Reversed Crafting

Reversed Crafting is an inquiry that aims to investigate alternative methods of form giving and manufacturing and their aesthetic consequence for dress. It is a practice-led venture that explores alternative materials and mediums through digital and analogue tools, rethinking what dress can be if not relying on currently dominant processes of form-giving and production. Its context is the interdependent relationship of cut and assemble as a method for artistic practice and as a system for manufacturing. Historically developed as a method and a craftsmanship for bespoke, on-demand production, cut and assemble is regarded by many as unsuited for industrial manufacturing, often directed by a high turnaround capitalist system. As an industry it is often described as unsustainable, both in regards to environmental and social challenges. Currently, the field is experiencing an influx of 3D digital tools, both directed at final production and form giving. Often arguing a democratisation of both design and manufacturing, the integration of 3D digital tools to the field are highly anticipated. However, commonly migrated from other disciplines, these methods are often merged with cut and assemble, rather than investigated as holistic and real alternatives. In relation to digital manufacturing, the perceived absence of suitable materials for the final artefact is far more debated then what to produce when these materials inevitably become ready at hand. Arguably, these methods of digital manufacturing, the technical how, has a plethora of real or speculated solutions. Nevertheless, the question of what, through an aesthetic reasoning, these techniques can suggest or enable as examples of dress are often less considered. Therefore, the work presented in this licenciate wish to speculate on aesthetic consequences of dress through physical investigations neither commencing, nor ending with the cut and assemble of textile on roll. It proposes the notion of reversed crafting as a way of thinking in order to facilitate the making of dress in a future system where craft knowledge is foremost required at the initial stages of interpreting and developing what is being produced rather than at the actual stage of production