How Fashion Can Be a Medium for Climate Action
CFC Member Spotlight: Mira Musank
Author and interviewer: Stella Hertantyo
Mira Musank is an interdisciplinary textile upcycling artist based in the San Francisco Bay Area who transforms discarded textiles into one-of-a-kind garments. Through her platform and monthly newsletter — Fafafoom.com and Fafafoom Studio Newsletter — Mira shares her slow fashion, textile art, and climate artivism projects and thoughtful insights.
Passionate about sustainability in fashion, Mira inspires mindful textile consumption and promotes a “waste not, wear more” ethos.
I interviewed Mira in the Conscious Fashion Collective Membership as part of our Member Spotlight interview series.
Below are some of the highlights from the conversation, including:
The connections between fashion and the climate crisis,
How we can challenge the narrative to show that fashion is about more than aesthetic value and a powerful medium for systemic change,
How we can all normalize practices of upcycling and repair in our own circles.
What led you to work at the intersection of fashion and sustainability?
It all started when I began attending graduate fashion shows at various art and fashion schools in the San Francisco Bay Area. When you’re still in school and creating a collection, there is so much room for creativity.
At the time, I had just started my career and was working in fashion retail. I loved that these garments were so much more creative than the clothing I saw in stores. I was enamored and I had so many questions about how they constructed and created the garments.
I followed this curiosity. I pulled out my first sewing machine, learned how to use it by watching videos and reading the manual, and started experimenting. It was a long process, because learning to sew isn’t easy. I’m completely self-taught and after over 10 years of doing this, I still consider myself a beginner.
This curiosity about construction is what got me started, but what kept me going was the realization that there is an over-abundance of high-quality material available that others view as waste.
When I started learning to sew, I didn’t want to buy new fabric, because I wasn’t any good yet. So I started asking people in my community if they had scraps that they could donate to me. Many people donated and what I realized was their scraps were not scraps at all. They were beautiful pieces of fabric that others didn’t have uses for.
That’s when I realized that I wanted my textile work to be a solution for these unused fabrics and to raise awareness about the reality of textile waste.
How do you use textile art and slow fashion to draw connections to climate justice?
Climate change is driven by the fossil fuel industry. Many synthetic fibers are derived from fossil fuels. So our current landscape of overproduction of clothing is directly connected to the acceleration of climate change.
These devastating climate disasters are happening, because the linear economy is working as it was designed to. It relies on huge bottom-line profits that are prioritized over people’s wellbeing and planetary boundaries.
With my textile art, I try to visualize the increasingly alarming impact of textile waste on people and the planet’s wellbeing. I do this with the awareness that I live in a country that is privileged enough not to see waste every day. I come from Indonesia, and every day we have no such privilege — waste is present everywhere.
Often the people who are receiving our waste are Indigenous people and local communities who are far from the biggest contributors to this problem — yet they have to deal with the burden.
Many people who live outside of the countries where waste is an everyday reality have an “out of sight, out of mind” mentality. But this problem isn’t as far away as people think. Textile waste is now the fastest-growing component of California landfills. According to the California Product Stewardship Council, textiles comprise three percent of total landfill waste and are the fastest-growing component of California landfills.
So I create intriguing and colorful textile art that I hope sparks people’s curiosity. Then when they look closer, they’ll notice that this colorful object is made from textile waste. These artworks grow in size with each iteration to mimic the growing nature of textile waste.
Given that the climate crisis is one of the biggest crises of our time, I feel that it’s one of our duties as artists to become storytellers and climate artivists.
Can you share a bit more about your Gathered Cloths Project?
Gathered Cloths is a textile art project that I started when I was participating in the Climate Creative 2021 cohort. The theme of the cohort was “waste to art”. This inspired me to repurpose discarded textile cutoffs to create vibrant pieces of ruffled cloth. No new fabrics were used.
I made many pieces of this ruffled cloth and then modularly assembled them, like building blocks. Using safety pins to join them, I turned them into a garment of sorts for various exhibitions. When it's done being exhibited, I remove the safety pins and disassemble it again.
I’m constantly making more of these ruffled cloth pieces, so the garment is constantly growing. The first iteration was made from seven ruffled cloths in the form of a corset. The eighth iteration was made from 100 ruffled cloths and covered a person from head to toe — and a grand piano. It’s currently in its tenth iteration and is made up of 128 cloths. It keeps growing to highlight the alarming growth of the textile waste crisis.
A lot of people don’t understand that this art piece is always evolving. People will reach out and ask if they can showcase the sixth iteration and I have to tell them that that iteration no longer exists. Although people don’t always understand this, I think it’s a powerful statement to show the impermanence that we have to get used to with the worsening climate crisis.
The landscapes and places we know today may be gone tomorrow, because of extreme weather events. So Gathered Cloths also acts as a reminder that we can’t take for granted what we have today.
How can we challenge the narrative to show that fashion is about more than aesthetic value and is a powerful medium for systemic change?
The discussions about climate and fashion are still very separate, but the gaps are getting closer. As artists, I think we have to keep highlighting the connections between these complex issues.
When I attended San Francisco Climate Week and New York Climate Week, a lot of the realizations were that nothing exists in silos and everything is connected. For example, fashion has a huge microplastic issue, and this is connected to ocean health and human health.
Our job as artists is to tell stories that make these connections clear. We have to tell these stories so well so that we can keep these discussions going. Legislation and technology can advance our structures, but artists can move people through stories and narratives.
History, ingenuity, cultural heritage, identity, and pretty much everything related to our existence can be connected to fashion. People who still think that fashion is just about aesthetics have a lot to unlearn.
Fafafoom Studio is a service-based business model. What is your approach to shifting this mindset and helping people understand the value of your services?
One word: perseverance. You have to keep pushing for it. Championing long-term benefits for people and the environment is still a radical approach, especially because fast fashion has distorted our understanding of value.
People's relationship with clothes and textiles has been distorted because of the price that we are conditioned to believe is appropriate to pay for clothing. So shifting this conditioning isn’t going to be a short process. It’s going to take all of us pushing for a change in this narrative. I could never achieve this alone, that’s for sure.
I’m currently part of a CIimatebase Fellowship. As part of this, we are running a survey to better understand people’s relationship to their clothes and the challenges people face in prolonging the lifespan of their clothes.
We have gotten lots of responses and it has shown me that a lot of people are interested in shifting their habits, but there may not be enough accessible solutions available to them yet — or at least perceived easily-accessible solutions.
Artists, makers, and people who run service-based businesses are the solutions. We need to keep making ourselves known.
How can we normalize the concepts of upcycling and repair in our own circles — friends, family, and colleagues?
I’m still working on this, but the best thing you can do is lead by example. If the people around you see examples of upcycling and repair, it will start to feel normal.
We can also find ways to have our friends, family, and colleagues be a part of the solutions. For example, my husband has a crossbody bag that he adores. One day he brought it to me and showed me that it was in desperate need of some repairs. I worked on these repairs by hand — reinforcing, restitching, and patching. He was so happy with the repairs, because he can now wear the bag for another five years at least.
I think the person needs to experience an example of upcycling and repair before they can be convinced.
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To connect with Mira and get featured in one of our Member Spotlights join the Conscious Fashion Collective Membership, the online community for sustainable fashion professionals. You'll also get access to live events, workshop recordings, career resources, extra job posts, and more.