Selvedge World Fair Podcasts
Image: Artisans from the Multicolores organisation.
We have recorded five podcast episodes to be launched at the Selvedge World Fair. Ticket holders get a preview and can listen from 4 September. The podcast, like the magazine, explores the fabric of our lives - that is, the connection between cloth, culture and creativity. Selvedge’s founder Polly Leonard hosts, interviewing artists, designers, NGOs, co-operatives, collectors and just about anyone who wears clothes; “I will be visiting artists' studios, mills and ateliers, as well as climbing mountains, crossing deserts and setting sail around the world (metaphorically of course at present), to find sustainable textiles that celebrate cultural identity, diversity and the heritage of humanity.” Here we introduce the first three.
Image: Christine Mayer
Episode one on upcycling features Christine Mayer, a German designer whose most recent collections have been made entirely from recycled fabric. Irma Churunel Ajú, a member of the non-profit organisation Multicolores in Guatemala who transform second-hand clothing into rag rugs that reference indigenous Mayan iconography. And Elina Tseliagkou, a designer living in Athens, who creates one-off coats hand-crafted from woollen blankets salvaged from villages in her native Greece for her label Unsung Weavers.
Image: Coat, Unsung Weavers.
Episode two on plastic features Álvaro Catalán de Ocón, a Madrid based product designer and founder of PET Lamp, lamps made from upcycled ubiquitous plastic bottles. Luisa Cevese, an Italian designer who combines polyurethane with post-production and post-consumer textile waste and Djilene Creations, a Senegalese partnership, who bring vibrant African design to a European market. In episode three on fibres we talk to people working with fibres outside of mainstream textile production: Pernille Solfverberg is an angora rabbit farmer from Sweden, Asaf Ali of Kashmir Loom in Srinagar, the beautiful lake capital of Kashmir in Northern India who works with pashmina and Mati Ventrillon, a crofter and a knitter from Fair Isle in Scotland who works with only Shetland wool. We find out why we should be less predictable when we’re choosing what our clothes are made of.
After the Selvedge World Fair we will post a podcast at the beginning of every month.
To get first access to Selvedge podcasts, buy your ticket here. Magazine subscribers get a special rate on Selvedge World Fair tickets and until the end of August you can subscribe with 50% off, using code AUGUST at check.