Central Saint Martins student Jiyong Kim has used sunlight, rather than traditional printing or dying processes, to create the organic, flowing patterns that grace his graduate menswear collection.
All eight looks in the Daylight Matters project were made from reclaimed vintage garments, textile industry offcuts and antique fabrics such as curtains and parasols. Kim chose the used materials as a way to address the 92 million tons of textile waste generated by the fashion industry every year.
"Textile and garment manufacturing causes environmental pollution and printing wastes a lot of water, only for the garments to eventually be discarded and cause more damage to the environment," Kim told Dezeen.

"That's why I decided to make every constituent element of a garment including the fabric, buttons and zips from reclaimed materials," the designer continued. "Just over half of the garments also use a square cutting pattern to minimise waste." The finished garments were then placed on mannequins and left out in the sun for up to five months to fade naturally, while also cutting out the large amounts of water and harmful chemicals used in standard dyeing and production methods.

Kim intends the collection to be a rallying cry against throwaway culture and hopes to create a new kind of appreciation for the process of sun fading through clothes which, much like wine, increase in value as time progresses.
That's because, over the course of several mont...