MODULAR CLOTHING - What is it? Why don't we see it around more often?

Today I thought I might research a little further into "modular" clothing. The concept of Modular clothing is that each piece is able to be worn in multiple ways and parts of it can possibly be able to be replaced, extending the life of the garment. I started my research with a good old trusty google search for "Modular clothing."

One of the first hits that popped up was a Gothamist.com article about the fashion designer Sandra Garrett. Garrett was a fashion designer that shot to fame when she cracked onto an ingenious fashion idea of tubular, knitted clothing, similar to the concepts that Make/Use have based their designs on.

According to the above article, Garrett had a messy legal battle with JC Penny in the mid 1980's, and the brand slowly receded from the spotlight after this point, however kept producing clothing. She went fully organic from 1992, and has kept her manufacturing in America, citing, "the Third World does not exist to be exploited as a cheap labor pool."

The idea is absolutely incredible, and intrigued, I checked out her website, only to be bitterly disappointed. It is possibly one of the strangest websites I have come across. I'm not quite sure if you can even buy anything from it, and I spent about 5 minutes trying to find images of the clothing and couldn't find anything.

The above image is apparently a list of the colours that the clothing comes in...

The next hit was a kickstarter page by L.A designer Sabrina Sigismondi. The small brand us called UDU, and the flagship piece is a sweatshirt,come t-shirt, come hoodie, come tank top, coming in 4 colours and boasting of "360 unique creations."

The idea is fantastic, and while I love the idea behind it, the connections of the jumper/T-shirt (the Shoe-lace/eyelet connection) seem like an in-elegant solution. This could be the Wellingtonian in me but I'm slightly terrified of the idea of different colored sleeves! This brand is based in L.A so there is probably a very different market to here in New Zealand - good on her for having such excellent success on Kickstarter though!

The next site in this search was Make/Use, which make me very proud of Massey University! Despite this, I was feeling like I hadn't really found anything commercially successful. I then came across a thesis from a designer called Mario Cadenas called Reform. This has been incredible reading, which I will update on in the next few posts, but I believe it will have a substantial influence on the way I view this project. One of the things he points out is,

" So far transformable products have been exiguously available on the fashion market. This may partly be due to the fact that transformable garments require much more time and consideration during the design phase than that of non-transformable garments. Another reason may be economical. From a business perspective, transformable products tend to render other products obsolete, which reduces consumption and potential revenue for companies (Karell, 2014). These contributing factors may very well explain the lack of visability and availability of transformable garments on the fashion market to date."

Check out Cadenas video of the garments he made at the end of his thesis below. Amazing work!