Story

Swap and Mend, a day of community and socialising around responsible fashion

an illustrated poster for the swap and mend event

Written byAda Maymó Costa and Tejaswini Sood
Published date 02 May 2023

On 19th of April, 2023 Post-Grad Community Ambassadors - Tejaswini Sood and Ada Maymó Costa - hosted ‘Swap and Mend’, an event to promote responsible practices around fashion and support UAL students with the rising cost of living.

For the event, we joined forces with the Camberwell Repair Café to take care of the mending. The library staff at London College of Fashion (JPS) also contributed by bringing books and articles about mending.

During the course of the event, which was held at the London College of Fashion's Fashion Gallery Space, students brought in clothes that they wanted to swap or clothes that needed to be mended.

four images showing people in a gallery looking at second hand clothes and making repairs to materials — **Swap and Mend**

A Space for Building a Community

This event had been in the works for over a couple of months. We got together in February to discuss our initial ideas and to see how to make the event a space to build community among postgraduate students and spark these conversations around fashion. Throughout the planning, we iterated a series of prompts that would allow us to embed interactions within the event which promoted both socialisation among participants and reflections around responsible fashion. Thus, to support the event, we crafted a series of prompts that allowed students to interact with others, both in the moment or asynchronously through their garments.

Tags to tell a story about the piece of garment and the possibility to connect through Instagram

four images of tags on clothing — **Tags on clothing**

A series of speech bubbles to choose from with different concepts around responsible fashion to pose for the pictures with your new garments

four images each with a person holding a piece of clothing — **Swap and Mend**

A mending corner run by the Camberwell Repair Café, where attendees got to watch and learn new techniques to repair their clothes and engage in conversations around good practices in fashion

four images of people repairing clothes with needle and thread — **Camberwell Repair Cafe**

Tips about mending through a prepared Padlet by the Camberwell Repair Café as well as a collection of books around mending prepared by the library staff at London College of Fashion

a screenshot of a padlet with various links to resources on mending next to an image of a trolley with books on it — **Padlet & LCF Library Resources**

Short interviews about responsible fashion and the event

A real-time poll, to see which practices around responsible fashion participants were already doing (in red) and the ones they wanted to start doing (in black)

four images of people sticking stickers voting on a poll — **Poll**

An Event Built Collaboratively

This event was a collaborative effort among students and staff across schools. Personally, this was a great experience to meet people across colleges, as well as to collaborate with diverse minds that brought new perspectives to a single event.

During the event, we got similar feedback from participants excited for the event to be a periodical thing. As Post-Grad Community Ambassadors we would like to see new editions of this event, integrating improvements from the first editions to improve even more the experience of the attendees.