Micro Week 1

Material value

Week 1 of 6

Team

Design a way for textile waste to reveal its hidden value. Textiles are subject to complex processes of production, use, and disposal. Across various sectors such as fashion, hospitality, and entertainment, huge volumes of textiles are discarded, often before they have fulfilled their purpose. These include textiles such as offcuts, excess stock, worn linens, fabrics used in the entertainment industry, and textiles that have become damaged.

Project partner: FibreLab

Luis Winkelbrandt
Shuairuge Shu
Molly Wensley
Mohammed Maheen
Vanashree Chowdhury
Niki Marathia
Merrin O'Connor
Jaime Santos Guerrero
Yihan Zhong

The brief

Figure 1. Reading the brief

Figure 2. Reading the brief

We were required to choose a textile waste industry between fashion, hospitality, and entertainment. To determine our main areas of interest, we placed a dot in a relevant circle and explained why (fig. 3). We didn’t make a final decision at this stage, but fashion and hospitality emerged as our main areas of interest.

On our first day, we projected our brief on the wall and read it line by line, making note of anything that stood out. One thing that came up was the need to define key terms to establish a common understanding of their meaning. We turned to Oxford English dicitionary for:

Hide [verb]

Value [noun]

Figure 3. Dot activity

Literature review

Appadurai’s The Social Life of Things (1986) was one of the works that influenced our thinking throughout the project. In the book, we encountered sociologist Georg Simmel whose writings placed the value of commodities not in the objects themselves, but in how desirable they are deemed by society. Our theme ‘how an object is perceived is flexible and socially constructed’ was largely extracted from this work (fig. 7).

We also became interested in the relationships between objects and humans, described as deeply entwined in Jane Bennett's (2010) Vibrant Matter. The book inspired us to explore what those relationships might be between humans and the discarded textiles that once enveloped them.

Figure 4. Literature review table

Figure 5. Searching for themes via affinity diagramming

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Figure 6. Literature review themes 1/3

Figure 7. Literature review themes 2/3

Figure 8. Literature review themes 3/3

Practice review

The installation Atrabiliarios (1993) was the work that stood out to me the most out of our practice review. Worn shoes that belonged to women who disappeared during political violence in Colombia are placed inside a wall and covered in a cloudy material made from animal fibre (fig. 9).

It prompted us to discuss how shoes carry stories of where people have been, and how they are a physical evidence of past existence. I liked how it showed that some everyday items are actually deeply personal belongings that can be transformed into memorial objects.

Figure 9. Salcedo, D. (1993) Atrabiliarios. Photo: Patrizia Tocci. © Doris Salcedo; © White Cube. Available at: https://www.whitecube.com/salon/doris-salcedo (Accessed: 23 May 2026).

Figure 10. The rest of our practice review

OOTD

We arranged a visit to our partner’s studio for the following week, which we felt would help us decide on a textile waste industry between fashion, hospitality, and entertainment. Anticipating this, we wanted to start searching for a hidden value that may emerge from textiles. That’s how we decided to do an outfit of the day exercise, where we photographed our outfits so we could analyse them.

Feedback

Following a discussion with our tutors during this week’s tabletop presentation, we finally decided to do an in-depth analysis of one outfit rather than analyse all but stay on the surface level. We chose Jaime’s for this purpose (fig. 11), where we asked him questions about where his clothes came from and his feelings towards them.

Figure 11. Screen recording Jaime’s outfit analysis in real time

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Figure 12. Grouping takeaways from the outfit analysis 1/2

Figure 13. Grouping takeaways from the outfit analysis 2/2

Figure 14. Some of the journeys we traced on Jaime’s garments

Vanashree synthesised the insights we gained from this exercise with findings from our literature review and a clothes swap we did later in our process. Her work surfaced that a garment’s usability, appearance and cleanness all contribute to how themselves the person wearing that garment feels. We didn’t quite know it in week 1, but identity would be become important to our project in the coming weeks, and I think here is where we started laying the foundations.

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Figure 15. Synthesis 1/2

Figure 16. Synthesis 2/2

Sources

Appadurai, A. (1986) The Social Life of Things: Commodities in Cultural Perspective. Cambridge University Press.

Bennett, J. (2010) Vibrant Matter: A Political Ecology of Things. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.

Oxford University Press (no date) 'Hide' in Oxford English Dictionary. Available at: https://doi.org/10.1093/OED/1142408324 (Accessed: 23 May 2026).

Oxford University Press (no date) 'Value' in Oxford English Dictionary. Available at: https://doi.org/10.1093/OED/5277092424 (Accessed: 23 May 2026).

White Cube (2026) Doris Salcedo: Atrabiliarios. Available at: https://www.whitecube.com/salon/doris-salcedo (Accessed: 23 May 2026).