‘Making Kin’ in Fashion Design. From Agri-food Waste to Sustainable Materials in Italy

This contribution explores the unique combinations and interdependencies that emerge in current fashion design in Italy. The paper focuses on the encounter between technology and biology to experiment with textiles and materials for the fashion industry. The theoretical framework draws on Donna Haraway’s concepts of making kin as generating new collaborations and staying with the trouble. It brings these concepts together with Tony Fry’s definition of futuring and Alice Payne’s fashion futuring. We applied these ideas to the analysis of four Italian case studies illustrating how four companies use agri-food waste: Orange Fiber from citrus, Grado Zero Innovation from fungi, Frumat from apples, the latter used by Womsh for the production of sneakers. Building new relationships between humans and nonhumans, in this case between companies, agri-food processing waste, new materials, and consumers represent a possibility to work towards a more sustainable future starting from the dynamics of the present. The paper presents findings on redirective practices as a way to stay with the trouble from initial research on fashion, and reports on new alliances and collaborations between people, business, waste, territory, technology and biology.