While most fashion brands opt for the traditional lookbook to show how to style and profile their latest designs, ADIFF went for a little something different this season: a fashion cookbook. The brand has released a book entitled the Open Source Fashion Cookbook. 

ADIFF was founded by Angela Luna and Loulwa Al Saad. The brand has made a name for itself by empowering refugees and upcycling traditional waste materials to create clothing and accessories such as their “jacket that can turn into a tent” a.k.a. the trench & bomber, one of the first solution-based items designed to provide assistance to homeless and refugee populations. 

The trench & bomber was Luna’s design that she created back in 2016 when she was a fashion design student at Parson’s. She specifically designed it to provide assistant to homeless and refugee populations, and it was sold on a buy-one-give-one model, where for every one bought, one would be given to someone in need. 

“The trench & bomber was originally part of my Parsons thesis,” Luna said. “At the time, it seemed like fashion was very disconnected from everything going on in the world and I just really wanted to connect the thread between reality and pressing global events and the fashion industry’s response to that.”

Luna then partnered with Loulwa to create ADIFF. The trench & bomber continued to be their bread and butter, with Luna joking that she should have probably gone to engineering school instead of fashion design school because she doesn’t even know how she was able to naturally create something so innovative. 

“Creating this just made sense to me in some way,” Luna explained. “When I was researching the jacket, I saw a lot of people making jackets that turn into tents, but no one made tents that turned into jackets. My idea was these individual shelters for one person that are more like a sleeping bag. In creating this jacket I actually worked backwards. We actually have a patent on the tent jacket now. Our goal right now is to turn fashion on its head.”

Many fashion designers spent the year that we would all prefer not to name (2020 *cringe*) trying to figure out how to keep their businesses afloat and what was next. ADIFF decided to use the downtime and slower fashion schedule to develop their 2021 fashion “cookbook” focusing on democratizing sustainable and ethical fashion and making it more accessible for people to participate. While the name sounds a bunch of fashion designers got together to share their favorite recipes, on contrary, the collection of “recipes” in the book feature instructions for consumer reproduction and how to create products utilizing upcycled materials that are readily available.