The back ground to DFT Textile is the amount of unwanted, disposed-of clothing piling up in Kenya, which is almost beyond measure. Left untreated, these discarded garments are a shameful symbol of the social issues we face today.
DFT Textile, Credit: Yuima Nakazato
DFT Textile, Credit: Yuima Nakazato
DFT Textile, Credit: Morgan O’Donovan,
As someone who is responsible for designing clothes, I felt an urgent need to visit Kenya and witness this situation with my own eyes. Our journey began with coming face-to-face with a vast amount of leftover clothing. Cheap and generic attire such as denim and T-shirts had obviously become utterly universal.
A simple yet fundamental question arose in our mind: “Do we really need to make any more clothes?” The production began when 150kg of used clothing was brought back to Japan from Africa. Most of the clothes did not have proper labels, and so their origin and component materials were impossible to ascertain. These sorts of clothes are generally very difficult to recycle, but using dry fiber technology with Seiko Epson we were able to convert them into new textiles for creating new garments. It was almost as if we were rescuing clothes that had nowhere else to go.
