Not a shred of fabric hits the design room floor when Queensland University of Technology's (QUT) fashion honours graduate Emma Price is at work.
Emma produced a collection of exquisite zero-waste clothes for her graduate collection that included underwear, leggings, blouses and dresses, without wasting a scrap of fabric.
Her amazing designs are part of a slow, but happening worldwide move to topple the mountain of fabric waste that goes to landfill every year.
"I have worked in the industry and seen a lot of fabric wasted. I realised that waseful practices start at the design stage," Emma said.
"I did some research and found it has been estimated that on average of 15 per cent of fabric is discarded per garment produced.
"Multiplied by the billions of garments manufactured globally each year and the waste builds phenomenally.
"About half the waste is recycled into mattresses and other items and the rest goes to landfill and takes 20 to 30 years to break down, causing harm as it decomposes, and that's why my project explored making clothes which produced no landfill by using every bit of material."
Emma has produced garments from a single piece of fabric in which each seam is the seam of another pattern piece so that no fabric is cut off in between the pieces as is normal practice.
"My patterns are not just lengths of fabrics draped around the body - function and beauty and wearability and fashionability are not separate but integral," she said.
"Before I began this project I used eco-fabrics such as hemp and bamboo but this did not satisfy my desire to be ecologically aware in my designs so I explored other ways to work sustainably."
Media contact: Niki Widdowson, QUT media officer, 07 3138 1841 or n.widdowson@qut.edu.au.
** Check out the stunning high res photos of the zero-waste collection available for media use here.
