Winter 2016: Unravelled. India – Bangladesh
The ‘Unknown Fields Division’ – is a nomadic design studio that ventures out on annual expeditions to the ends of the earth to explore peripheral landscapes, industrial ecologies and precarious wilderness. These distant landscapes – the iconic and the ignored, the excavated, irradiated and the pristine – are embedded in global systems that connect them in surprising and complicated ways to our everyday lives.
For our Winter Expedition we have travelled through India and Bangladesh to document the landscapes behind our runway dreams and street blue jeans. Before we wear them, our clothes make journeys of tens of thousands of miles in their process of production making textiles the most globalized industry on the planet. Fast Fashion’s rolling tide, dumps mountains of cheap clothing on the high street shores. Worn for one wild night and destined to be discarded, the whims of the style minded have set in motion a global industry that is reshaping developing economies half a world away. We delve in the dressing up box, into the wild, whimsical, weird and wicked world of fashion, and look deep beyond what is reflected in its glittering gilded mirror. Behind the parties and the cash-registers the textile industry is the focus of our year’s investigation and speculation. We have reimagined seasons, rewritten trends to operate between the scale of the stitch and the planetary supply chain and weave new connections between consumption and production.
