sculptural top and skirt made of discarded tea leaves can absorb odor

images courtesy of Mengyan Guo

Dried tea leaves with insect molting for the hem

The hem of Mengyan Guo’s TeaFab combines dried leaves with insect molting, where the bubbles produced in leather-making mirror the marks left by insect bites. The back of the sculptural top and skirt highlights insect wings with mechanical structures, completing the ensemble of her fashion design. Mengyan Guo made her own bio-leather upon learning that tea leaves are rich in polyphenols that can offer antioxidative properties, making garments out of this waste more durable than other bio-clothes.

She also learned that they contain active carbon that can eliminate odor from the air and that the tea-leaf leather’s texture can change depending on the humidity levels of the space it is in. A bump in the road appears when she realizes that the tea leather can quickly mold in enclosed and damp spaces, but not enough to halt her research and crafting process to produce her own sculptural top and skirt made of discarded tea leaves.

designer Mengyan Guo creates TeaFab, a sculptural top and skirt made out of discarded tea leaves

discarded tea leaves into dyes, paper, bioplastics, and bio-leather

Mengyan Guo crafts TeaFab as a fashion design project, forming part of the Super Green project in the Innovation Design Engineering (IDE) program at the Royal College of Art and Imperial College London. The symbiotic relationship between tea and nature became her source of inspiration, nudging her to look into innovating clothing using environmentally friendly materials. Along the process, she has also repurposed discarded tea leaves into dyes, paper, bioplastics, and bio-leather and turned to ‘beauty tea’, or insect tea, as a design influence.

In her words, this ‘beauty tea’ is produced from leaves bitten by the tea jassid, an insect that feeds on the tea plant, furthering the backstory of her sculptural top and skirt. These products allow her to demonstrate reusing and giving second, third, or more lives to discarded objects in nature, a way to underline sustainable fashion. In her words with designboom, she shares that all things are intergenerational and interconnected. ’What you thought was your destruction turned out to be your success,’ she adds. For her, this symbiotic relationship between man, nature, and fashion reminds her of the harmony in the Chinese Tea virtue.

the outfit can cleanse odor from the air, given the activated carbon innate to these wastes

Mengyan Guo also experimented with making her own tea dye and ink from discarded tea leaves

the designer was able to produce her own bio-leather by repurposing tea leaves with tea brew and gelatin

the sculptural top and skirt follow the veins and shapes of tea leaves, trees, and insects

detailed view of the sculptural top made from discarded tea leaves

the collar is made of discarded tea leaves too, bent and twisted together

even the decorations are a mix of tea tree and shapes of insect legs

detailed view of the skirt

the heart of the clothes features a blend of insects’ skeletal structure and the texture of tea leaves

project info:

name: TeaFab

designer: Mengyan Guo

designboom has received this project from our DIY submissions feature, where we welcome our readers to submit their own work for publication. see more project submissions from our readers here.

edited by: matthew burgos | designboom