Micro Nutrient Couture: Emily Crane

Don’t you just wish that when you are walking along the street with a sudden craving for food you could just rip off a piece of your fashionable dress and eat it? Emily Crane is a designer who started the Micro-Nutrient Couture project in 2010 which makes exactly that kind of scenario possible. Micro-Nutrient Couture developed through the idea of using zero resources to create fashion futures and excluding current mass production possibilities.

The project examines the everyday customer who is tending towards fast fashion, high street consumption and throw-away prices. Emily Crane cooks, blends, cultures and forms different substances in order to create fashion using boundary-less techniques from the everyday and provoking a new conception of what we see as fashion. Micro-Nutrient fashion awakens the idea of individuality and uniqueness, as no-one but the individual will ever wear the same dress again. The process has formed a deeper consciousness of out future planet and the impact from current fashion cycles. Crane describes her fashion as “no longer a thing of simple beauty, but of nutrition also.”

In 2010 the total value of exports of textiles and garments from China reached $149.8 billion according to the China Textile Network Co. The demand for textiles has had a great increase (in the European Union especially) and is hindering sustainable ideals to break forward. Designers such as Emily Crane use sources that are locally scouted, which reduce the costs and environmental consequences occur when importing inexpensive textiles.

It is incredibly interesting to see such a creative process with uncommon materials and shows how sustainability can be pushed much further than we think. Going from cotton to gelatin is a huge step, but Emily Crane proves that it is not impossible. It is artists and designers like her that trigger inspiration to pursue sustainability in a creative and artistic way which can help us develop a more environmental outlook on fashion couture.

Micro-Nutrient Couture from Emily Crane on Vimeo.