‘Campus Couture: Foraged Fashion - we are dyeing to end fast fashion’ was a recent fashion show presented by students of the Introduction to Textiles: Plants, Place, Fibre and Colour class at the ANU School of Art & Design, led by Dr Rebecca Mayo & Aidan Hartshorn. The event was a welcomed opportunity for staff and students in the social sciences to see material artefacts of collaborative processes, publicly modelled in the foyer of the Research School of Social Sciences building.

Over the course of the semester, students had gathered natural materials from four sites on the ANU campus for the purposes of dyeing thrifted fabric and items of clothing. Gathering material from the Coombs Building, the School of Biological Sciences, the Kitchen Garden and Sullivan’s creek, the fashions paid witness to the flows of water at Sullivans creek, the traces of the plant and animal species that populate the sites, the built environment, sites of knowledge production and sustainable collaboration, but also the detritus of human activity. The event was part of a pilot for a teaching collaboration between the students in this course and students in Sociology's Contemporary Social Theory, convened by Dr Maria Hynes. It was also a great opportunity for social scientists engaged in creative methods to see the results of a materials-based investigation of plants, place, fibre and colour.

Hosted at The Research School of Social Sciences by the ANU School of Art & Design.