Invasive Species
What if we are the invasive species?
A collection of garments designed to fold the wearer back into the environment symbiotically.
Autumn Seed Saver Coat
operating from the perspective that humans are an invasive species - non-native species that spread rapidly once established - this collection of garments shroud you in a lightweight, durable material. The hems are sewn outward, left deliberately unfinished to collect seeds and spores and carry them on your person to their next location.
Charcoal Zip-Off Trousers
An outdoor apron, a work coat, and trousers that transform into shorts—each made from durable, temperature-regulating silk taffeta. This fabric is woven to display different colours from various angles, mimicking nature's ability to camouflage and attract pollinators as needed. Greens recede into the landscape, while burnt oranges contrast and then fade with the changing seasons. Black blends into the night, inverse of each day.
Beige SEED Legionnaires Cap
Each garment comes with a collection of six seed types that can grow mostly year round and begin to comprise an edible and medicinal garden. Seed saving at the end of their life cycle will yield many more seeds to plant in the following seasons.
Nettle Outdoor Apron
seeds included:
Broad beans grow strong and nourish birds, animals and ourselves with fiber and protein, they nourish the soil with nitrogen.
Nasturtiums, with their peppery edible leaves and flowers, a great pollinator, food to the caterpillar and to the soil below. One plant will provide hundreds of seeds and will return year after year if left to its own devices.
Spring Pollinator Coat
seeds included:
Peas - easy to grow, reliable, nourishing - full of vitamin C above ground, feeding the soil below.
Calendula, a companion plant that attracts insects that would otherwise settle on a useful harvest, its bright orange flowers a neon flashing pollinator.
Nettle Zip-Off Trousers
seeds included:
Kale, a dense, dark cruciferous that keeps going long into winter and provides vital nutrients both above and below the soil, long after other growth has died back.
Red Clover - an herb used medicinally for hundreds of years, a pollinator that will come back time and again, a nourishing sprout. When eaten young, a red clover sprout continues to synthesise while moving through a digestive system - one of the most alive things that can be ingested.
Charcoal Outdoor Apron
The traveling seeds each garment picks up move further because of you. Where you stop and choose to engage your labour is up to you.
None of these seeds are considered invasive in the UK, where this project originates. Harvest and move from location to location at your own discretion.
Green SEED Legionnaires Cap
Is it eco acclerationism or something more twee? A radical position or just what was happening anyway - MADE VISIBLE.
An East London allotments’s illegal three-cornered leek is an Upstate New York farm-to-table chef’s prized wild ramps. When a local council’s budgets don’t allow for the best practices of Japanese Knotweed removal, day labourers build encampments under the vines; finding safe shelter.
