Heritage Lace Shirts

Earley’s four Heritage Lace Shirts employ approaches to the redesign of polyester shirts that contributed to the development by Earley et.al. of TED’s TEN. TED’s TEN is a set of principles for sustainable design. In material terms polyester shirts can last 200 years. In fashion terms, they may only last up to six months. Polyester is 50% of global fibre production – the volumes of waste at stake are therefore huge.

The Heritage Lace Shirts are overprinted using a damaged antique lace shirt as a stencil, imbuing the second hand garment with an increased visual and aesthetic value by referencing the detailed qualities of the lace. Earley’s ‘exhaust printing’ process (Dupree, 2012) ensures that a single dye application of disperse dye, applied to recycled paper, is used to create a gradually fading series of prints onto shirts using one set of materials. The chemicals and water needed for a single shirt are here making four.

The shirts were presented at the ‘Upcycling Textiles’ symposium, 2008. The transcription was published in The Textile Reader (Hemmings, 2012). Two of the shirts were exhibited in ‘Evolution/Revolution’ (2008), Museum of Art, RISD USA. Designers in the exhibition included Eley Kishimoto, Shelley Fox, Sophie Roet, and Alabama Chanin. The museum acquired the shirts, and some went on to be shown in ‘Taking Time: Craft and the Slow Revolution’ (2009-11), a Craftspace exhibition, which opened at Birmingham Museum. Craftspace funded the project’s website, www.upcyclingtextiles.net (2009), which records the making of the shirts. The exhibition toured to 8 UK venues and recorded 113,912 visitors in the Arts Council report. Earley presented the work at ‘MADE’, Institute of Mining and Materials, Royal Academy of Engineering, London, 2008, and the conference ‘Towards Sustainability in the Fashion/Textiles Industry’, KEA Copenhagen, 2011.

• http://www.upcyclingtextiles.net/docs/07...