Push Pull Textiles is a responsible design studio located on unceded Bidjigal Land in Sydney, Australia. Designer and maker Eloise Rapp established the practice to show new ways for the industry to work more responsibly with textiles, demonstrating care for local economies and ecosystems.
Push Pull is a radical rethink of ecologically-sensitive design, exploring innovative methods of restoring and revaluing existing materials. Working from the principle that any material can be broken down and re-assembled, Push Pull’s purpose is to use what is available—rejecting outdated and harmful models of extraction and instead exploring the potential of what already exists. The results are rich and expressive studies in the transformational quality of hand making, where each metre of cloth created is completely unique.
Eloise is a contemporary practitioner of traditional crafts, using time-honoured techniques alongside her own unique methods of hand-making. Specialising in natural dyeing, surface design and experimental textile manipulation, she produces one-of-a-kind textiles for clothing, accessories, interiors, art installations, performance and more.
Seeking to care for local ecosystems and the community, Eloise works exclusively with natural fibres and mainly sources materials from the Greater Sydney area. Fabrics are created entirely by hand and in-house, ensuring that 100% of Push Pull’s production process is verifiably ethical, with minimal environmental impact.
Push Pull acknowledges the people of the Bijdigal and Gadigal Nations as the sovereign owners of Country. Generations of custodians have stewarded the land, its species and local biodiversity. Their knowledge must lead the care of natural systems. Always was, always will be, Aboriginal land.
About the designer
Eloise Rapp is a designer and maker who is driven to re-imagine how we make textiles.
Working at the intersection of craft and transition design, she founded Push Pull Textiles to build her vision of a viable alternative to exploitative and extractive textile production methods. She understands that responsible, caring and sustainable practices are not only just, but result in exquisite textiles.
A qualified textile professional, she has spent over a decade working in fashion and textile design and production on Gadigal Lands (inner Sydney) and in Naarm (Melbourne). She is currently working as a Social & Environmental Manager for a suite of local fashion brands, and has taught as a sessional academic at UTS, UNSW Art & Design, Tainan National University of the Arts in Taiwan and Vantan Design Institute in Tokyo.
She spent two years studying traditional and sustainable textile techniques in Kyoto, Japan and Tainan, Taiwan. She has designed and consulted for groundbreaking fashion social enterprise, The Social Outfit, and her commitment to regional craft recognition has also seen her write and curate for organisations such as Garland Magazine and The Japan Foundation.
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Push Pull is located on Wangal Country
Sydney, Australia