Interview about Undiscovered Landscapes Sustainable Coat, winner of the A' Fashion, Apparel and Garment Design Award 2025
While it is possible to explore almost every corner of the Earth on computer screens, is it possible to rediscover the world? This collection is inspired by receding views of Earth, where buildings, streets, and cars fade, leaving only geometrized contours. Coats made from sewing industry waste, it leads a new sustainable aesthetic. The textures of the fabrics resemble shifting landscapes, like maps seen from above, urging reflection on sustainability and global political tensions. The coat symbolizes warmth, offering refuge against life’s fragility and the uncertainty of changing world.
View detailed images, specifications, and award details on A' Design Award & Competition website.
View Design DetailsWhile traditional fashion production remains essential today, it often lacks the tools or vision to shift toward true sustainability. A more responsible path forward would combine high-quality, natural materials with long-lasting design principles. At the same time, integrating the creative use of offcuts and even defective textiles into limited-edition, artisanal production could form a cohesive system—offering the industry a viable model for transitioning toward circular, sustainable practices without abandoning its core.
Global political tensions, especially the redrawing of borders through military force, had a profound impact on this collection. The fragmented fabrics in the Undiscovered Landscapes coats reflect the instability and complexity of today’s world. The map-like visuals are not just aesthetic; they symbolize the shifting mental and geopolitical landscapes we are all navigating. Through this work, I wanted to show how fragile our systems are and how urgently we need to rethink them, not only politically, but also in how we produce, consume, and relate to material things.
The process begins with sourcing leftover, high-quality natural wool fabrics such as merino, cashmere, and alpaca from local production facilities. These are often small offcuts or pieces with minor flaws that would otherwise be discarded. Each fragment is carefully examined, sorted, and classified based on its thickness, elasticity, texture, and drape.From there, a compositional process begins. Rather than forcing uniformity, I allow the fabrics’ differences to guide the design. Thicker, more structured pieces are used for areas that need support, like shoulders or collars, while softer, more flexible ones are placed where movement is needed. The goal is not only to ensure functionality but to create a visual language through contrast.The assembly of fragments is intuitive and slow, like building a collage. Seams become both structural and expressive elements, forming patterns that resemble aerial landscapes. It is a process of translating waste into meaningful design, where every texture tells part of the story.
I am deeply inspired by Lithuanian heritage, especially our national costume and the resourceful traditions embedded in folk culture. Patchwork, for example, is not just a decorative element but a meaningful practice that appears throughout Lithuanian heritage. It reflects a mindset of care, repair, and respect for materials—principles that are closely aligned with sustainability today.A few years ago, we collaborated with the Lithuanian Museum of Ethnography on an exhibition that showcased how people, especially in times of scarcity, creatively repaired and repurposed everyday objects and clothing. That tradition of "sustainability through necessity" stands in powerful contrast to my own work, which deals with "sustainability in the context of excess." By referencing folk techniques and values, the Undiscovered Landscapes coat connects the past and present, showing that sustainability is not a trend but a deep, enduring mindset that can guide us even in a globalized, overproducing world.
The Undiscovered Landscapes coat is designed with future adaptation in mind. Since it is constructed from individual fabric fragments, the structure naturally allows for easy repair, replacement, or even aesthetic updates over time. Instead of hiding wear and tear, the design embraces change as part of the garment’s evolution.This approach transforms the traditional idea of longevity—from simply preserving the original form to actively engaging with the garment as a living piece. Owners are encouraged to maintain, personalize, and even reshape the coat, extending its emotional and functional life. In this way, circularity is not just about recycling materials, but about building a long-term relationship between the garment and its wearer.
The biggest challenge when working with small and diverse fabric fragments was avoiding visual chaos. With varying colors, textures, structures, and thicknesses, there’s a real risk of creating something that looks messy, overly busy, or unintentionally rustic. My intention was to achieve a refined, harmonious, and even luxurious aesthetic, regardless of the fact that the coat is made from scraps.It was all about creating a visual dialogue between the fragments so that they complement rather than compete with one another. This required a lot of sensitivity and time, but in the end, each coat became not only a sustainable garment but also a coherent visual statement.
The map-like patterns in the Undiscovered Landscapes coat are a visual metaphor for shifting perspectives. Just as borders on maps are redrawn in times of conflict or change, I believe we also need to redraw the internal maps that guide our values, habits, and priorities—especially in relation to sustainability.Each fragment in the coat represents a small part of a larger system, stitched together to form a new, cohesive whole. It is a way of asking the viewer to reflect: what do we consider waste, and what could we choose to value instead? The coat becomes a wearable landscape of transformation, suggesting that change starts with how we see, think, and connect to the world around us.
Winning Gold at the A’ Design Award for the Recreated collection gave me even more confidence in this idea and confirmed that the aesthetic I was developing is both relevant and contemporary. That recognition helped the concept grow into a larger project. We are now actively working to use all the leftover suiting fabric from our production.Designing a suit from offcuts already brings challenges, but suiting fabrics are usually similar in texture and weight, and they can be rotated easily, which makes composition more manageable. Coating fabrics, on the other hand, are far more complex. They often have a fixed direction, significant differences in thickness, and sometimes even a visible nap or pile. It took time and experience to mature the idea before we felt ready to apply this zero-waste strategy to coats.I’m very happy that this next step has also proved successful and was recognized with a Bronze award. It confirms that sustainability and aesthetics can evolve together, even within the strict limitations of textile waste.
My background in materials engineering and technological sciences has shaped the way I approach fashion by teaching me to see things from the inside out. Engineering helps me understand how materials behave, how they connect, and how they respond to form and structure. Design, on the other hand, focuses more on external expression, emotion, and aesthetics.This project begins from within. It starts with the material itself: its properties, limitations, joining possibilities, and how it fits into existing patterns and constrained forms. Only after resolving these internal aspects does the garment take on its visual and aesthetic value. This approach allows the design to emerge naturally from the material rather than being imposed on it. It is a slow, thoughtful process that combines technical insight with creative intention, grounded in the belief that sustainability begins with respect for the material.
I see the principles behind the Undiscovered Landscapes coat as part of a broader shift in how we think about fashion production. Instead of relying on uniform materials and predictable processes, this approach embraces irregularity, fragmentation, and limitation as creative tools. It shows that beauty and value can come from what is usually overlooked.In the future, I believe we will see more integration between traditional production and one-of-a-kind, waste-based design. Large-scale systems could begin to incorporate zero-waste thinking, not only by reducing excess, but by designing with it. This would allow for more flexible, adaptable production models that combine craftsmanship, circularity, and emotional connection.What we need is a change in mindset. Materials should not be treated as disposable, but as resources to be understood, respected, and extended. I hope this project can offer one example of how that future might begin.
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