Re-Imagining Garment Cutting Waste: Fashion Hacking, Zero-Waste, and the Power of Negative Spaces

This contribution aims to explore the implementation of the zero-waste design approach in fashion, with a specific focus on the offcuts from the cutting stage, here defined as “negative spaces” of both the pattern and the cut garment. The main scope and priority of this study is to find new use for existing and ongoing cutting waste from industry and, at the same time, is on how design can change approaches in cutting to begin with. The goal is to investigate a new perspective that considers the textile waste generated during the cutting stage as “negative spaces” – “containers” (Torres, 2024) rich in value and meaning – which, instead of being discarded, can be transformed into new textile products for the fashion industry or related sectors. In this context, the designer becomes a “transmuter” of waste, permeating it with economic, social, cultural, and productive value through hacking operations within the design process. Waste material is thus interpreted with a different sensitivity, allowing us to discern “the various visible and invisible components of the cosmos” and to reshape and revalue “the remnants of something we no longer need or want in our lives” (Binotto & Payne, 2016, p.6).