British designer Hoyan Ip is tackling two problems at once: the problem of food waste, and the problem of clothes that are insufficiently disgusting. She’s making buttons, buckles, collars, and other embellishments out of food scraps.
Ip calls her innovations “Bio-trimmings,” and her process seems to be similar to making nuggets out of leftover chicken parts: Food waste is cooked, dried, ground up, made into sheets, and shaped in molds. After Ip cuts out the shapes of buttons and buckles, the leftover bits of the food-waste sheets can be used for more free-form embellishments on bags, shirt collars, and bow ties.
Hoyan IpIf Bill Nye is serious about ending global warming, he will wear this recycled-food tie.
This is obviously a little gross, and it’s kinda supposed to be — Ip says she’s partly experimenting with the psychological impact of recycled-food accoutrements.
By changing the little details on a garment such as a Burberry trench coat with trimmings made of wasted food, how might the standard Burberry devotee react and more interestingly, what will the actual brand think of this? Does adding products made from wasted food de-value the brand or add value to it because of its ethical reasons?
I’d say it somewhat decreases the value because it looks like a Fruit Roll-Up that’s already been eaten, but also slightly increases it because now you have something to nibble in the case of a nutrition emergency.
