Molly Binns

Throughout her Foundation Diploma at Ravensbourne, Molly developed a strong love for knitwear, teaching herself how to use a domestic knitting machine, leading her to experiment with knitting different textures and patterns. Molly's tactile approach to design development fuels her creativity to develop different shapes and silhouettes with unusual patterns and texture across her designs, finding ways to incorporate unconventional, multi-media materials throughout. Her final major project 'Biophilia' highlights the human reliance on nature around the world, understanding how humans can solely rely on the earth to survive. This inspired her to experiment with creating and growing her own natural materials from fruit, vegetables, fish skin and kombucha. Her earthy colour palette and sustainable materials allowed her to create an outfit that represents the natural world and its beauty. Molly is now starting BA Fashion at Ravensbourne and is looking forward to developing her ethical approach to fashion and hopes to develop more sustainable materials mixed with knitwear in the near future.

Molly had done work experience at Goat Fashion and recently won a live project with River Island, during this project she collaborated with a fashion promotion student, making a campaign and designing a capsule collection of multi-functional clothing ready to wear for any occasion. Molly is going to be gaining fashion design experience by working with designers at River Island post-pandemic.

Romanian Sheepherders – Researching different cultures- I decided to research Romanian Sheepherders to gain inspiration for potential knit textures, experimenting with adding different objects to knits e.g. cotton buds and straws.

Mango Leather – Making mango leather and experimenting with how the fabric moves and fits on the body. From this I made various fruit and vegetable fabrics including; avocado, aubergine and strawberry. It was interesting to see how these fabrics could be used in the future with a more sustainable approach to fashion.

Fish Skin leather – Curing salmon skin to make fish skin leather in order to see its different properties and characteristics. This was inspired by the Inuit and Ainu people.

Kombucha Material – Originally for my final outcome I was going to make a jacket made entirely from kombucha material that I had harvested and grown myself, but due to the experiment going wrong I was only able to incorporate a couple of sheets of kombucha material into my final outcome. Here is an image of the 8 boxes of kombucha material that had grown after the 3 weeks.

'Biophilia' Final Outcome – My final outcome was inspired by a mix of cultures from around the world who rely on nature to survive. I used a domestic knitting machine to knit the entire outfit, using only 100% wool yarns. I knitted each fabric piece to size to ensure that there was 0 waste. I also incorporated kombucha material into the sleeves and mango leather for the cuffs. I sewed together pieces of fish skin leather to make a small bag.