ABOUT
Tying Eden Tan’s work together is a desire to play with the order in which things are manufactured. People are most familiar with his seminal work, which sought to create clothes without consuming any material. The result was On Borrowed Fabric: six looks made from the first few metres of six borrowed rolls of fabric, leaving the material embellished but not damaged, and ready to be reused. At the other end of the spectrum is where Eden Tan spends most of his time: inventing industrial-lite processes to recycle others’ consumption. While most recycling first breaks waste down to its component fibres before reusing them, Tan treats the discarded product as a material in and of itself, removing the middleman and going straight from old object to new object. An Eden Tan product is designed to simultaneously celebrate what that object once was, renew the value of its constituent materials, and build what the product’s legacy will be.