In 2012-2014 design work was developed by the seven partners of the Local Wisdom International Network with the aim of investigating, amplifying, and extending garment usership.

These designs have also been used as educational tools to materialize and recalibrate conversations about fashion ideas and practices. That is to prompt a leap to imagining what fashion might be like in a world which develops qualitatively, in recognition of finite resources and planetary limits. 

A Timeless Ride was developed by Lin Borchersen Hansen, Anne Ditte Grøngaard and Agnes Toksvig Bjerre at the Kolding School of Design. Their work approaches fashion as an unfolding process. The practices of life between and within layers of cloth and seam is anything but a static fashion commodity. Yet too often fashion presents garments as waxworks, as ‘still lives’, as sites removed from the whirring of real life and all its social and political significance.

But what happens when clothes are designed for movement, not just for sitting still? What if we sketch, design, create not just objects but the actual active use of those objects? Lin, Anne and Agnes explored articulation of joints, ventilating layers, reflective details including knitted cuffs within pieces designed for cycling. Here use is linked to movement of the body; to social structures which influence how we choose to travel; and to the mental patterns and knowledge that help us act in the world. See more examples of design work from the Local Wisdom network in the summary publication of the Craft of Use event.

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