Dr Ruxandra Lupu
I was trained as a traditional printmaker in Italy, where I gained advanced skills in textile printing. In 2017 I took specific courses at Leeds College of Art focusing on sustainable textile printing and natural dyes.
During my PhD at the University of Leeds, I started maturing an interest in heritage innovation, especially in relation to fashion craft practices. Over the past years, I delved more into innovative fashion projects for which I received grants from the EU, British Council and Nordic Culture Fund. These projects deal among other with interactive children’s clothes (using AR/VR to read patterns), transdisciplinary Lab concepts that experiment with new uses of fashion and projects which ideate hybrid co-design systems for fashion communities.
As a researcher in Digital Humanities, I deploy my skills in arts-based practice, aesthetic theory, co-creation and innovation driven design to develop bold ideas that transform the way we perceive and consume fashion. Wearing both a researcher as well as an artist hat enables me to juggle with different ideas and approaches contemporaneously, creating new connections and coming up with bold/transformative ideas.
To give an idea about the nature and scope of the projects that I am interested in, I share below further info on the initiatives I have worked on until now.
- Wear-Abouts are interactive children’s clothes offering digital access to heritage that change our relation to the environment; using co-creative approaches, we design collections that ‘give a voice’ to children in relation to how clothes are being created (we are part of Designing for Children Rights Association).
- Cirkelkids (part of Illustrious North) is a blog for sustainability in fashion that co-creates knowledge/insight about the sustainability of children products by working with researchers in fashion sustainability who are at the same time mothers. “North at Home” (part of Illustrious North) is an experimental kindergarten format that aims to bring Nordic education approaches to the rest of the world and support mothers/families throughout the educational journey of their children. It uses fashion/toys and other objects for children to foster alternative education.
- The Illustrious Atelier is a new experiential format for engaging with fashion that encourages recycling, upcycling and education.
- The WeAr Design ecosystem has a specific approach to living heritage, educating towards a caring and respectful engagement with design through co-creation.
- Listing ID: 2567
- Contact: Dr Ruxandra Lupu
- What are your aspirations and plans for the future?: I would like to continue working in a non-conventional way, at the intersection of research and industry. My aim is to develop and implement more ambitious (one could say ‘impossible’) projects through which I design for inclusiveness, wellbeing and sustainability. Through these projects I would like to carry on the idea of sustainability as a resilient and caring way of living that can benefit communities and our planet.
- What types of projects are you interested in working on through Future Fashion Factory?: I am interested to collaborate on projects related to circular economy, fashion aesthetics and data-driven design. At the moment I am focused on developing tests/prototypes for the following topics: interactive children’s clothes using VR/AR; digital platforms offering hyper-customized products/ new collaborative spaces; using data-driven processes to map invisible fashion craft knowledge; immersive digital libraries for sustainable fashion materials. I would love to get in touch with people sharing similar interests, to discuss more.