Fringe Benefits
The Edition One Shirt, designed by Sarah Brunnhuber for Stem (image: Fabian Frinzel).
Uneven fringe hangs from the chest of Sarah Brunnhuber’s crisp cotton jacket like haphazardly chopped doll’s hair. Even when it falls in more conventional places, such as the arms or the back, the fringe doesn’t recall the jacket of a biker, a cowboy or a rockstar. It is, instead, wispy like baby hair or vermicelli noodles; the shoulder tufts are more like budding angel feathers than a military epaulette.
“I’ve kind of coined the term ‘form follows technique’,” Brunnhuber says, explaining that she doesn’t decide where the fringes on her garments
are positioned – these design elements are an expression of how her fabric is woven and cut. “I think of the fringes as being my design assistant,” she says. “I think of them as cooler than me – they bring an edge and a rawness to the design that I would never think of myself.”
Instead of cutting a clothing pattern out of a rectangular bolt of fabric and throwing the scraps away, Brunnhuber initially wanted to weave fabric on a loom with carefully placed empty spaces in order to create a ready-made pattern and avoid waste. After realising these blank spaces would disrupt the tension of the loom and cause it to malfunction, however, she replaced them with patches of looser weaves which she chops apart to make her signature fringes, creating garments with no offcuts.
Since starting her company Stem and releasing her Edition One collection, Brunnhuber has also collaborated on a zero-waste line with luxury fashion brand Ganni. “I try to position Stem in between craft and industry, merging high tech and low tech,” she explains. “The fabric can be mass produced, but I think of the cutting technique as a craft, which is quite interesting to do at a time when hand crafts are dying out, especially in textiles.”
But convincing mills to make a challenging new fabric is a difficult task, since it takes time to experiment with weaving it. Brunnhuber also uses certified yarns such as recycled or organic cotton, and many mills don’t have these yarns certified for use on their machines when dealing with small quantities. Creative hub Lottozero has helped connect her with mills in Prato, Italy’s textile district, but her work is often delayed while larger and less complex orders are prioritised. In the future, Brunnhuber plans to open her own micro mill in Denmark to produce her fabrics locally and cater to companies on the smaller end of the mass production scale. “In the industry 300m is considered the minimum production quantity for a roll of fabric, and you generally have to pay a subsidy for anything less,” she says. “We need to put systems in place to produce less in a way which makes economic sense.”
Rather than hiding the seams of her garments, Brunnhuber’s fringes flamboyantly highlight them. Her clothes tell a production story that Brunnhuber hopes will provoke her customers and the wider fashion industry to reflect on their consumption habits. She exhibits her garments alongside their fabric to illustrate the process, and the patchwork of carefully divided textures reminds me of seeing farmlands from a descending airplane and glimpsing a view of a laborious and often hidden process. “I realise that I’ve made producing clothing quite complicated,” she says. “And in some ways that’s a really good thing, because it’s actually way too easy to make a lot of clothes, and I think that’s led to disconnection and overproduction.”
Words Helen Gonzalez Brown
Photograph Fabian Frinzel
This article was originally published in Disegno #37. To buy the issue, or subscribe to the journal, please visit the online shop.