A Study On The Development Status And Trend For Discarded Clothing Re-design Through UP-CYLING

Currently, the ‘environmental protection’ concept is one of the most prominent concepts which have been heavily debated in the fashion industry. Also, for many businesses and consumers, the discarded clothing and waste disposal issue in the work and life didn’t just concentrate within the scope of the fashion industry, and this is the main problem that the international community and China are concerned about. At present, an independent design program has been developed at abroad in order to develop ‘up cycling’, which seems to have become the industry trend of a new brand identity. It not only is the research and experiment that the reality has conducted of the ‘environmental protection’ concept, but also is a kind of means that changed theory into practice.The most representative of recycling in the field of environmental protection is that the nature of the product itself has been directly re-used and re-utilized, while up cycling refers to that the re-cyclable products are creatively transformed with the aesthetic purposes in accordance with the design so as to create the products with a higher value. Up cycling fashion belongs to a wide range of recycled clothing. And it is a particular design and may be referred to as a resource and the ‘eco-friendly re-design’ which both equals to and ‘maximizes’ the value of waste. Under this view, up cycling often appears in the form of newly environmental protection clothing in the fashion industry. It has an equivalent research value with the sustainable fashion. Meanwhile, it has a positive significance to explore the up cycling fashion design and related fields.This study based on a large number of the research of foreign literature and materials about re-cycling and up-cycling, two concepts and definitions as well as the comparison and characteristics of fashion are proposed. It explores the brands and works of up cycling and analyzes the current situation of up cycling fashion. The product characteristics and development dilemma of up cycling brands on the market can be realized through the field visit to two up cycling brands in Korea. Meanwhile, it takes the clothing practitioner as core and conducts the questionnaire survey in the respect of industry, design, brand, consumer groups of up cycling, as well as analyzes the different people’s views according to the demographic results, then observes the clothing practitioners’ awareness degree of this concept and the possibility of future industrial development.Finally, according to the research results, data for reference in the research of this field was provided through using brand inventory and personal discarded clothing, the experiments that used the to conduct fashion design of up cycling, realized the fashion design for up cycling, as well as that explored way of development for up cycling fashion, provide a reference for the field of up cycling.