Turin Polytechnic
Franciacorta, Brescia, Italy
45°37’12” N, 10°1’12” E
Treviso, Veneto, Italy
45°40’20” N, 12°14’32” E
Manifesto Collection by Cap_able
Rachele Didero and Federica Busani (Cap_able) 2019
Cotton yarns by Filmar Better Cotton Initiative (BCI) Knitwear, Jacquard
43 cm length x 51 cm sleeves length x 46.5 cm chest width
Inspired by a discussion with a UC Berkeley engineer on privacy and human rights at the Fashion Institute of Technology, Rachele Didero developed the idea of combining crafting in fashion and computer science. Subsequently, Rachele met Federica Busani, current Co- founder of Cap_able, and together they decided to transform this project into a start-up, a cultural, as well as entrepreneurial, tool to promote and facilitate innovative actions by young people, in this case young women. Usually, it takes the form of a trig able to enhance networking actions between designers, young entrepreneurs and production districts to encourage their entry into the broad community of sectoral production and to enable the intersection of solutions for the execution, commercialisation and dissemination of design focused on ethic concepts also in order to foster good practices in social issues due to micro-commerce and tourism. Through this start-up they proposed to stimulate a new type of neocraft production in their territories, but also connected with a rural sustainable initiative, the Filmar Better Cotton Initiative (BCI).
A gallery of images of the exhibit item.
The starting point of the project is spinning, knitting and jacquard, techniques for the production of textiles for clothing that can be traced throughout the history of personal artefacts. The encounter between a long-standing traditional technique and the contemporary concept is resolved in the use of a technological innovation that lies in the creation of a system capable of transposing images (called adversarial patches) onto a knitted fabric that can be used to detect people in real time. Using computer vision, tested with the most common of the object detection system tools (YOLO), a simple action on the pattern taken by the knitted yarn allows privacy to be safeguarded. The specialised needs of the start-up stimulate further collaborations with various stakeholders who in turn specialise in actions that coincide with the project’s broad mission: manufacturers of sustainable and certified yarns, specialists in technologies related to controversial topics such as personal data privacy. In this way, a valorization of various production clusters and their employees, skills refinements and connections between hard skills and behavioural changes is realised.
The Manifesto Collection feeds on the liveliness of research promoted by international training programmes and exchange agreements between cultural institutions for the promotion and improvement of design and production culture in higher education. It poses itself as a response to the industrial crisis by bringing knitting back to a semi-craft scale, which can be placed in the category of new craft, not just by relaunching its production, but by assigning it new meanings. It consists of knitted garments that protect the wearer’s biometric data, without the need to cover the face. This second facet of the project deals with the exquisitely contemporary and highly topical problem of the use of facial recognition systems, the storage of biometric data, their use and the ensuing debate, an issue that is often underrepresented despite affecting the majority of citizens around the world.
Historically and anthropologically, we can state that the manufacture of yarns represents one of the most significant threads in the history of mankind, as well as one of the most common objects in everyday clothing to defend against the cold and heat and to communicate personality through the way one dresses. The variants and different applications testified by findings over the centuries range from “home” production for domestic and family use, to high quality artefacts. Furthermore, the production of yarns and their processing developed from a domestic scale, for subsistence in rural areas, to the networking of small domestic workshops enabling production districts to be defined, to the development of more or less industrialised systems, until the crisis that affected the whole of Europe from the 1970s onwards. Over the years, production delocalization practices and competition from Asian markets have pushed some companies to specialise in high quality processing and in some cases to focus on environmental and social sustainability issues. In some realities, the production chain has focused, also by acquiring raw materials from abroad, on renouncing the use of chemical additives that are useful in the production process but harmful to the natural environment, the workers and the end users. Even in the absence of binding European regulations and in the context of unclear policies in green labelling, some companies, including Filmar, which supplies the yarns for the collection, have initiated corporate policies aimed at sustainability that have favoured collaborations with other companies and implemented employment in the area. It represents a good practice of international exchange and contact between ways of managing shared problems, declining them on a local scale, in abandoned or underestimated areas, through adaptation to the specific sensitivities of the user public.
The Manifesto Collection is produced in two geographical areas with a strong and long-standing vocation: the area of Franciacorta, around the city of Brescia (north-west of the country), and the area around Treviso, in the northeast of Italy. For yarns, the Franciacorta area is characterised by the presence of dedicated manufactures since ancient times. Silk, cotton, linen, hemp, are the materials historically worked in the area, linked to crops and worm breeding, in a rural before industrial context. In the Franciacorta area there are several small museums, with an anthropological slant, that bear witness to the spinning and weaving activities traditionally rooted in the territory, including the machinery of small manufactures. The second area concerns the knitting cycle, located in the northeast of Italy, in the area around Treviso. Also, it is a long-lasting district, which saw the establishment of many small factories after the Second World War, which mainly employed female labour, coming from rural areas. The workshop used, Maglificio Pozzebon, with a history of more than fifty years, professes the mission of a focus on product quality and the creation of a pleasant and engaging work environment for the employees, who are involved.
Author: Elena Dellapiana
References:
Didero, Rachele and Giovanni Maria Conti. “Brevetto per Invenzione Industriale: Metodo per realizzare un tessuto in maglia che riproduce un’immagine avversaria”.
Didero, Rachele and Giovanni Maria Conti. “CAPABLE: Engineering, textile, and fashion
Collaboration, for citizens. Awareness and Privacy Protection”. Human Factors for Apparel and Textile Engineering, V. 32, (2022): 39–45.
Didero, Rachele and Giovanni Maria Conti. Method for manufacturing a knitted fabric reproducing an adversarial image. OMPI, PCT/IB2022/051036, 2022.
Didero, Rachele and Giovanni Maria Conti. Adversarial Knitted Fashion. Method for making a knitted fabric that reproduces an adversarial image. Proceedings of BAck to Life: Seeking Vision and Purpose in Principles and Practice. 16th International Conference on Design Principles & Practices, 19-21 January 2022, University of Newcastle, Newcastle, Australia.
Turnaum, Irena. History of Knitting Before Mass Production. Institute of the History of Material Culture, Polish Academy of
Science, Warsaw: Akcent, 1991.
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