The Research School of Social Sciences recently hosted a novel event: 'Campus Couture: Foraged Fashion (we are dyeing to end fast fashion)' - a fashion show put on by students from the School of Art and Design’s Introduction to Textiles. It was a great opportunity for those of us in the social sciences to see the material artefacts of creative collaborative processes, stylishly modelled in the foyer of the RSSS building. 

Over the semester, the students gathered natural materials from four sites on the ANU campus to dye thrifted fabric and clothing items. Gathering material from the Coombs Building, the Research School of Biology, 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. 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.