There is a busy atmosphere in Room 21 in the Unified Arts Building. Sewing machines buzz and scissors snip pieces of fabric. Students are putting the finishing touches on their camouflage clothing pieces which are intended to blend into a place at the high school. They will present their work during the next class.
The Wearable Arts and Apparel Design class is working to teach students about more sustainable ways of doing fashion.
The Wearable Arts and Apparel Design class is a new elective this year. Its teacher, Lauren Comerato, said students’ need for a creative fashion elective led to its establishment. The class teaches the basics of apparel design and manufacturing, while also educating students about more sustainable fashion practices.
According to the U.N. Environment Programme, the fashion industry produces 92 million metric tons of waste each year. The semester-long class culminates in a project that asks students to rethink what they can do with clothes they no longer want. Comerato said students learn many techniques to prepare for this assignment, such as altering clothing, revamping old clothes and recycling used fabric.
“A lot of the time, students have so many clothes that they want to just get rid of,” Comerato said. “What’s a way that you can take something that you already have, and now that you have these skills of sewing and doing all these techniques, how can you change it to something you want to wear?”
Students pitch in to provide the needed materials, an action that both reduces the amount of clothes students discard and the amount of fabric the school has to purchase.
“One thing I was really excited about was having students bring in clothes they were going to throw out and finding a way for them to re-alter [the clothes],” Comerato said.
Junior Sofi Treacy said the class does not have an ample material inventory, so students rely on simple materials and self-provided fabric to build their garments.
“We don’t have infinite resources. We’re just one class right now. So we work with what we have: cotton muslin and scrap materials,” Treacy said.
Unlike other arts electives, Wearable Arts and Design does not differentiate between levels. Thus, while many students are very experienced with apparel design, others are learning for the first time. Comerato said the mixed levels create a class environment that fosters collaboration.
“I actually like having that [variation of levels] in the class, because those students who might be a little bit more experienced end up taking on this leadership role in the class and helping other students,” Comerato said. “The students who are brand new gain confidence.”
Senior Lucia Oft said she had taken a beginner sewing class in her sophomore year and has experience in fashion-intensive classes. She said that certain methods of sustainable fashion were emphasized in the Wearable Arts and Design class
“I feel like I’ve learned a lot about upcycling and re-using material. For the first project, we took this oversized T-shirt, and made it into something that fit a specific theme. My piece for it was [based on] one of my favorite characters,” Oft said.
Treacy, who is new to apparel design, said she heard about the class from her friends last year and joined to learn more about how apparel design works.
While Treacy doesn’t envision a future in fashion design, she said she appreciates the life skills she has gained from the class, such as sewing clean seams.
“If anyone is considering the class, it’s something that they should definitely take because even if you don’t think that you’re going to pursue a future in fashion, you will learn skills that you didn’t necessarily have before,” Treacy said.
Oft said that clothing as a form of art and self-expression is new to many of the students in the class.
“People think of painting and drawing when they think of art,” Oft said. “But I feel like through fashion, you can take everyday clothes and make them into how you would perceive a painting.”
