Mila Burcikova

Life in Clothes

What would fashion look like if it developed alongside natural seasons rather than the market driven seasons of the fashion calendar?

As part of her Life in Clothes research project, Dr. Mila Burcikova from Centre for Sustainable Fashion, London College of Fashion, presented her work in progress on the Life in Clothes Almanac: The seasons of garden and fashion making.

Almanacs are yearly handbooks that map the calendar cycle and contain key practical information and tips for every day actions. In her work on the Life in Clothes Almanac between January and December 2023, Mila is interested in how this age-old concept could help inform and reframe the process of fashion making and remind us of our own and fashion’s embeddedness in nature.

The Almanac is a continuous conversation between gardening and fashion making that takes place in Mila’s rural studio and the flower and vegetable garden attached to it. Through careful observation, photography, and a garden and studio diary, Mila explores and probes how fashion centres and priorities may be shifted when fashion making is truly grounded in connection to nature and a rural space. The process unfolds a whole new paradigm for fashion, through a conscious choice of a lifestyle that is better attuned to the rhythms of seasons as well as to our own creative cycles, and wellbeing needs.

Life in Clothes: Place-based organic fashion systems for human and environmental healing is funded by the Sheepdrove Trust Research Fellowship

To hear more about this work, listen to Mila’s conversation with artist Rebecca Chesney and Amber Butchart in Episode 6 of the Cloth Cultures podcast, Season 3.