Forward to Basics - Openwear Collaborative Collection Workshop from Openwear on Vimeo.

‘Think, intervene and send’ are the main lines of the Boomshirt project, a shirt that was passed between 3 designers, each intervening on it independently and then sending it to the next designer. Boomshirt exposition during Estoril Fashionart Festival in Portugal exhibited 50 shirts from 150 diferent international designers.

I participated in this project together with Yoad David Luxembourg and Wieteke Opmeer.

The idea of my intervention was to extend the use of the shirt. Without eliminating any original part of the shirt or its primary use, a new part was added made of a special fabric- Khadi.

To see more click here!

From 14-19 of June took place at Ljubljana University(Slovenia) the first collaborative Openwear workshop: Forward to Basics.

Organized by EDUfashion, this project is fostering community, collaboration and innovation in order to provide a new vision and practice for fashion. To develop an Openwear community - a collaborative platform for fashion creation and continuous education, emphasizing skill-sharing and ethical branding are the main goals.

I was invited to participate together with other 7 brands/design studios: I-Gle Studio, Oloop Design, Open Source Pants, Pamoyo, Jure Purgaj, Serpica Naro and Yoad David Luxembourg. For 5 days we worked together mixing, changing, producing and prototyping, eventually reaching the goal of having a collaborative capsule collection of 8 items.

During this week I worked more closely with Cecilia Palmer from the brand Pomoyo. Together we researched into ways of re-using men’s shirts into all kinds of garments. It was important not only to find a good piece but also to find processes of making that we could transmit to others in the community later on.

To see more click here.

I was asked by the Portuguese development organization-ADXTUR to create a clothing collection for the local weavers of Aldeias do Xisto to produce. To answer their request I created a series of workshops/ classes for the weavers. 

Click on the Weaving Design post to see more about this project.

Currently we are working on a special series of design workshops, aimed at the revival and renovation of old deserted & abandoned villages in the center of Portugal - through creativity & sustainable design development - that will take place in the last weeks of August 2009.