The Flying Carpet – (Square One)

Each garment  begins with a quadrant of cloth that can be draped, tucked and tacked using simple joining methods.

The client may return the garment for disassembling and recutting or choose to carry out the renovation by themselves with instructions from S!X.

The current design/ retail climate, confronted with a global pandemic, has changed how we consume fashion , forcing the wearer to be more resourceful and creative in their approach to clothing, with perhaps minimal skills and experience in design and construction.

This design approach is a response to this problem.

The Flying Carpet addresses problems associated with the sustainability of household material waste, passive consumption, and the disposal of garments whose aesthetic form has lost its appeal. It allows materials at the apparent end of their life cycle to be revived and returned to use, and to repeatedly revived through different cycles of assembly and disassembly.

Once the current pandemic isolation has ended, The Flying Carpet can easily be adapted to other contexts. Outside the household, it can be used to design and transform found or purchased material rolls by the user. It can be used to offer a range of easily assembled and reassembled garments from new fabric by designers. For example, the ‘isolation version’ of the design will form a new model of design for S!X, allowing us to offer both new garments that can assembled and reassembled, as well as online instructions allowing consumers to construct their own versions of the designs.

The design uses any readily available materials that may have been neglected or rejected, found or in excess that is already in the form of or can be cut into a square. It is user-centred in that the maker-wearer is abler to transform the material into a range of possibilities of form following the assembly and disassembly instructions provided by the designers. It does not rely heavily on the user having an advanced set of pattern-making and sewing skills. The design, in other words, is a form of co-design.

The Flying Carpet has the ability to move into the digital space by future creating patterns for the home sewer to download and make.

• It enables the user to re purpose materials in a simple way that does not require advanced construction skills, transforming the user into a co-designer.
• It addresses the idea that once something is worn out or lost its aesthetic appeal it can be repeatedly reshaped rather than disposed of.
• It addresses the problem of waste within the home and educates consumers in basic decorative techniques.
• It transforms the role of the consumer from a passive to an active one.