About me…
Dr Mark Liu.
The fashion designer who brings science to fashion.
A sustainable fashion designer best known for pioneering zero-waste fashion at London Fashion Week in 2008. During his Masters in Textiles Futures at Central Saint Martin’s College, Mark realised that the key to better fashion was to understand why traditional techniques work using science and learn from mathematics to create better methods. His mathematical patternmaking allowed him to make curved, fitted garments fit together like a jigsaw pattern allowing him to create zero-waste fashion garments. His fashion label was exhibited at fashion weeks for several years and in museums worldwide.
He grew dissatisfied with traditional fashion patternmaking processes, which were systemically inaccurate and wasteful. Returning to research, his PhD invented the field of “Non-Euclidean Fashion Patternmaking”, which explains why clothing does not fit and how modern curved 3D mathematics can help create better-fitting clothing.
Holding a post as a Chancellor’s Postdoctoral Research Fellow, he collaborated with academic experts in science, engineering, and law. He developed research into fashion STEM education for young people, carbon-negative algae threads, gender justice laws in the fast fashion industry and 3D patternmaking algorithms. His research had applications in space suits, medical gowns and 3D scan to fitted garment technologies. He is also an expert the media would contact for advice on the fashion industry.
Mark became uncomfortable with “sustainable fashion” design education taught in universities as it was not based on scientific evidence. He created the website “Fashion is Science”, a body of research that debunks sustainable fashion greenwash.
About: Fashion is Science…
After spending years collaborating with scientific, engineering, and legal experts, I learned the limitations of “sustainable fashion” in the field of Design. Most concepts taught are “greenwash”, misleading advertising based on no scientific evidence. Commonly taught concepts, such as the “circular economy” and “upcycling”, violate the laws of physics, yet designers and businesspeople don’t seem to mind.
Design institutions that teach these concepts may be reluctant to change their syllabus as their expert design staff don’t like having their skills devalued and because collaboration between different disciplines is difficult. The current design educational system in 2023 will indoctrinate an entire generation of designers to greenwash the industry for the interests of corporations and the fossil fuel industry. Without understanding the underlying science of fashion, “sustainable fashion” experts will accelerate the size, fossil fuel usage, carbon dioxide emissions and appalling human rights records of the fashion industry.
With the looming climate crisis, I hope the young people who inherit this planet will read these words and start moving in a different direction. We can’t consume our way out of the climate crisis, it will require activism. The fashion industry is unregulated, and we must establish laws to regulate it from misleading claims, unregulated manufacturing practices and exploitative labour laws.
Fashion must move beyond the domain of design expertise if we are going to reform the fashion industry. This is liberating as activism to change fashion is not restricted to fashion design experts but anyone who wants to make a difference.
You can find out more about Dr Mark Liu at: www.drmarkliu.com