The Sarabande artist explains repurposing waste materials to increase their original worth and cultivating a more sustainable design industry. Closing the gap between what we deem waste material and artisanal items, Katy Mason’s craft challenges the notion of ‘traditional’ fashion products and the materials we deem appropriate to adorn our bodies.  A multidisciplinary artist delving into jewelry, sculpture and fashion, Mason has “always enjoyed the textures created by objects conventionally seen as mundane or waste”.  

From using broken chandelier parts to mimic precious stones, to lacing necklaces with wires, chains and cassette tapes, Mason sources the materials of her designs from discarded trash, giving “the object humanity and a soul”. 

There is “a new advent and push in fashion to expose the way something is made, who’s hands, where and how” Mason explains. Sustainable practice and ethical sourcing are driving forces of Mason’s design ethos and through selecting to work with materials that are “dented or knocked or torn or scrunched” Mason gives new life to traditionally discarded debris, “combining the storytelling aspect of materials through production.”

With cornerstone events like Rana Plaza spotlighting the hidden cost of garment production, there is not only increased regulation surrounding ethical production, but also a responsibility for fashion practitioners to take accountability for supply chain practices. Collectively in pursuit of fashion careers, Mason and her friends Jasmine Febbraro and Sophie Ruane questioned their relationship with design production and their ethical footprint. Instead of employing traditional flat pattern cutting techniques in their work, which often maximizes textile waste, the young designer’s reimagined their approach to fashion, developing alternative finishing and silhouette techniques to not only hinder textile waste, but to liberate the fabric’s natural formation.  

Through a shared design ethos,  Mason, alongside Febbaro and Ruane, established  Soup Archive – an initiative that sees the three designers create intricately distorted clothing from existing garments; using donations from friends, second hand shops and materials on the street. 

“The driving force [when establishing Soup Archive] wasn’t necessarily always to be ‘sustainable’ but for the garment and person wearing them to entwine, for the clothing and person to be as one.” Through working with used materials, adding found gloves, ironic statements, or stitching together quality textures to make wearable pieces, Soup Archive reflects the designers’ humor & desire to re-use unwanted items in a contemporary manner.

From the minute we are born, textiles wrap the surface of our bodies all day, everyday for the rest of our lives, painting a vast timespan for a fabric’s lifetime. Through re-narrativizing swathes of fabric in such a way, we can learn to appreciate the bumps, creases, wear and tear, its current state plus its history and imminent future…if we can really feel the object and appreciate its presence in our lives then maybe we would be less interested in constantly wanting to attain new pieces – our minds would naturally gravitate less to the new as we’d realize how much we already have.”

The importance of collaborative working extends to Mason’s efforts in co-founding Trash Talk with Matthew Needham, an online conversation on discord, taking place twice a month and an authentic space for creative practitioners to share thoughts and reflections arising in the midst of respective creative practices. Some of the reflections “aren’t always positive” but for Mason, it is important to curate a “genuine and safe space for sharing struggles, excitements, worries and achievements when navigating the creative sphere”. 

As Mason’s design process allows raw material to dictate its natural form, Mason aims to capture the aesthetics of the “spontaneous chaos you find in nature”. Whether it is wood in it’s untouched state, “exposing overgrown hedgerows full of moss” or “rubbish stacked on the street or falling out of a bin”, Mason wants us to negate our approach towards waste and throwaway culture – a practice that has seen fashion firms burn stock that doesn’t sell at a high enough price.

Mason’s designs reflect an expression and acceptance of reality. “To enjoy this aesthetic is to celebrate human existence in its mundanity” according to Mason’s philosophy. “It’s messy and chaotic reality as opposed to a perfect, polished surface”