AWAYTOMARS the world’s first 100% user-created fashion brand presented their AW19 collection at Lisbon fashion Week.
Sustainability has always been one of the central principles of AWAYTOMARS. From the creation process, which incorporates a diverse network of creative talents, to their use of technology to predict consumer demand and avoid over-production. The brand’s mission is to think of creativity as something renewed, rather than wasteful.
This season, the collection, named Collection Zero explores the Japanese concept of mottainai – a sense of regret over waste, and not wasting what is valuable. It was developed not through production but instead by re-thinking, re-designing and re-cycling pieces discarded by their former owners. It was co-created using clothes sent by customers and members of the AWAYTOMARS community. This way the designers were forced to find new ways to design and work with new techniques.
The AWAYTOMARS community is connecting between the pieces by drawing on influences such as the Brazilian outsider artist Bispo do Rosário and the Italian-Brazilian modernist architect Lina Bo Bardi, using paints and dyes as linking motifs.
Where items have arrived damaged, they used a mixture of traditional and cutting-edge technologies to reconstruct them, including recycled balls of wool and heat-applied tape from Framis Italia. The result was a relativity between the new and the used in a collection of re-imagined pieces, each one containing a plethora of hidden stories.
