The whole concept for Paula Martin’s graduate collection ‘Textilised traditions’ started by walking around London during the lockdown. She was surprised by the amount of resources that surround us when we live in a city as big as the capital of the UK. As a designer, she realises the potential hidden in these piles of rubbish and large containers. Waste that we pass by every day, piled as if it was part of the urban infrastructure.




According to her, this waste is systematically discarded as a result of an increasingly faster and instant consuming system. We seek the greatest monetary efficiency in the shortest possible time, and this philosophy is reflected in the constant disposal of "waste" and the loss of culture and tradition, which affects the survival of communities and the urban identity of our cities. For this reason, she chose Billingsgate Fish Market as the source of her material, because of its historical importance in the city of London. These sorts of local institutions represent a piece of history for the community and are slowly being lost to oblivion in favour of the construction of huge buildings.




Therefore this project was born as a desire to use design as a tool to promote ecological and cultural sustainability. Paula starts by collecting fish waste from this market as well as from other local fishmongers. She mainly uses the skins that the fishmongers discard when they prepare the fish fillets for their customers. In this way, she was able to collect pieces of skin and scales of different sizes and species.




To explore the textile potential of this material, Paula immersed herself in the world of ancestral crafts of tribes and communities that work with fish. Inspired by the techniques they used, she built her own compact tool to work with this material herself. She has the idea of creating a fish atelier, where all the waste once treated and prepared for use is categorised as if it were in a regular fashion workshop, making you forget that it was ever treated as rubbish. She has also designed an entire fish garment inspired by the fishermen's uniform that demonstrates its use and potential in the textile field.