Replica Project x National Trust of Victoria (Melbourne Design Week 2024)

The aim of the project is to foreground the methods of cut & construction of clothing, hi-lighting overlooked skills & techniques & practitioner’s integral to the design process, exploring how garments can be made more mindfully with alternate models of practice, presentation & consumption. The project questions what can historical costume artefacts reveal to us that is absent within contemporary fashion & vice versa & how can we use these artefacts to inform contemporary fashion design practice.

The project presented is an iterative series of dresses informed by an artefact (1923) from the Biographical wardrobe of Mrs Pattilini Wilson held in the National Trust of Victoria costume collection. Materials, techniques & design details were replicated through swatching & prototyping, developing multiple iterations of the garment exploring methods from costume production interrogating temporality, form, movement, posture, magnification of detail, & notions of high street versus luxury ready-to-wear fashion. Collaborating with a reactive dye digital print practitioner & an art finishing costume practitioner, specific costume methods are explored through the manipulation of flatlay photography producing fourteen contemporary commercial 'replicas' of the archival dress.

In an increasingly disconnected world facing problems of overconsumption, waste & poor design, Replica Project is a human-centred artisanal practice producing garments embedded with history, storytelling & value through their research, development & production. Garments are produced in Australia utilising a pre-order system, contributing to minimal material, energy & time wastage. Encouraging considered purchases from consumers, the garments are designed to be worn, altered, repaired & shared. We work with local suppliers to source raw materials and practitioners including dye-houses, laundries, & textile designers & printers who are integral to the outcomes produced.

Replica Project explores the ‘replica’ as a design method to cite history & traverse the fields of costume & fashion by developing & producing thoughtful propositions which consider current issues faced by the fashion industry & consumers. Great consideration & care is taken when selecting archival garments to reference for the projects as well as their potential to be translated to a commercial contemporary context. Replica Project in collaboration with the National trust of Victoria costume collection referenced a single dress (c.a 1923) which had been altered, re-cut, & repaired, however presented in near perfect condition after almost 100 years. Fourteen contemporary commercial ”replica” iterations of the original dress were made for this project. Within each dress a pocket housed headphones & an audio recording of creative writing, narrating the methods of design, development and production of the garment. Each of the dresses, excepting two styles, are multi-sized, include generous seam allowances & hem finishes allowing for alterations & repairs & consider our social responsibility as consumers & custodians of clothing & fashion. The dresses were presented carefully wrapped in tissue & housed in archival boxes ready for purchase alongside a fashion film installed in the hallway and drawing room of Tasma Terrace, East Melbourne as part of Melbourne Design Week 2024.