The Widows From Waste: The Making of The Widows

Like a calm moment before a storm…

As the five Widows have been completed and they are waiting for the upcoming photoshoot, my hands are now having more free time to write about the making of the Widows, a process that has taken me around three years.

The silhouettes of these dresses had been wandering in the back of my mind long before the collection fully took form on paper in 2020. The velveteen, elegant shapes that follow the curves of the body, the falling shoulder lines, the slits that would reveal a leg or a cascade of layered lace...

At the same time, the problems of the fashion industry, the fate of the textile waste and the dramatic effects of the current speed of fashion consumption were casting their shadow over my mind as a designer and a maker of garments. We have a true need for wearing clothes, but often no respect for them. There are a lot of articles, books, podcasts and documentaries about the textile industry’s problems and I dived into them with my full weight and attention. Some of these were also shared in the Instagram Stories of TORN.

The sad destinies of the textiles and the elegant black ghosts in my mind came together in a way that felt like fate. The vision was so clear that each character’s story seemed to stream out naturally from the pen to the sketchbook. The pages filled out with the ideas and variations of each melancholic dress. After testing several ideas over multiple days, the final five emerged. The five Widows From Waste.

In the earlier entries of this blog, I wrote about the hunt of the materials for the dresses. It was of the utmost importance to me that for this collection all fabrics would be sourced second hand. If it was something a little broken, something with a price tag so low, that the next stop for the cloth would be a trash can, the better! A broken seam was no issue, a little hole, easy to go around.. The hunt spanned over several days and took me to Helsinki, Turku and Tampere, but yielded a splendid amount of velveteen and lace wonders.

As many of these clothes were but slightly worn or broken, but still cast away by their earlier owners, it inspired me to share through TORN social media several things in hopes to have people think of the clothes they owned. For one Christmas there were the tips of how to easily fix clothes with small holes with but needle and thread, for one Valentine’s Day I asked people share their favorite clothes and their stories that I then further shared to others in the Instagram Stories. The later one was particularly wonderful. After all the documentaries of abandoned clothes, it was heartwarming to see clothes that were cherished, trusted and loved –often for years!

After the materials were gathered, the next step was to draw patterns for the Widow, all of which was done by hand without the help of computers or programs, now and then a traditional calculator. The patterns were drawn on paper, but some sleeves and tops were shaped out of the fabric directly on a mannequin. The most important, and a bit more unusual part of the pattern making was that the pieces had to be relatively small. As the already existing clothes were already cut to shapes and pieces, the pieces for the Widows would have to come together from cutting those pieces again in different ways. It was quite a puzzle in the end! The pieces would change places, shapes and purposes. A sleeve would turn into a hem, a collar into a hat.. If you look closely at the Widows, there are many hints and traces of their past. Their history is an integral part of the new garments. While it might be impossible to say if a specific part had come from a top or a trouser, the Widows will carry their past with pride.

The cutting of the pieces took its time. Seeking for the right sized piece among the materials was not always the most straightforward task. But once this was done, the sewing itself could start! The Widows were completed one at a time, worked from the pattern stage to the last stitches of the head piece. The fabrics were joined and the long seams attached with the purring sewing machines. But even more often, the work required a precise needlework entirely done by hand. One detail that carries through each of the Widows are the lace details that climb over them like vines of ivy on trees. All of these flowers, branches and leaves were cut out of several lace clothes and then hand sewn individually on place. This all took a great deal of time, but is that not exactly what these clothes needed a deserved? The fast fashion victims being given the attention and love of the slow fashion? I would playfully imagine that perhaps this made the clothes happier and more proud of themselves.

As I write this, I’m expecting the news from the kind people who have agreed to take part in the official launching photoshoot of the Widows from Waste collection. Somewhere in the near future, the Widows will get to wander the Earth once more.. Maybe if one day in July you see a slender figure broodingly haunt a location, it might well be…

Until the next time!

Sincerely

Iina