Up-cycling as green path for the artisanal self-entrepreneurship and professional training in the tailoring fashion sector

What is Fashion Upcycling?

A tailoring technique but also a green conception of fashion, well suited to artisanal creations, and able to give a unique distinctiveness to the clothes made by its use.

Thanks to the technical know-how and creativity of their creators, through the upcycling process used or salvaged clothes can be converted in new original high-quality items with a new sustainable second life.

This valid strategy to rethink waste or disused materials as well as to consume respecting environment can contribute to encourage behavioral changes in future artisanal tailors, who can become active agents of change and more attentive to relevant issues as saving resources, reducing energy use and waste

About the project

Fashion Up is an Erasmus+ project that aims to wager on creativity and environmental sustainability to innovate the craft tailoring sector promoting the Fashion Upcycling and supporting self-employment initiatives in this area. The project brings together partners from Greece, Italy, Poland, and Portugal to develop and implement an original Training Program (UpTraK -
Upcycling Training Kit) made by modules and resources on upcycling techniques and entrepreneurship.

Objectives

Develop a Training Program (UpTraK - Upcycling Training Kit) centered on fashion
upcycling for future artisan tailors, fashion professionals and entrepreneurs
Promote upcycling as sustainable alternative for artisanal fashion design and production.
Support the creation of new artisanal businesses based on sustainable practices, valorizing the individual initiative and creativity as support to employability, career advancement or positioning in this area.
Contribute to a more sustainable, circular and slow idea of fashion.
Raise awareness of the environmental and social impacts of fast fashion.

Target audience

Young with legal age and adults to support their access or positioning to the Labor Market.
A special regard will be paid to people with fewer opportunities to open new employment prospects:

NEETs, low skilled adults.N
Students in fashion and design schools to move them close to the Labor Market by acquiring more operational skills and specialization
Fashion professionals, such as tailors, designers, and pattern makers interested in diving into upcycling businesses and sustainable fashion

Activities

Comparative research in partner countries (Italy, Greece, Poland and Portugal), catching data, info and main references on circular economy and last trend for sustainable fashion, upcycling procedures and entrepreneurial potential
Development of training modules and resources on upcycling techniques for fashion enclosed in a proper original Training Program.
Support for the creation of new artisanal businesses.

Dissemination of project results through a website, social media, and other channels.

Impact

Contribute to update the training offer for the artisan tailoring making it more in line with the Labor Market evolution and the last trends for sustainable and eco-responsive fashion.
Improve access and transition to the local Labor Market in the artisan fashion area especially for youth and people with fewer opportunities, improving their skills for employability and sense of initiative and entrepreneurship.
Sustain female employment through self-employment also pursuing equal opportunities and better reconciliation of life-work times.
Promote awareness about the benefits coming from the circular-economy within the artisan fashion area by adopting a green aptitude to rethink waste and disused materials, to
consume respecting environment and to foster behavioral change.
Strengthen the cross-sectoral cooperation among VET Organizations, Circular Economy
Organizations and handicraft fashion business.

"Sustainable fashion is not just a trend, it is a necessity."
Anna Wintour

Partners

Results

UpLeaF - Upcycling Learning Framework

A general introductory compendium linked to an initial project’s survey phase carried out in partner countries and focused on themes such as the relationship between the circular economy and the fashion sector, the basic principles and definitions pertaining to this area (re-cycling, down-cycling, up-cycling), entrepreneurship perspectives for eco-responsive artisanal fashion and the clothes upcycling process in a whole.

Upcycling Training Kit (UpTraK), the project core

Original Training Program for future artisan tailoring professionals, specialized in fashion
upcycling. The Program includes proper training materials, practical indications and video tutorials
on clothes upcycling techniques and green self-employment strategies in the artisan tailoring. The
Program will result from partners’ collaboration and exchange from different background such as
training, artisan tailoring, circular economy.
Available as OER in Italian, Portuguese, Greek, Polish and English from Results Section.

Still in progress

Pilot courses in Partner Countries

Four editions of the experimental training based on the UpTrak professionalizing Program will be
delivered in each partner country. 220 training hours on innovative contents, whose result will be
an original upcycling project made by 10 learners. Their creations will be paraded in Florence at
the project’s ending and collected in a Fashion Catalogue, describing the stylistic and
environmentally sustainable choices behind each dress.