Rebecca Earley

Rebecca Earley is a London based textile designer and Reader at Chelsea, University of the Arts London. She currently produces hand and digitally printed textiles for her own label, undertakes public art projects and commissions, and is an educator, facilitator and curator. Earley graduated from Central St Martin's in 1994 and set up her label 'B.Earley' the following year with help from the Crafts Council and the Prince’s Youth Business Trust. Using a unique 'Heat Photogram' printing process that she developed whilst studying, she produced womenswear and accessories for stores like Liberty, Harvey Nichols, and Barneys. In recognition of the development of this printing process, the Victoria and Albert Museum bought six pieces of Earley’s work in 1996 for their Fashion and Textiles collections. When Earley became a visiting lecturer at Chelsea College of Art and Design, also in 1996, she got involved with the 'Textiles Environment Design' (TED) staff project whose remit is to 'explore the role that the designer can play in producing textiles that are more eco friendly'. Earley subsequently developed an 'exhaust printing' technique which produces hand printed textiles with no water pollution and minimal chemical usage. The resulting collection of PET recycled scarves won an award at the first Peugeot Design Awards in 1999. Earley became a Senior Research Fellow at Chelsea in 2002 and has continued to investigate new techniques and theoretical approaches to textile design. From 1999 – 2001 she worked with scientists and other designers and educators at the Eden Project in Cornwall, developing garden designs and educational programmes and workshops. The most recent work, Top 100, explores the benefits of using recycled synthetics. The second hand polyester blouses are recut and styled, then overprinted using different design themes, intending to increase consumer attachment through a series of unique narratives. They are made to be washed less often and never ironed, and finally at the end of their second life they are 100% recyclable. The blouse collections have been exhibited in France, China and London, and were seen on the catwalk in Paris in November 2004 and London Fashion Week, March 2007. Another ongoing project is the TED Resource that draws together samples, products, imagery and information about eco textiles and fashion. This resource based at Chelsea, is a toolbox to help designers create more environmentally positive textiles, and opened to the public in Autumn 2005. Projects for 2006/7 included the curation of Well Fashioned: Eco Style in the UK, an exhibition which opened at the Crafts Council Gallery in March 2006 and toured in the UK until March 2007. She was nominated for the 'Morgan Stanley's Great Britons' award in 2006, in recognition of her contribution to eco design and education. Working as part of the wider University research culture, Earley’s current post involves working with diverse groups of students and researchers, generating project concepts, funding applications, and strategies for dissemination. In June 2005 she was awarded a large grant from the AHRC to fund a three-year collaborative practice-based research project called Ever and Again: Rethinking Recycled Textiles. The interim outcomes from this collaborative project will be exhibited 19th - 25th October 2007, at the Triangle Gallery, CCAD, Atterbury Street, Millbank London. For more information contact ted@chelsea.arts.ac.uk

Textiles Recycling The Textile Environment Design (TED) project at Chelsea was established in 1996 and comprises of a unique collective of practicing designers / educators. Few designers realise the environmental impact of their creative decisions. They have a crucial role in improving the environmental profile of a product, with ‘eighty percent of a product’s environmental and economic costs…committed by the final design stage before production begins’ (Graedel et al, 1995). Earley has in recent years extended her practice as a textile designer/maker to work in an innovative way with ideas from eco design theory. The AHRB funded Five Ways project (2002) addressed the lack of fashion clothing that has been successfully designed with the environment in mind, by using five theoretical ideas to inspire garment ‘sketches’ in the form of real samples. The Top 100 project explores the recycling of polyester blouses, modifying them to lower the need for laundering, and giving them narratives designed to increase the sense of consumer attachment. Recycling textiles saves energy and, if no recolouration takes place, it can save water and chemicals too. In the case of 100% wool fabric for instance, the recycling process uses only half as much energy as it takes to produce a fabric from virgin fibre. However when textile fibres are recycled, they are downgraded almost immediately into low-quality end-uses such as wiping rags or mattress filling. Exhibitions about recycling, like Re(f)use (2004), focus on ‘good everyday design’. Charity organisations like Traid aim at the same market and commission young designers to adapt second hand clothing. The outcome is a low quality one-off, with customised sweatshirts selling for approximately £30. An exhibition at Sotheby’s in 2003, Waste to Taste, recognised this discrepancy and showed recycled products that aspired to a loftier level. However, this exclusivity was afforded by reusing high quality original vintage and antique textiles rather than new technologies or unusual techniques. The recent Ethical Fashion exhibitions in Paris (2004 – 2008) show a global interest in this area, but the artefacts often failed to reach a couture level. Not only does the recycling of the garments potentially more than double their lifespan - making items more durable is one well known strategy for reducing materials consumption and environmental impact - but redesigning certain aspects of the textile artefact could also improve their performance during their re-usage. www.beckyearley.com Well Fashioned exhibition, Crafts Council - http://www.craftscouncil.org.uk/wellfashioned/flash/index.html www.tedresearch.net www.5ways.info www.chelsea.arts.ac.uk/17221.htm