Future Archive is the research based project of RMIT BA Fashion Design graduate Melanie Read. Through the act of archiving discarded fashion items Future Archive strives to understand contemporary consumer culture and explore possible outcomes that reassign value to materials otherwise deemed as waste.

This practice looks to history to relentlessly question why things are the way they are — in order to speculate how design might be approached differently. The project can be divided into parts — research, collecting, documenting, and archiving — all of which then come together to inform a process of redesigning waste to create new outcomes.

Using this framework notions of circular production, product stewardship, waste mitigation, and value are explored.