Profession / role:

Designer

Company / organisation:

ROOFLESS

Website (if you have one):

www.rooflessclothing.com

My primary role in relation to fashion is:

Designer

I am looking to discover or buy

Networking

About me / About business or organisation:

ROOFLESS is an art practice and fashion collection with a charitable message. We aim to recreate social-professional models and apply their production methods. ROOFLESS wants not just to comment on a community, but work in their social spaces to try to create a change through furthering economic gain for charity. By using our social capital, intellectual and labour intense skills we aim to create a profit, which will be given to connected charities, continuing the cycle.

ROOFLESS strives to alter and question the complex system of fashion and believes the critical power of art can be used to achieve this. Through this collaboration ROOFLESS has created a collection embedded with real people and we hope to caused a real effect in this social space.

Career history / Company history:

Firstly ROOFLESS established a cycle of exchange, where three warm, second hand items are exchanged for one item belonging to the homeless that we met through volunteering at a Monday night Soup Kitchen. We took these items and the stories of the person who previously owned them and create a unique collection, embedded with a history.
So that the clothing retained its essence and character from the previous owner, ROOFLESS added a second skin, making the items reversible. By using materials sourced from hardware stores, ROOFLESS relines, reinsulates and reinvigorates garments, creating a newly improved form of shelter. Ironically playing with the requirements of a garment belonging to the previous owners in contradiction to the requirements of the new owner.

Through the latest collection ‘A New Life’ ROOFLESS explores, engages and embodies the social space of Wood Street. Working along side Public Works and Megan Dow, as part of a project involving 24 artists who have each been given a shop on Wood Street to reinvent, ROOFLESS use the window of the New Life Charity Shop’ as an art residency. By creating and sourcing in the New Life Charity Shop, we hope the collection has been influenced by the stories we have over heard and the history that we have learnt during our time in Wood Street.