For their Mastery project, Marily and Sofia created OMANA – a clothing brand focused on redesigning feminism. Marily served as the design director and Sofia as the business director. Together they launched their first design- FURIA.

Fire is the main element of this design. Here, it represents the fires that take place in the protests because of anger or conflicts, as well as the fury of the feminist movement and the extreme strength that appears when all women come together.

Purple represents feminism and greens the fight for legal abortion. Pink symbolizes intersectionality, and orange the feminist movement’s protests. When wearing FURIA, you feel empowered.

Having the opportunity to create a wearable technology that can potentially be part of the solution for such a pressing issue was something rather exciting to accomplish. I think in-depth research and constant brainstorming helped me make a rather thoughtful project, and I believe I’ve grown a lot.

-Class of 2023 Student Seher Y.

Driving Question: How can I create a wearable inspired by the Expo 2020 ‘Opportunity’ theme that solves or draws awareness to a contemporary problem?

Every 40 seconds, someone ends their life. My smartwatch concept has the primary purpose of monitoring the suicidal behavior of the patient while providing a feature of manually alerting selected people about their suicidal state. The watch monitors physical symptoms (e.g. heart rate, breath irregularities, stress, motion tracking) by using sensors to detect suicide risk objectively and rapidly. Out of sight, easy-to-use, and effective.

Driving Question: How can I modernize traditional Filipino fashion?

Project Overview: For her mastery project, CM1 Student Gigi Engalla set out to create a fashion collection that modernizes the traditional Filipino. To do so, she mastered elements of couture craftsmanship and developed a deep understanding of Filipino fashion by learning about its significance and how its classic features can be integrated into a modern medium.

Driving Question: How can I use the logic of building up a garment using the right techniques to build up a dress from scratch?

Module Overview: For this project, my goal was to create a summer dress that meets my goals and purpose. My goal was to do a dress that is trendy, comfortable, and that suits me well. I did all the process from making the pattern, cutting the fabric, sewing it, assembling it, and adjusting it to fit me best. I didn’t know anything about sewing, so I had to learn the basics to then sew my dress. The final product is a photoshoot of the dress showing it from different angles.

Project Reflection: “This project was challenging and exciting at the same time. I knew nothing about sewing, so I had to learn everything from the basics. The dress that I wanted to do was so complex that I would get frustrated at some points and didn’t know how to continue. After tons of work, I am proud and surprised by the final product; I wasn’t expecting to do such a pretty dress with so little experience.”

Driving Question: How does the fashion industry work in China and what are its impacts?

For her personal project, CM2 student Monica D. created a video essay focusing on fast fashion’s environmental impact. The presentation’s goal was to convey the environmental effects of fast fashion and how everyone can help reduce these negative effects by being conscious of the items they choose to buy and donating clothes instead of throwing them away.

Clothing brands make new clothes based on the trends of the moment and churn them out quickly to make them accessible to the general public. Brands that do this are considered fast fashion brands and create a total of 150 billion garments per year.

Monica discusses how the mass amount of clothing produced affects the environment, including the ocean and land, and explains how the production of clothing – from beginning to end – releases an unimaginable amount of greenhouse gas and carbon dioxide into the air. For example, during the fiber production stage, oil is utilized. Next, when the clothes are produced, chemicals are added to change the appearance of the textiles. As the consumer uses the garment, it is washed with additional chemicals, and finally, after use, it goes to landfills where it is eventually burned.

So what can you do about the issue? Monica explains that the main thing you can do is decrease your purchase of fast fashion brands. If everyone did, this would lower consumption, and these brands would be forced to reduce their production, lessening the environmental impact. Also, when purchasing clothes, look into buying items that are made through greener methods.

Driving Question: How might we produce a product or concept that contributes to a more sustainable fashion future?

Final Product: My summative product for this module was a textile art rug bag that visually incorporated ideas of punk and queer fashion. The bag itself is sort of a tote bag style and on each side there is a different design that I hand punched. For the “punk” side of the bag I designed a traditionally punk aesthetic image of an eye, a large X in front of it, and the words “F**k off”. When designing this, I wanted to keep in mind the traditional punk look as well as the values of being anti-capitalist, anti-oppression, and just generally living outside of the traditional social norms. For the other side of the bag, I wanted to express more ideas of the queer self and experience with a rainbow design around a stick figure body. My aim was for it to be colorful and expressive, just like the queercore fashion movements that intersected with the punk subculture. 

What were your goals for this module? How did you achieve them?

I wanted to have fun creating my own unique textile art piece that incorporated different subculture fashions I was interested in exploring. I also wanted to grow in my creativity and continue to make new pieces as an artist. I got to learn a lot more about the history of punk fashion and the queer community’s influence on it. I’m really happy with my final product because I think it’s a very unique piece that not only visually represents the aesthetics of this movement, but because I also made it myself, it embodies the values of the punk and queercore movements as well. 

What did you learn about yourself or about your creative process or about your medium?

I’m pretty new to making rugs, but I’ve absolutely fallen in love with the art form. Making this rug bag was a bit of a risk, but I’m really proud of how it turned out. I like taking creative risks and having fun with my art. In the future, I hope to continue to have fun and practice creativity with any art project I do. 

Driving Question: How might we produce a product or concept that contributes to a more sustainable fashion future?

What were your goals for this module? How did you achieve them?

My goals for this module were to learn more about the circular economy in Estonia’s fashion industry and create a sustainable sneaker design using existing solutions. I achieved my goals by doing research and then creating a small presentation and designing a shoe using Photoshop. I gained inspiration from various sneaker companies. My presentation is down below, but you can also access it HERE on Canva, in case you’d like to check out the links and citations.

What did you learn about yourself or about your creative process or about your medium?

In this module, we focused on all the necessary and unavoidable future developments in the fashion industry, which will hopefully happen during the next few decades. As climate change is slowly starting to emerge from all the other problems under the sun, companies are trying to keep up with the demand for sustainable garments. A good illustration of how serious climate change is would be comparing it to our body temperature – if one’s below 37 degrees Celsius, it’s alright. However, only 2 degrees make a big difference in one’s well-being. For example, when I had a high fever, I felt extremely lethargic – now, imagine the Earth not functioning properly. Exactly – it would be a mess, especially happening at a rapid speed!

It was encouraging to learn how other countries have inspired the Estonian Ministry of the Environment to participate in improving their circular economy systems and how studies conducted have found that, although there’s still a lot of improvement to be done, the environmental awareness index had increased from 37,5/100 in 2014 to 47/100 in 2020. This module made me notice a lot of things I haven’t before, and before buying anything, I’d advise everyone to not rely heavily on surmise, but rather think twice before letting a new clothing item into your life.

My summative consisted of making a brief summary about sustainability in the Estonian fashion industry. Additionally, I also designed an illustrative sneaker that could contribute to the importance of sustainability. I learned that it’s very challenging to learn how to use Photoshop, even more so to master the art of designing a sneaker (which I think I still need to practice in case I want to continue exploring this area of fashion). I didn’t know a lot about materials and where they’re sourced from in Estonia, nor did I know how much of an impact we could have on garment factory workers’ health and well-being. It wasn’t a big surprise for me to discover that making a sneaker using entirely Estonian-sourced goods would most likely result in more CO2 emissions than just buying it in bulk from Finland, where they, in turn, get it from India or Turkey.

Driving Question: How might we produce a product or concept that contributes to a more sustainable fashion future?

What were your goals for this module? How did you achieve them?

Across Africa, traditional prints are integral to feelings of belonging to a group, defining identities, and showing who you are. For generations, cultures around the continent have traditionally made textiles. Using my brand, I hope to show homage to these cultures and disseminate the stories behind their textiles while also using fashion as a catalyst for change to encourage more women to engage in more physical fitness.

For this project, I designed two collections for my activewear brand, Jarabi Fitness, paying homage to traditional African textiles and celebrating African culture and heritage. The designs included West Africa Kente prints and Dashiki prints. Using my platform, I also created blog posts detailing the cultural significance of the prints.

What did you learn about yourself or about your creative process or about your medium?

I learned that my creative process tends to veer towards putting hours of work in on one day when I feel motivated, as opposed to stretching my work out over time. Once I feel a jolt of motivation, I’m able to get a lot of things done.

Driving Question: How might we produce a product or concept that contributes to a more sustainable fashion future?

What were your goals for this module? How did you achieve them?

I made a magazine-like platform that showcases my process through creating the sketches, from my research on sustainable fabrics, why I chose the points from the fashion manifesto and finally each design allocated to the material they are made from. One of my main focuses for the module was to make sure that people embraced using sustainable materials in their designs and creations. I also wanted to include the theme of simplicity, not that trendy.

I guess I could say I was able to learn new art skills like making art sketches and a bit of digital art. I think I have a good understanding of what sustainable materials are best for the fashion industry, which makes sense, because combining sustainability into my designs was my main focus for the summative assessment.

What did you learn about yourself or about your creative process or about your medium?

I got to learn how to work with digital designing through Illustrator and Photoshop. However, it’s still a growing skill for me so I wasn’t able to showcase it for my final product, but I hope to continue improving on it. Making digital art made me realize that there is more to just drawing and painting-basically all the physical work-that can also be expressed in computers which is cool!

I also learned that it’s helpful to look at others’ work for guidance.

Driving Question: How might I grow my creativity during the COVID-19 crisis through exploring the science of creativity and innovation and experimenting with art?

What were your goals for this module? How did you achieve them?

My goal for this module was to grow my creativity by learning more about my creative process through something that I like and that I’m passionate about, which is fashion. Through my process, I was intentional about exploring different things that affected my creativity, such as my environment, and in the end, I created sketches of five dresses each inspired by traditional Moroccan fashion and elements.

What did you learn about yourself or about your creative process or about your medium?

This module allowed me to grow a lot creatively, especially when it comes to things I wasn’t necessarily confident in or didn’t have a lot of skills at. I feel like I’m a lot more comfortable experimenting and taking risks than I was before. I also learned a lot about sketching specifically. It was something very new for me, and there was a lot of trial and error before I managed to create the final product.