Vancouver — the birthplace of global brands like Lululemon, Aritzia and Herschel — throws away 22,000 tonnes of apparel each year, even though 95 per cent of it could be repaired, reused, or recycled. At UBC, the Slow Fashion Research Cluster aims to adjust social attitudes and the demand for fast fashion to confront this urgent problem.
The research cluster’s annual Slow Fashion Season highlights their endeavours with a slate of events featuring textile workshops, student design challenges, exhibitions on sustainable fashion research and textiles and a fashion show displaying sustainably made clothing from local artists and designers.
One of these workshops, which focused on visible mending practices, was hosted by interdisciplinary designer Bianca Del Rio Kodato and Slow Fashion Season Assistant Karen Zhou on Jan. 23. It gave participants the opportunity to learn the basics of repairing clothing using sashiko stitching, darning and other methods to mend with a personal twist. It was held in the Audain Art Centre, in a wide open space with spanning windows that showcased pretty sunset views of the UBC campus.
I brought with me a brown oversized striped sweater that I had thrifted when I was fourteen and have worn upwards of a thousand times since. While it has held up impressively considering it’s well into its teens, a single thread had unraveled a long, thin hole that spanned from my sternum to the side of my chest. It was time to fix it.
We were seated at plastic tables that clearly had a long history of being painted, sculpted and crafted on, with embroidery thread and hoops, needles, scissors and scrap fabric scattered over the surface. The workshop started with a fairly brief presentation from the hosts introducing the visible mending concept, showing instructional sewing diagrams that seemed abstract to a beginner like myself. We were soon given complete creative freedom to do what we wanted with all the tools we might need at our disposal. This accessibility is a core value of the workshops offered throughout Slow Fashion Season.
The Slow Fashion research cluster — officially called “Slow Fashion: Circular Textiles, Sustainable Fibre” — was developed early last year by Germaine Koh, an assistant professor of Visual Art at UBC. When Koh arrived in her position in late 2024, she decided to expand on her ongoing work with upcycled materials in textile and garment production to create a sustainable fashion show.
For Koh, UBC seemed like a great place to start a dialogue about issues around sustainability in fashion since, as Koh said, “students are quite well attuned to issues around sustainability, but at the same time, are also big consumers of fashion and clothing.”
She launched the initiative by connecting with other academics through the Green College Leading Scholars Program, an interdisciplinary cohort of new faculty at UBC. There, Koh met Dr. Alexandra Tavasoli, an assistant professor in Mechanical Engineering, and combined her industrial production know-how with Koh’s academic interest in fashion. Together, they decided to focus on the common goal of community-based manufacturing.
The number of interested faculty grew, and “the next thing we knew, we had a research cluster on our hands,” said Koh. Now comprising two dozen UBC faculty, community partners, independent artists and researchers at other institutions, they are all united by the overarching goal of a circular textile economy and sustainable fibres. Koh said the group is approaching sustainable fashion “through a lens of circularity,” focusing on regenerative processes that “are not damaging to the environment.”
Alongside visible mending as a type of regenerative process, documenting this kind of care offers another way to prevent clothing from being prematurely discarded — a goal that Custodisco (Custo) seeks to achieve. Built on the idea that items with a documented history are less likely to meet an untimely end of life, the Custo kiosk is a label printer created by artist Trav Fryer that lets users create custom fabric or sticker tags for their items. Each tag is printed with a unique QR code linked to an updatable digital record, allowing the item’s chain of care to be documented over time. During the mending workshop, the Custo kiosk was available to participants so they could develop custom labels for mended garments.
The workshop quickly turned into a friendly community space. UBC students, staff and community members got to connect with each other through a shared passion for sustainable clothing. Whether it was complimenting others on their patches or sashiko designs, teaching each other how to do a specific stitch or laughing over a silly sewing mistake and discussing how to fix it, the space fostered a collaborative environment where sustainability was practiced not as an abstract concept, but as a shared social experience.
To me, coming together to make and fix things is a beautiful symbol of community, love and care. Before the workshop, I had very little experience with sewing — it was my partner that sewed a floral star over the hole of a different sweater for me, matching the same fabric of his jean cuffs. After just two hours of instruction, collaboration and community, my other thirteen-plus-year-old sweater has a renewed life — a thin mustard yellow darned patch spanning across my chest that I can proudly wear for more decades to come.
If you missed the first Visible Mending Workshop, there is a second one coming up on Jan. 31, this time facilitated by embroiderer Sadie Gilker and Dreamstill, a sustainable fashion house focusing on reducing textile waste. There are other workshops and events scheduled throughout the season, including Designing from Waste on Feb. 3, Clothing Construction on Feb. 12, and the culminating Slow Fashion Show at the Museum of Anthropology on March 12.
The Slow Fashion Cluster isn’t spending all their time on Slow Fashion season — Koh recently submitted a grant proposal in collaboration with Campus and Community Planning to turn a site off of University Boulevard into a fibre garden primarily growing flax, with the idea of producing linen and developing a system for localized textiles right here on campus. Design and mechanical engineering students in the cluster are also working together to develop a human scaled, bike powered machine for processing flax to establish a scale of production at the community level. “It can be people in their backyards doing [this],” Koh said.
Ultimately, the goal of these projects, workshops and events is to give people the tools that they need to develop lifelong skills to preserve their clothing, build community and contribute to the goal of a circular apparel economy. “Giving a thought to our world and what it needs, it seems to me that [we need] to not lose track of how to actually make [things],” Koh said. “A big part of the [creative work] that I’m doing is encouraging more and more people to have agency, to make things and to have the courage to go out and make stuff happen in the world.”
