Space Between is a new social enterprise for fashion which is is a thoughtful new way to design, make and use locally-produced fashion. Situated in Massey University’s School of Design, it is about exploring alternatives to mass-produced high-waste clothing, and creating ethical business opportunities for new designers.
Space Between has two distinct strands:
The Fundamentals range: Designing with waste.
Limited edition collections designed by students recent graduates and fashion researchers, made locally using unwanted corporate uniforms and other waste material.
The Fashion Lab: Designing out waste from the system.
Using new research strategies that shift fashion towards zero waste through products and services, to challenge and amplify experiences of consumption, retail and post- purchase. Here we use design to create unique minimal/zero-waste garments and explore different models for the future of fashion.
Space Between makes a strong assertion for the potential of working collaboratively in a multidimensional capacity. The initiative can advocate new practices for an expanded view of fashion. Within the current environment it is clear that we cannot enact change by following our business as usual practices and working in isolation. Our networked society is ripe for developing partnerships that can link many partners and stakeholders across different sectors. Space Between aim to encourage a shift in industry practices whilst setting up new opportunities for designers, producers and new participants. By engaging in a form of design-led fashion activism they assert that we can explore an ‘integration of action into new grids, connecting practices, making new sense of the world’. Space Between proposes a new form of green entrepreneurialism, which advocates business as a way of achieving and sustaining social, environmental and financial, goals, not the opposite.
