Maison/0 Green Trail 2020

We're proud to announce the five winners of the Maison/0 Green Trail which celebrates the most innovative sustainable projects from this year's graduating students.

The Trail – soon to be launched in its entirety on the Central Saint Martins Graduate Showcase – spans the College's disciplines and courses, highlighting design that responds to the climate and biodiversity emergency. The tricky task of choosing five winners was negotiated by a jury including Alexander Capelli and Clara Gomez from the LVMH Environment Team alongside fashion journalist Tamsin Blanchard and MA Biodesign Course Leader Nancy Diniz. Selected from a group of 27 nominated students, the five winners are awarded £1,000 each.

"Design is not just an act of creation, it is an act of contribution. In the face of climate and Covid-19 adversity, our graduates have demonstrated yet again the pertinence of creativity to re-imagine a better world. I feel privileged to witness such ingenuity and hunger to embrace ecological values in the design process and I am confident these designers will play a key role in reshaping their future industries."
Carole Collet, CSM LVMH Director of Sustainable Innovation

‘Once again, the Green Trail has highlighted very ambitious and ground-breaking projects. From slow fashion to cutting-edge biomaterials, from disrupting the fashion supply chain to redesigning our urban space with up-cycled materials; students have demonstrated their infinite capacity to rethink our creative practices, despite facing a very challenging context in 2020.’
Alexandre Capelli, LVMH Deputy Environment Manager

"Public Atelier is a new business model that disrupts the current norm of fast fashion. Harnessing distributed manufacture as well as ethical and local production, it consists of a platform that enables designers to design and sell their garments, producing them locally with recycled or upcycled textiles through a network of 'fab labs' and makers. The platform’s tools allow the users to personalise their clothes, choosing the design, fabric, makerspace and maker, creating an intimate relationship with the product and making them active producers in the system."

"BUY, BE BOUGHT is a collection of twelve body-pieces made using SCOBY (Symbiotic Culture Of Bacteria and Yeast). SCOBY is part of the bacterial cellulose family, it is completely biodegradable and can be home-grown. The name of the collection refers to being trapped in our consumerist world once we purchase a mass-produced item.

Nature is beautifully unpredictable; this raw material will grow differently each time. In my collection, I want to emphasise that nature is uncontrollable, compared to man-made creations. By uniting untamed natural elements with man-made controlled aesthetics, I aimed to critique our consumerist society. Fast fashion, one of the most affluent and polluting industries of the twenty-first century, was my main inspiration. The re-interpretation of traditional fast-fashion manufacturing methods, such as knitting, allows not only the exploration of different textures and uses for SCOBY, but also obliges individuals to ponder on our consumerist society."

Léa Hiralal's website

For Daylight Matters Jiyong Kim uses the sun to fade secondhand fabrics as a sustainable way of mark-making without water or chemicals. In this poetic process, time – sometimes months – makes its mark before the designer transforms the fabrics into the final garments.

"The garments are faded by the sun without chemical sources and acid which contributes to emissions of waste products. Additionally, having fabrics faded helps to reduce the usage of water so I am confident to say that faded fabrics are an innovative material that reduces harmful impacts on the environment. I also minimised the waste of fabrics when it comes to production of the garments themselves using particular patterns, natural draping and the power of gravity."

Jiyong Kim's website

"Appropriating the Grid demonstrates how unfinished domestic spaces can play a decisive role in social empowerment. I strongly believe we can use unfinished architecture structures, such as the 'contemporary ruins', to start creating more participatory environments which reflect society.

This exercise is a critique of the way of producing and consuming architecture in European countries, from the point of view of sustainability and social inclusion. Are new constructions ethical, sustainable and tenable considering the quality produced and the volume of unfinished, empty real estate? I present an encouraging view of this new landscape of unfinished structures with enormous possibilities.

"Decomposition of Materiality and Identities describes a circular living system, where garments grow, decompose and change shape throughout the time and changing environment. From the first look to the last, the garments gradually and organically evolve their form, materiality and entity. Using 3D rendering as a medium for presentation, the later part of the collection sets the opposite of using 'materials' however the medium is transformed from decomposing the biodegradable textiles."

Scarlett Yang's website

Congratulations also to the five highly commended graduates:

Cameron Bray, M ARCH: Architecture
Katie Gibbon, BA Jewellery Design
Seonmin Kang, MA Material Futures
Mia Karren, BA Textile Design
Smaranda Maria Voican, BA Jewellery Design

Maison/0 is an incubator of sustainable intelligence designed to provoke practices and challenge our collective futures. Set up as part of the CSM LVMH partnership launched in May 2017, Maison/0 provides a platform to develop innovative sustainable projects across Central Saint Martins and LVMH.