From the Sea
Seaweed jacket, skirt, trousers and bag from Tanguy Mélinand’s graduate collection (photo: Tanguy Mélinand).
A coat spun from seaweed that turns golden when the light shines through. Ribbons of kelp waiting to be transformed. Three guardians of the seaweed, each dressed in the muted tones of their subject matter. It sounds like an apocryphal setup from a fairytale, a kindlier and more eco-conscious Rumpelstiltskin, but standing in the lobby of The Reykjavik EDITION you’re inclined to believe in the mystical.
Outside, daylight shines eerily for all but a few hours of twilit weirdness in the witching hours. Snow dusts the imposing cliffs of Mount Esja, visible from across the harbour, and wind whips through the rigging of fishing boats. Inside, the cavernous lobby – designed by Icelandic studio T.ark alongside New York-based practice Roman and Williams – resembles the most tasteful kind of supervillain’s lair. It’s all volcanic-black stone, black shaggy sheepskin rugs, and flames crackling in the midcentury-style hanging fireplace. As you enter, you are greeted by a towering vörður, an elaborate cairn of stacked rocks like those that the island’s original Norse settlers left for each other to help find their way.
Mélinand demonstrated his work with seaweed at DesignMarch in Iceland (photo: Tanguy Mélinand).
For the duration of DesignMarch 2023, Iceland’s design week (formerly held in March, now in May, a pandemic shift that has stuck thanks to the weather and good vibes that so much sunshine brings to the capital), The Reykjavik EDITION played host to Seaweedworks, a nascent not-for-profit dedicated to elevating the profile of seaweed as a design material. The founder, Charlie Strand, is a British-Icelandic stylist and fashion photographer who has been experimenting with seaweed as a design material. Flanking him are fashion designers Tanguy Mélinand and Drífa Líftóra, whose recent work harnessing this precious, albeit capricious, material was on display as one of the dozens of pop-up design week installations.
Strand, the ringleader of the three, founded Seaweedworks to build a network of collaboration that can promote seaweed as a sustainable material and raise the profile of the handful of artists currently working with it. “We’re really keen that seaweed gets its moment in the sun, rather than just our projects or our name,” says Strand. “But, I’m not going to give you a three-hour lecture on the history of seaweed, that might be a little bit dry.” The lecture would probably have been fascinating, though, as seaweed is a strange and marvellous thing. It’s fast growing and, like all plants, absorbs carbon dioxide while producing oxygen. Unlike crops on land such as cotton or linen, it requires neither fresh water nor fertiliser. It’s also truly ancient. Fossil records suggest the first green seaweeds evolved at least 800m years, potentially as far back as 1bn years ago.
The lobby of The Reykjavik EDITION where Seaweedworks was displayed (photo: Nikolas Koenig)
While it may be older than the dinosaurs, seaweed is still a fairly untested material for fashion, but the potential to make garments that can completely biodegrade is attractive in an industry that is gaining notoriety for how much of its output ends up in landfill – or worse. Consider the piles of unwanted fast fashion flotsam washing up on the beaches of Accra in Ghana, a ghoulish manmade parody of seaweed. Spurred on by this purpose, Seaweedworks’ members are pooling their knowledge. "I wanted to connect with people who have already been, like myself, experimenting and seeing if we can exchange ideas,” explains Strand. “Rather than having a competition factor between seaweed artists, because it's quite a difficult thing to work with.”
Working with seaweed currently remains very tricky. Although it grows heartily and abundant beneath the waves, seaweed quickly begins to rot once ashore. That salty-fetid tang that haunts beaches is seaweed in decay, and the artists must work rapidly to dry and cure it. Each has their own method of gathering their raw material. Strand chooses to work only with plants that have already washed up, a foraging approach similar to woodworkers who only use fallen trees. Then he sets to work processing it, experimenting with different methods of preserving the seaweed while turning it into a fabric-like material that could be worked with. “It’s like a mad scientist approach of tweaking it,” Strand says of his trial-and-error approach. “It's not a random process. I tend to do 10 different blocks for every single batch, so that I can go, OK, even 10 per cent more water, this time is going to make it a bit more flexible, however, it might make it a bit weaker.” Everything in the process is a trade-off that will impact what each piece can be used for.
Seaweed, harvested by hand, drying at Mélinand’s family home on the French coast (photo: Tanguy Mélinand).
Mélinand, on the other hand, “does the most hardcore foresting” explains Strand, going out into the water to collect his material himself. Growing up on the coast of Brittany, Mélinand found that the seaweed industry was all around him, hauling it up in great volume so that it can be crushed to produce sodium alginate – the gelling agent added to skincare and cosmetics to make it thicker and more moisturising. Mélinand takes a more bespoke approach to his harvesting. “I harvest them by hand so I can select which one I cut,” says Mélinand. “I met with a seaweed farmer who taught me how to cut seaweed perfectly to let it grow again,” he explains. “He taught me about the process of the life and death of seaweed.” Working locally has its limitations, of course. “In Iceland the water is much colder, so there is much more seaweed already there. In France, you can collect seaweed for four months [of the year], depending on the species.”
Once the seaweed has been harvested, Mélinand processes the fronds on his family’s property, drying, curing and experimenting with colour in a makeshift studio beneath curved corrugated roofing sheets. Different species produce different effects as raw material for crafting; some flat like ribbons of semi-translucent aquaponic pasta, some bubbled and whorled so they look like the skin of an exotic alien life-form. To create the garments, he laboriously stitches together the panels with cotton thread; he estimates the jacket alone took 150 hours to make. Despite the trendy, workwear style aesthetic of his designs, the process is as involved as couture. His first seaweed collection, the graduate project for his BA from Haute Ecole d'art et de design de Genève (HEAD), has already earned Mélinand acclaim in the form of the Gold Award for Sustainable Design at the 2022 Yinger Prize, an international fashion awards programme in China.
Seaweed specimens pressed between silk and cigarette rolling paper.
Since then, Mélinand has continued to push the boundaries of what can be achieved with the material. He has collaborated on a new collection with a friend who works with OCB paper – the ultra-thin paper used for hand-rolling cigarettes – as a medium, pressing whole fronds of seaweed flat between a layer of silk and the paper. In the finished pieces, the interleaved specimens appear like a hyperrealistic botanical print. Next he is working on colouring the seaweed, dying it fabulous shades of orange and blue with food dye, or a rich Burgundy achieved by steeping the seaweed in wine. The natural palette still holds interest for him, too, though. “Seaweed can come from dark green to brighter colours, and I love to play with that,” he says. The plant also bleaches naturally in the sunlight, an effect that Mélinand works with to create patterns in his pieces. He pleats finished garments and leaves them under glass in the sun, creating a dappled camouflage effect. He’s also in the early stages of experimenting to create a leather-like material out of seaweed, grinding it down into powder, then reconstituting in into strips and panels in a method he likens to a paper-making process.
It’s exciting times, clearly, at the vanguard of sartorial seaweed, but the learning curve is steep. “With each bit of seaweed that we prepare, we're learning a lot from that,” says Strand. But once it goes into the garment, that's when we really learn. It can be a painful experience.” Líftóra, who is a screen printer and illustrator as well as a seamstress, has only recently begun to work with seaweed. At DesignMarch, she displayed a fantastical jacket she stitched using seaweed panels to create an armoured effect that looks like a piece of costumery from a high budget sci-fi film. Working with such fine, friable pieces of seaweed was a painstaking task. “I’m aways learning,” she says. “Seaweed is incredibly difficult to work with. I find that it becomes very interesting, and easier to work with, when you add the padding and just layering in general.” Each stitch is an experiment, which makes designing and making with seaweed a high wire act. “You don't have the benefit of ‘Oh, there’s this couture house that has been doing it for 100 years, and I can really learn from their mistakes.’ We've got to learn from our own mistakes. And that's always the downside of trying to innovate something.”
Mélinand’s work on the catwalk for the 2022 Yinger Prize (photo: Raphaëlle Mueller).
Despite looking rugged and tough due to its leather-like appearance, Seaweedworks is keen to stress that as a material it should be seen as closer to its equally luxurious but more sensitive cousin silk. You would never treat a seaweed garment roughly or throw it in a washing machine, but cherish it as wearable art. And despite coming from a distinctly watery place, once fashioned into garments it shouldn’t get wet. “You wouldn't be able to, for example, go out in a seaweed jacket in the rain,” warns Strand. “It would definitely start to change the structure.” That’s not to say that a showerproof seaweed jacket is not in the future, though. “These are stepping stones on how the material evolves,” he adds. “We’re at its infancy, which is really exciting.”
Interest in seaweed is gaining momentum across a variety of industries. Designers have been working with seaweed as a material for creating objects and structures for some years now, most notably in the work of Julia Lohmann, who founded the Department of Seaweed in 2013 at the V&A to bring together makers interested in working with this sustainable resource. Lohmann builds elaborate structures informed by the natural world out of rattan, stretching panels of translucent kelp over them to create a stained glass window effect. Skincare brands such as Haekels, which picks its own seaweed in the English seaside town of Margate, are also making the most of the plant’s natural moisturising properties.
Strand is hopeful that Seaweedworks’ presence at DesignMarch will garner future collaborators, intrigued by the potential of seaweed as a sustainable and rarified material for garment-making. “If there was like someone who would give us a little bit more of a facility,” he enthuses, “then the speed at which this progresses could really ramp up.” It’s an auspicious location for such a project; there are an abundance of glamorous people passing through the lobby of the Reykjavik Edition, and one hotel staff member informs me that Chanel staffers only stay there when they’re in town. As Strand says: “Please, watch this space.”
Words India Block
Photography courtesy of Seaweedworks
Disegno's trip to DesignMarch was paid for by The Reykjavik EDITION, with flights provided by Icelandair.