Josie Strick:

On a Saturday morning, I looked up at the tallest living being on this earth, the sequoia tree. It seemed immune to everything else, and almost immortal. These trees dwell at the epicenter of the natural process. They thrive off of fire and are reborn even stronger, mirroring the dual fragility and strength of nature on this planet. However, that natural process is becoming endangered by greenhouse gas emissions and warming temperatures, resulting in more dead trees. As I explored the forest, I couldn’t help focusing my attention on both the thriving, living trees and those that were now nothing more than melted bark. I began to ponder the sense of responsibility I have in preventing potential catastrophes such as the extinction of sequoia trees and how I could help restore the natural rhythm of their environment. I began to consider the many ways of doing this, thinking about where I put my dollar or what I wear on my body.

The fashion industry contributes to 10% of global greenhouse gas emissions, with its long supply chains and unethical, energy-intensive production. As we create these garments, we should instill the ethos of patience, one that parallels the need for humans to slow down in their everyday lives and take a closer look at the world around them. Never before have we experienced a more vital time to support fashion designers aiming to diminish their societal carbon footprint.

During my exploration of the Sequoia Forest, I felt honored to wear and photograph garments by the textile and apparel designer, Madeleine Lyon. The ethos of Lyon’s designs explore the processes of deconstruction, manipulation, and reconstruction. Wearing garments that mirrored my own care, curiosity, and respect for Mother Nature felt vital to my emotional experience within the forest, one that necessitated facing a complicated and devastating confrontation with potential climate catastrophe. I had the pleasure of discussing with Lyon her desire to explore themes of the breakdown and natural rebuilding of Mother Earth.

Madeleine Lyon:

I am not sure I can draw upon the first moment when I felt the impact of nature. I’ve always had a strong appreciation for the outdoors, from camping in the mountains with my parents as a newborn to spending summers canoeing and kayaking in northern Wisconsin. I’ve always had a strong respect for how nature can be both violent and beautiful; the way water shapeshifts and transforms has helped me understand the circular nature of the systems on our planet.

When you really start to look around and pay attention, it’s almost impossible not to notice the similarities in structures we encounter everyday. I’m obsessed with how the sidewalks freeze over in Milwaukee, leaving endless patterns of ice beneath our feet, and how we build grids out of city streets to maneuver ourselves around and within the natural landscape. I recommend Benjamin Grant’s Instagram and book project, Daily Overview, a showcase of satellite images of earth’s man-made and natural structures. I think it really puts things into perspective when you compare the veins of a leaf with a bird’s eye view of agricultural fields. You find the shapes aren’t very different.

My senior collection at Syracuse was really my first exploration of these motifs and the ideas of taking old things to make new shapes. Those prints and garments investigated how nature rebuilds itself after breaking down. I like to focus on the three R’s of renewal in my work and consumption habits — first reduce, then reuse, and as a last resort, recycle. I love renewal because it’s a process that nature does on its own. When considering how to implement sustainability into the apparels industry, renewal marries financial and environmental needs. At the end of the day, we need the environment to be healthy if we want healthy industry. But I think practicing renewal should come before practicing sustainability. To a lot of people, sustainability means using organic cotton or Tencel (a biodegradable textile made from wood pulp). Although these are better alternatives to synthetics, they still require raw materials to be harvested. I think we need to work with renewable resources more than anything and find creative ways to close the circuit.

Transparency in the textiles industry means being honest about the good and the bad. I don’t think you can be fully transparent if you only share the positive ways you work to become a better designer or artist. I think that there is so much trial and error with design, and we have to be honest about where we screw up. Without mistakes, we’d never learn better ways to be eco-friendly. I spend a lot of time asking myself, “How can I challenge the end use of a material?” It takes a lot of experimenting before you get it right. It’s sort of like a scientist testing their own hypothesis; starting by asking a lot of questions. I don’t necessarily want to show people when I mess up a screen print or how much water it takes to wash a single garment, but I think these are the details consumers are missing out on when they purchase clothes.

I wouldn’t call myself a particularly patient person, but my favorite kind of work is generally really meticulous and detailed. There is definitely something to be said about holding out for a product that has high quality and is handmade because you can see and feel the time that someone puts into it. Patient craftsmanship gives an inanimate object more soul – especially when repurposing materials that have their own history. It took me just over a year from concept to finish to create the garments you wore to Sequoia National Forest. It was always a passion project for me to develop on the side. Coming home from work as an assistant designer and working on something that had no deadlines was a great practice of patience. I had all the time to get the details right and re-do things if I wanted to. Screen printing everything myself took a lot of patience, and there were definitely some moments where I had to step away from it for a couple days or weeks – it’s pretty easy to screw up even the simplest steps. I think my patience during the design process gave me more time to be inspired and create a better end result.

There are many steps you can take as a designer to create sustainable and ethical garments — buying vintage or making your own clothes, trying your very best to reuse materials from old projects and using deadstock fabric, breaking down old clothes to give them a new life, testing textile manipulation techniques in smaller batches as not to waste water or other materials, challenging yourself to upcycle materials and bioproducts in new ways, and creating ways to share and be transparent with your work to inspire others.