Re-Imagining Garment Cutting Waste though the Power of Negative Spaces

The fashion industry generates a substantial amount of textile waste, accounting for 10–15% of the total fabric used solely during the garment cutting stage (Rissanen, 2007). These offcuts, typically seen as useless residues, can be reimagined as valuable resources for creating new products by combining Otto von Busch’s 2014 theory of fashion hacking with the zero-waste design principles discussed by McQuillan et al. (2018), particularly for optimizing the cutting process. This contribution explores the application of the zero-waste design approach in fashion, focusing specifically on the offcuts generated during the cutting stage, referred to here as the “negative spaces” of both the pattern and the cut garment. The goal is to introduce a new perspective that views textile waste generated during the cutting process as “negative spaces”—“containers,” as defined by Romanian artist Marion Baruch (Torres, 2024)—rich in value and meaning. Instead of being discarded, these offcuts 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. With a renewed sensitivity, waste material is reinterpreted, allowing us to identify “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, 2017, p.6).