sculptural top and skirt made of discarded tea leaves can absorb odor
along the process of making her sculptural top and skirt, designer mengyan guo also repurposed discarded tea leaves into dyes, paper, bioplastics, and bio-leather.
Mengyan guo’s teafab top and skirt made of tea leaves
Designer Mengyan Guo creates TeaFab, a sculptural top and skirt made out of discarded tea leaves that can cleanse odor from the air, given the activated carbon innate to these wastes. She created her top and skirt by mixing the discarded tea leaves with biodegradable glue and found out that the thicker the substance, the more durable it becomes. Mengyan Guo also experimented with making her own tea dye and ink from discarded tea leaves and was able to produce her own bio-leather by repurposing these tea leaves with tea brew and gelatin.
The sculptural top and skirt follow the veins and shapes of tea leaves, trees, and insects. It’s no wonder Mengyan Guo took this path since she wanted to thread nature with biomaterials for TeaFab, a means to thread nature with man-made designs. The result springs from the collar made of repurposed tea leaves, bent and twisted to hark back to the natural formations of tree branches and roots. Even the decorations are a mix of tea tree and shapes of insect legs, while the heart of the clothes features a blend of insects’ skeletal structure and the texture of tea leaves.
Dried tea leaves with insect molting for the hem
The hem of Mengyan Guo’s TeaFab combines dried leaves with insect molting, where the bubbles produced in leather-making mirror the marks left by insect bites. The back of the sculptural top and skirt highlights insect wings with mechanical structures, completing the ensemble of her fashion design. Mengyan Guo made her own bio-leather upon learning that tea leaves are rich in polyphenols that can offer antioxidative properties, making garments out of this waste more durable than other bio-clothes.
She also learned that they contain active carbon that can eliminate odor from the air and that the tea-leaf leather’s texture can change depending on the humidity levels of the space it is in. A bump in the road appears when she realizes that the tea leather can quickly mold in enclosed and damp spaces, but not enough to halt her research and crafting process to produce her own sculptural top and skirt made of discarded tea leaves.
discarded tea leaves into dyes, paper, bioplastics, and bio-leather
Mengyan Guo crafts TeaFab as a fashion design project, forming part of the Super Green project in the Innovation Design Engineering (IDE) program at the Royal College of Art and Imperial College London. The symbiotic relationship between tea and nature became her source of inspiration, nudging her to look into innovating clothing using environmentally friendly materials. Along the process, she has also repurposed discarded tea leaves into dyes, paper, bioplastics, and bio-leather and turned to ‘beauty tea’, or insect tea, as a design influence.
In her words, this ‘beauty tea’ is produced from leaves bitten by the tea jassid, an insect that feeds on the tea plant, furthering the backstory of her sculptural top and skirt. These products allow her to demonstrate reusing and giving second, third, or more lives to discarded objects in nature, a way to underline sustainable fashion. In her words with designboom, she shares that all things are intergenerational and interconnected. ’What you thought was your destruction turned out to be your success,’ she adds. For her, this symbiotic relationship between man, nature, and fashion reminds her of the harmony in the Chinese Tea virtue.
project info:
name: TeaFab
designer: Mengyan Guo
designboom has received this project from our DIY submissions feature, where we welcome our readers to submit their own work for publication. see more project submissions from our readers here.
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