reFashion/transForm

reFashion/transForm investigates the possibilities that emerge when waste is reimagined as resource, casting discarded materials into new forms and meanings.

Against the backdrop of pervasive garment waste, the exhibition foregrounds practices of transformation, adaptation, and reuse within both historical and contemporary contexts.

Visitors will encounter an exhibition imagined as a room, an interior of reconfigured objects arranged into a domestic space, like a living room filled with furnishings, fashion and decorative treatments. A curatorium of creatives explores what happens when materials shed their former uses to become entirely new entities: discarded clothing liquefied, reconstituted, or reimagined as furniture, art, or new materials.

Historical artefacts from the NTAV collection anchor these contemporary practices within a long trajectory of resourcefulness, jackets remade from sailors’ trousers, 1850s furniture fashioned from cotton pulp, and crazy quilts from textile remnants. In dialogue with these histories, the exhibition showcases practitioners across fashion, furniture design, science, history and the visual arts.