Sustainable fashion student portfolio building! Upcycled wedding dress project inspiration.

In this video, fashion students from Farnborough College of Technology in Surrey, UK, share their experience and insights on completing a special project, called WHITE ON WHITE, using old wedding dresses, to add to their portfolio.

This project was about combining SUSTAINABILITY WITH STYLE and I encouraged the students to think about how confident the wearer of their garment was going to feel, and where possible to make this a zero waste project.

The students repurposed unwanted old wedding dresses and used them to explore design & fabric manipulation without relying on colour and pattern for interest.

Having sourced and donated many of the wedding dress samples last summer for the students to use, I’m here today to see the results of their work and talk to some of them about why they think upcycling and repurposing is such an important skill to develop.

For designers like me, the most exciting thing about this kind of project is that upcycling and reusing fabric has become the norm for fashion graduates and not the exception as it was for my generation of designers.

There are 100s of 1000s of surplus sample wedding dresses, discarded by the bridal industry every year in the UK and an estimated 10 million old wedding dresses in peoples lofts.

I spend a lot of time trying to redirect them to places like FCOT and I hope you’ll feel inspired to include repurposing one in your fashion portfolio, or if you have a dress, dig it out of the attic and either donate it to your local fashion college for a project like this, or watch some of my other videos about repurposing, and be inspired to transform it and bring it back into your life again.