Verbal and visual presentation of practice led research.

Reversed crafting is a practice-led investigation of alternative ways of doing and thinking within a field where cut and assemble is perceived as the dominant method for artistic expression. Addressing form giving and crafting of surfaces as a simultaneous act of making propose questions that can not be answered through cut and assemble. Not only an artistic method for crafting dress, cut and assemble is a system for industrial manufacturing, or material hyper consumption. The production of textiles and their use in garment production stands for one of the most complicated chains in todays manufacturing industry. With its appetite for burning fossil fuels it is linked to the knowledge that human activities have changed the functioning of the earth system, introducing the age of the Anthropcene.

Employing an estimated 60 million people globally, nearly three quarters of the work force are female and the conditions of the labourer are often atrocious. This makes evident that cut and assemble as a system for industrial manufacturing is unsustainable and in order to re-think these systems of manufacturing, there is an acute need to re-think what is manufactured and how this what comes into being.

The field of dress is currently experiencing an influx of 3D digital tools, both in regards to final assembly and form giving. Commonly migrated from other disciplines, these methods are often merged with cut and assemble, rather than investigated as holistic and real alternatives. If eliminating the relation to cut and assemble, these emerging 3D digital techniques can aid autonomous investigations of form giving and surface crafting as a simultaneous action in dress.

This practice-led research formulates and proposes methods of reversed crafting, addressing suggestions that digital manufacturing requires front-end craft knowledge where craft and designerly ways of thinking is reversed within the process of dress. Through physical examples mimicking processes commonly found in the fields of glass and ceramics, it abandons cut and assemble as the artistic method of form giving. Exploring moulding, 3D digital techniques and analogue tools in collaboration with material alternatives to that of fabric on roll, the work allows for the modelling of holistic methods of dress and the speculation of future systems of manufacturing.