Fashioning fire hose: Design in the liminal spaces between product lives

Abstract

Among the scrapheap of society’s unwanted materials lies a vast and wondrous world of fashion potential. In the liminal phase between a product’s rejection and its fate as landfill, designers are called on to create a positive alternative. The upcycling process encourages designers to consider how they might release the past social lives of products to uncover the design potential of new creations. Upcycling introduces the dimensions of time, designer knowledge and skills into the creation of a garment or accessory. This practice makes a place in fashion for challenging the hypercycle of consumption and the new by valuing fabrics that can tell stories of their past lives in other times and places. In this article I examine the appropriation of retired fire hose in the fashion industry by the company Elvis & Kresse. In the framework of Arnold van Gennep’s ritual phases of transition, namely the ‘pre-liminal’, ‘liminal’ and ‘post-liminal’, of critical interest is the second or liminal phase, in which the retired fire hose risks becoming obscure and permanently separated from reality but is instead incorporated into luxury bags and belts. This article advances the perception of the liminal as a place for collecting ‘polluting’ materials and, via design, reintroducing them into society. In my focus on this company and on fire hose as a fashion textile, I probe the liminal threshold as a place of creative experimentation and a powerful framework for understanding and structuring product transitions. The ability to change how an item is perceived by fracturing its sense of time and place highlights the importance of upcycling in tackling many of the current criticisms levelled at fashion while introducing new roles for designers as facilitators of transformation.