September is New York Textile Month, a citywide celebration of textile creativity. As in past years, the museum is collaborating with the Textile Society of America. A non-profit professional organization of scholars, educators, and artists in the field of textiles, TSA provides an international forum for the exchange and dissemination of information about textiles worldwide....
As part of Eileen Fisher’s numerous sustainability efforts, the company committed to taking back used Eileen Fisher garments from its customers. Since 2009, with almost no promotion of the initiative, over 600,000 garments were returned. About 40% are still usable; they are cleaned and repaired in the company’s recycling centers in Irvington, NY and Seattle...
If you’ve ever taken a moment to investigate your shampoo bottle, pill organizer, or Tic-Tac box, you may have noticed the thin, flexible piece of plastic connecting these containers to their lids. This often-overlooked component is the living hinge, an innovation that helped boost plastic’s popularity and versatility. In the broadest sense, “plastic” simply denotes...
Jamdani is a Persian term for the extremely fine hand woven figured muslins made in Bengal. Thicker cotton threads laid individually into the weft produce the illusion of a suspended pattern on the surface of an almost transparent cloth. Intricate color motives seem to float on the cloth. Jamdani is generally thought to have derived...
Reduce, recycle, and reuse are the three words to live by when thinking of how to limit waste generation and the human footprint on the environment.
Born in Hungary in 1906, Eva Zeisel endured two world wars and the Soviet revolution. She spent sixteen months in a Russian prison and escaped Nazi persecution before emigrating to the U.S. in 1938. Best known for her ceramics, Zeisel called herself a modernist with a “little m.” She rejected doctrinaire geometries in favor of...
The Shredded Collection Table (Fast Company Edition), made from 26 kilograms of Fast Company magazine. The Shredded Collection Console (White Edition), made from 5 kilograms of shredded confidential documents. Belgian industrial designer Jens Praet’s Shredded Series upcycles old magazines and paper into handcrafted furniture. According to Praet, “what started out as a research project...
The majority of India’s poor still live in rural villages, while the many living in the urban areas have increasing purchasing power. In response to this growing disparity an Indian organization, GOONJ, has developed a large-scale resource mobilization initiative to re-use surplus clothing from the urban consumers to the rural poor; rather than simply giving...
Many families are still crowded into one-bedroom FEMA trailers even 2 years after Hurricane Katrina devastated the US Gulf Coast. The Building Goodness Foundation has been providing relief to these cramped conditions building extra rooms for storage or a living room, even an extra bedroom. Over 150 of these extra rooms have been built in...
