This designer's answer to fast fashion? Clothes that fight air pollution. Meet Roya Aghighi, who wants us to rethink our wardrobe...
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CreativityTranscript
00:00They simply close your eyes right now and think of what you're wearing is a lie.
00:13Immediately would change the way how you're reacting to your clothes, right?
00:19Clothing used to be precious. It used to have a lot of sentimental value into it,
00:24but they're all gone right now, right? It's considered as something disposable these days.
00:29So we just constantly buy, consume, dispose.
00:47Coming from Tehran, which the air pollution gets to its hazardous levels most times,
00:55that you can actually taste the air in your throat. I wanted to do something about all of
01:00that. So I started to think about what if clothes were alive and what if they could photosynthesize?
01:07These clothes are going to start with no color. And as time goes by, they start growing these
01:14beautiful green patches and sort of a full growth cycle where the whole garment is green.
01:21And after this life cycle or by the end of it, they start losing the colors.
01:26So that's how you know what to do, when to do it. It's basically algae,
01:32which is an abundant material in the nature. Spun with biodegradable fibers. So it's a textile,
01:40but the fibers or the threads are already infused with algae within it.
01:54Basically, the life cycle of this clothing absolutely depends on how it's taken care of.
02:00For something that we think is going to last a month, if you take better care of it,
02:04if you provide it with what exactly is necessary, it may last even longer, right?
02:09So that depends on the care that it's receiving. And that's the whole point for
02:14me in this project, exactly, because I want people to figure that out for themselves.
02:18I don't want this to be considered as a new innovative material that's going to solve the
02:23fashion problem. I want this to be a conversation starter, a habit changer, a tool for all those
02:31alternative worlds that can happen, right?
02:50As a part of my goal, it was not necessarily to mass manufacture this type of material
02:58to the world, right? I wanted it to be a piece, a project that can work as a pathway for other
03:05designers to shape new realities and explore different ways or modes of being and thinking
03:12versus just another material to the world. There are many practices that are trying to actually
03:17do something, but that's like after the fact, upcycling, recycling, repurposing. They're great.
03:22Those are amazing practices that help raise the awareness to come from five years ago in
03:28terms of sustainability and encourage young generations to buy better materials that are
03:35good for the environment, eco-friendly, introduce all those meanings to the world, but they're not
03:40going to be effective alone. So I aim for this to push the fashion industry and textile industry
03:47to a different way and get them to think about other ways of manufacturing and producing
03:55that doesn't need to consume a lot of energy, labor, wasteful materials, and all of that.