Alligator skin is a luxury textile often used to make apparel, bags, belts, and more. However, because of the irregular shape of an alligator's feet and legs, much of the leather gets wasted. LSU student Susan Lindrew's research seeks to find new ways to use it and reduce waste.
When designers at fashion houses like Hermès are building an alligator skin bag or belt, they start with a single long hide—tail to nose, legs and all. Per traditional pattern-making, the ideal textile is flat and flawless. As a result, the irregularly shaped skin of the alligator’s legs is almost always discarded, ending up literally left on the cutting room floor.
“The legs and feet are very, very curved,” explained Susan Lindrew, a senior in LSU’s Department of Textiles, Apparel Design and Merchandising. “It’s really a tough section to use.”
This spring, with funding from LSU College of Agriculture’s undergraduate research grant program, Lindrew worked with faculty member Casey Stannard to explore creative ways to make use of those wasted textiles.
For the project, Lindrew and Stannard set out to apply experimental patternmaking techniques to designs that make use of these “lower grade” portions of the alligator hide. “The goal,” explained Lindrew, “was to use as much as we could of the alligator to (1) reduce waste, and (2) potentially increase the value of the hides—which would help the [alligator farming] industry as a whole, and the fashion industry benefits as well.”
Using three different experimental patternmaking approaches, Lindrew created a full-length gown, a short “trapeze” dress, and a wool coat—each using the three-dimensional textiles in innovative ways.
The gown, inspired by Victorian-era bustles, utilized designer Julian Roberts’ “subtraction cutting” technique—which “thinks more about the body inhabiting the space, [as opposed to] making flat patterns sewed together to contour the body. It’s visually very unique, draped, and in no way symmetrical. And it lends itself to bends and twists and turns, so you can used curved pieces within it.”
Image courtesy of Susan Lindrew.
“Ebb & Flow,” Lindrew’s dress design, using Shingo Sato’s “transformational reconstruction” approach, which allowed her to use style lines resembling the Mississippi River, with hot pink low-grade alligator skin color blocks that represent the gator’s habitats.
For the shorter dress, Lindrew turned to Shingo Sato’s “transformational reconstruction” approach, which creates three-dimensional garments from traditional flat pattern blocks. For this design, which proved the biggest challenge in terms of using the low-grade alligator textiles, Lindrew took inspiration from the twists and turns of the Mississippi River.
And finally, for the coat, Lindrew threw out all of the rules in favor of using everything—the zero-waste approach. “So, I just stood there during the planning process, with my dress form and the alligator. And just started draping it over the shoulders, draping it around the waist, around the neck—just trying to find places where I might be able to incorporate the curves, or where they might naturally fall. I made a collar that has, like, a ruffle over the shoulder. You can make sleeves with the curves and the ruffles, you can make a curved peplum. Even scraps—you can sew together to make parts of the belts, or a pocket trim.”
Though Lindrew admitted that these approaches—which require a lot of planning, and rely on a distinctly unstandardizable textile—are more suited for couture or custom garments than mass production, she concluded that the research showed this could be done. “It’s absolutely possible to utilize every piece of the alligator,” she said.
Lindrew’s research will now be distributed throughout the fashion industry through associations like the International Textile and Apparel Association, hopefully encouraging designers to embrace creative ways to reduce waste in their designs.
