It starts with Colouriosity

Why is it our goal to share the most inspiring and significant examples in which colour, design, and nature are in symbiosis? Because the abundance of colouring methods which can significantly lower the environmental footprint of the fashion industry keeps unfolding since the beginning of the project. At the core of Atlas there is a belief that showing the range of available colours, and ingredients, as well as people behind the movement of alternative dyeing will promote ecological thinking across the fashion makers and users.

How did it start?

In 2018 Julia - the AoSC founder and creative director - started with a very ambitious attempt to catalogue colours made from plants and naturally pigmented bacteria.

During her masters in fashion's critical practices, she focused on alternative colouring methods in the field of fashion and design. This is when she first tapped into the realm of colours that are produced without synthetic dyes. She found herself personally and professionally on a constant quest to find what makes the colour truly sustainable.

Fascinated with the correlation between colour, environment and aesthetics of fashion she wanted to find a medium to communicate the impact of colour to a broader public. Few years later and here we are.

Atlas of Sustainable Colour(s) is forming itself into a digital space for conscious colour explorers and designers who are willing to experiment with aesthetics in order to produce less harmful collections.

In June 2021 at a birthday party of a mutual friend Julia met Katya - AoSC's now founding partner and commercial director. They connected over their passion for creating a new fashion system and quickly established that Katya's community and communications background in sustainable fashion compliments Julia's research and design work very well. Needless to say, Katya fell in love with Atlas and in October that year joined the board to develop it into the vision they both share.

Here at AoSC we are driven by Colouriosity - a state of being curious about the origin of colour.

When we look back to the history of art we start looking at colour as a craft. Painters in the past were using pigments to create paints for their masterpieces, they knew where the source of their colours came from.

We use this analogy to highlight why colour matters and why Colouriosity is our driving force. Different shades and therefore approaches to colour, illustrate how we can rethink colour design and its use in fashion in order to slow the climate crisis. The acknowledgement of the value of colour has an important role in sustaining and restoring biodiversity, as well as its part in reconnecting humans with nature through design. But it takes all of us to acknowledge colours' impact and value - on the designers, producers, media and consumer level.

Colour as a tool to create aesthetics.

Looking at the fashion world's structure, we can see that aesthetics very often had the function of covering any traces of their ecological impact. Paradoxically, the example of the currently widely developed method of dyeing textiles with naturally pigmented bacteria is actually a process where certain kinds of aesthetics are created by microorganisms who leave traces of their life on the textile surface.

Aesthetics and sustainability are driven by the same virtues at the same time. Both domains offer us the opportunity to experience the feeling of being connected to the bigger whole and both are rooted in an intimate relationship between nature and humans.

The example of bacteria dyeing represents the current shift in colouring from using synthetic and polluting dyes towards creating colour expressions through the collaboration with other living organisms which aren't even visible to the naked eye.

This transition depicts the broader change happening amongst designers who define the path of twenty-first century fashion. Where is the place of colour in a design practice which aims to sustain the biodiversity of our planet? We keep exploring it and we are continuously amazed with new colours, pigment sources, projects and people who believe that we can sustain the pleasing aesthetics of textiles without harming the environment.

There is always a story behind each colour.

And this story ultimately blends into the identity of every designed object, textile, dress.

Each colour of the colour wheel in our logo was inspired and digitally extracted from pictures of colour swatches dyed at the very beginning of the Atlas of Sustainable Colour(s) project. In 2018, Julia created an artistic book. She selected 6 different un-dyed textile swatches and sent them to dyers, designers and startups who became first contributors presenting their physical samples of alternatively dyed colours. The colours you see on the moodboard are the colours which were sent back to Julia. That was the beginning of making a truly organic colour palette - and this time we call it organic not because of the organic pigments, but because the process of creating it was not strictly designed, but organic in its journey of co-creating. Colours were made with various bacteria and plants in 5 different European cities, yet they still create certain harmony characteristic only for natural colours.

Our project is an ongoing journey that's why we are always open for new enquiries and collaborations. Thank you for being here!