According to National Geographic report: “A scrap of difference: why fashion offcuts don’t need to end up in a landfill”, one of the most unspoken culprits of pre-consumer waste production is hidden in the manufacturing process. Traditional pattern-making, based on organic body shapes, can produce up to 15% of textile waste during the marking and cutting process. 

Zero Waste Fashion emerges as an opportunity for designers and manufacturers to implement creative project design methodologies that have a positive impact on waste production, by rethinking conventional design, patternmaking and construction techniques to work with a global context and take advantage of the entire fabric width. 

Here, the main focus is shifted to the raw material, the backbone of any garment, factoring in the width of the fabric to maximize material utilization. Design is no longer based on a body or a mannequin, nor are fashion figures drawn as a source of inspiration. Rather, the design is based on the optimization of the fabric through the geometric figures that will form the volumetric body grid on which the design will be based.

Designing without generating waste poses considerable improvements on the creative process. Patterns have new shapes and fit together in unconventional ways, construction requires technical specifications of operation sequences in order to build the garment, but at the same time they are straightforward to construct if one has access to these specifications.