in industry for over 20 years and education for 15, I have a passion for textiles and clothing, and knowledge that needs passing on. This last year has taught us even more about the environmental impact of fashion. It is vital that young people know more about their clothing and have the skills and knowledge to make informed choices because it affects the climate and social challenges ahead of them. With this in mind, the project is based on repurposing an existing garment, learning more about fashion and the environment, more about the major fibres used in clothing (Cotton and Synthetics) and core hand skills that can also be used for mending

Everything is in Word format so you can alter as you wish. If you want to do additional or alternative interpretations the following might work, within the same basic brief:

• Redesign jeans or jeans jackets to include visible mending/decorations/expressive experiments. It is important to note that many jeans now contain 3-5% elastane which is synthetic and fundamentally plastic.
• Use pre-loved cotton materials to make a finished item and incorporate hand skills, buttons, visible mending and manipulated polyester as part of the design. Shortly, we will be adding a list of waste free patterns. An estimated 35% of fabric is wasted in the manufacturing process.
  To really see how garments work in landfill – why not bury some jeans with elastane in them and monitor over a year? Plenty to report on after that and really visual too.

If you want to informed about material updates, or created additional materials you want to share with us, please email repairwhatyouwear@gmail.com

We hope you enjoy and use what we have prepared.