Soft Studio: Revaluing Post-Consumer Textile Waste through Creative Design Practice

In Australia, the rate of clothing consumption and disposal is high and increasing rapidly. New methods of approaching consumption and intervening in waste streams are needed to develop a more circular system. While the textile economy is global, a circular textile economy can start at a local level through webs of smaller economies. In line with a small-scale approach, we developed Soft Studio, an experimental design studio that re-values post-consumer textile waste through creative design practice. Beginning with just one bale of post-consumer textiles we applied a creative design process based on material experimentation to help us think through how discarded clothing could be re-valued. This paper reflects on the pilot of Soft Studio in 2022, outlining the emotional, aesthetic, and pragmatic challenges in recuperating the value of discarded clothing. We propose that small scale interventions such as Soft Studio can generate valuable insights into the issue of textile waste, facilitate new design practices and bring creative communities together to establish new circuits of social and economic value.