US editor Dan Howarth’s pick of graduate collections from this year’s Parsons catwalk presentation includes wearable gardens, Memphis-influenced garments and etched plexiglass panels.

A selection of graduates from the Parsons School of Design BFA programme 2017 showcased their final collections at Pier 60 in New York earlier this week.

The designers showed both menswear and womenswear, although many pieces were not designed for a specific gender – a common theme in fashion of late.

Here’s six of our favourite collections from the show:

Jiwon Choi

After noticing a surplus of clothing in her own wardrobe and many others, Jiwon Choi decided to design garments that could be worn in different ways to cut down this excess.

“I wanted to highlight the waste and overconsumption in our modern society with graphic symbolism and construction, and offer a solution with multifunctional clothing that would reduce the need for more items in our closets,” he told Dezeen.

The result is a series of colourful garments vaguely reminiscent of Samurai armour, which feature stripes that can be pulled and tightened to alter the silhouettes.

“I started each garment with a stripe, and I built upon that one stripe repeatedly to represent overconsumption in our society,” Choi said.

Jacob Olmedo

Wheat grass grows from the neutral-toned organic material that Jacob Olmedo has turned into clothing, creating a trio of wearable gardens.

“I engineered a hydroponic growing textile: a textile that supports and promotes plant life,” he told Dezeen. “I see these as three conceptual pieces that act as environmental armour.”

The material he developed combines layers of beeswax for waterproofing, a blend of fibres that holds moisture, then wood pulp that holds the seeds and stores the nutrients needed for the plants to flourish.

“I use a material that I engineered through months of research and technical trial and error,” the designer said. “I ended up growing wheat grass, but I can also grow micro greens and I would ultimately one day like to grow flowers.”

Alexa Chia Wan Yu

A model for Alexa Wan Yu Chia wore a laser-cut plexiglass panel etched with the suggestion of a denim jacket, based on digital scans of garments, strung around his neck.

The designer’s other materials included translucent vinyls and polyurethanes that were similarly patterned and layered to create a sense of progression and change.

“My focus was on this idea of preservation and sacredness of the physical form,” she said.

“I wanted the attention to be kept on the materiality, without the distraction of colour, for these textiles to be viewed in their purest form.”

Min Kyung Kim

Influences for Min Kyung Kim’s collection came from the 1980s Memphis design movement that has recently seen a resurgence in popularity, as well as the vivid imaginations of children.

“I created my own Memphis design by deconstruction garments combining colours and mood of my childhood visualisations and finding a new system of designing,” Kim said.

The bold abstract shapes, graphic patterns and bright colours found in Memphis furniture were translated into large sculptural panels that formed waistcoat tails, giant collars and A-line skirts.

“Just like how little children obscurely wear clothes, I designed my garments in the same manner, such as by putting your head through the armhole, taking out your hands from the collar and wearing the sleeve as you would wear a pant,” she said.

Sijia Wu

Linen, cotton and wool were among the natural fabrics used by Sijia Wu to create a series of floaty, earth-toned pieces with frayed elements trailing across.

“Fraying techniques created a raw, falling and fading away illusion for the delicately connected broken suit,” the designer told Dezeen.

Wu also created a series of paintings to accompany the collection, as well as ceramic vessels that were carried by models during the show.

“The colour palette is inspired by the process of making ceramics,” she said. “From neutral, raw and clean colours of the clay, getting gradually darker during making, and the experience of the firing process.”

Myung Eun Cha

The chaos of a disorganised room with clothes all over the floor influenced Myung Eun Cha to combine different materials and silhouettes into her garments.

“[My] Alluring Disarray collection definitely shows my habit, my personalities, my room, and my aesthetics,” Cha told Dezeen. “This is for myself and other women to get over shyness and embarrassment not to show my and their personal space due to disorganised belongings.”

Standout pieces include a padded white sweater with one giant arm, as well as the accompanying geometric metal-framed eyewear.

“I tried to combine architectural shapes with natural fluidity, by mixing hard materials with soft ones or by attaching interfacing a couple of times in order to make an angular shape with soft material such as knit fabric.”

Photography is by JP Yim.

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Researchers at MIT‘s Tangible Media Group have brought the ethos of flat-packing to food, creating pasta shapes that go from two-dimensional to three-dimensional when dunked in water.

The “programmable pasta” has gelatine mixed in with the starch. Gelatine naturally expands upon absorbing water, giving the researchers a way to manipulate the foodstuff.

As with flat-pack furniture, the main benefit of the invention would be to save money on food shipping costs.

By having macaroni that stores flat instead of in its individual curls, for instance, distributors could fit a greater amount of the food into the same space, while still allowing the end user to eat a textured, three-dimensional meal.

“We did some simple calculations, such as for macaroni pasta, and even if you pack it perfectly, you still will end up with 67 per cent of the volume as air,” said Wen Wang, one of the team’s research scientists.

“We thought maybe in the future our shape-changing food could be packed flat and save space.”

The Tangible Media Group is a part of the Media Lab at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). The Media Lab works at the intersection of technology, multimedia, sciences, art and design.

Wang led the project, titled Transformative Appetite, together with Lining Yao. They were backed up by research from Chin-Yi Cheng, Daniel Levine, Teng Zhang and Hiroshi Ishii, who heads the Tangible Media Group.

The researchers are able to control the shapes the pasta takes in a few ways. They can create a simple macaronic-like arch by using two layers of gelatine – a more dense top layer over a thinner bottom layer.

The top layer absorbs more water, growing larger and slowly curling over the bottom.

For more irregular shapes, the team 3D prints thin strips of edible cellulose in various patterns over the gelatine layer. These strips act as a barrier to the absorption of water.

“This way you can have programmability,” Yao said. “You ultimately start to control the degree of bending and the total geometry of the structure.”

The researchers said the pasta they produced for Transformative Appetite “had great texture and tasted pretty good”. They even worked with a chef at a Boston restaurant to test high-end versions of the pasta flavoured with plankton and squid ink.

Based on their experiments, Yao and Zhang have also authored a modelling software for users to design their own shape-shifting pasta.

The MIT Media Lab has produced a number of shape-shifting projects of late. Earlier this year one of its teams presented Aeromorphs, inflatables that automatically fold from flat into complex forms.

Another team in 2015 demonstrated a “bio-skin” fabric that peels back in reaction to sweat and humidity.

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Common furniture are based on a cube. But – why not using simple slices that lean against a rear wall?

Sounds crazy, doesn’t it? Although most of the earliest cameras didn’t have glass lenses. They relied solely on pinholes (that provided a point source of light) for a focused image to be captured on film. The results were beautifully eerie and vintage and looked like Instagram filters WAY before Instagram was even a word.

Contemporary cameras use state-of-the-art lenses, mirrors, mounts, AF/MF techniques to deliver amazing images, but those images are too life-like. There’s always a charm to vintage filters, with the way their colors are de-saturated/different, with the vignette around the borders. Rather than relying on software, the Pinhole Pro lens allows you to harness the vintage style of photography using your go-to camera. Available in a series of mounts that allow it to fit onto most popular camera brands, the Pinhole Pro employs a series of pinholes of varying apertures that can be adjusted, not just to achieve different styles of photography, but to also intimately understand the intertwined relationship between light and photography.

The Pinhole Pro comes with a completely machined metal construction. The absence of a glass lens makes it more resilient and impervious to damages like scratches, smudges, etc. What’s the most interesting is that the Pinhole Pro features a variable aperture, with pinhole sizes going all the way from 0.1mm to 0.8mm in diameter. The pinhole diameter is adjustable by the dial around the lens, allowing you to play with multiple pinhole diameters, allowing for real-time experimentation and manipulation, a feature that doesn’t exist in any model so far. Smaller pinholes provide crisp details but require a lot of light, while larger pinholes are great for shooting vintage, Hitchcock-esque videos!

What’s more, is that the Thingyfy Pinhole Pro brings professional vintage-style photography at a reasonable price. Rather than shelling out more than $1000 for a pinhole lens, the Pinhole Pro comes with the same precision, but at a fraction of the price. Based on tour camera make, you can get yourself a Pinhole Pro custom made for your camera’s mount. Thingyfy currently works with Canon EF, Nikon F, Sony A, Sony E, Fuji X, Micro 4/3 (MFT) and Pentax K style mounts. Early buyers can even get their name laser-engraved on the lens! Definitely worth a ‘shot’ I say!

Designer: Chenchen

Nikon D750 + Pinhole Pro (by Searing)

Nikon D800 + Pinhole Pro (by kkcat)

Short experimental film shot entirely with the Thingyfy Pinhole Pro on a Nikon D750.

This week on Dezeen, we revealed leaked images of a skyscraper that David Adjaye has designed for New York, and brought you the latest from the city’s month-long design festivities.

Early renderings of British architect David Adjaye‘s 61-story skyscraper for Downtown Manhattan were accidentally revealed, by developer Lightstone Group, sparking a strong reaction from readers.

NYCXDesign came to a close this week. Highlights included Colony’s politically charged furniture and lighting installation, and the award winners at the International Contemporary Furniture Fair (ICFF), which included a furniture collection for Alzheimer’s sufferers and a blue foam booth.

In other news, it was announced that Spanish architect Antoni Gaudí‘s first built house will open to the public this autumn, following a major restoration.

In the UK, Labour pledged to put creative industries at the heart of Brexit talks with a dedicated manifesto and IKEA indicated it will increase UK manufacturing to avoid post-Brexit price hikes.

Chinese president Xi Jinping revealed plans for the world’s largest-sprawling infrastructure project, which aims to develop trade links between China, Central Asia, Europe and Africa.

Apple’s chief design officer Jonathan Ive was announced as James Dyson’s replacement as chancellor of London’s Royal College of Art, which is also launching two new courses in September.

Nestlé received a blow after losing a four-year battle to get the design of its KitKat chocolate bar recognised as a trade mark in the UK.

Meanwhile, London designers flocked to Clerkenwell Design Week, where Dezeen hosted a talk with design studio Doshi Levien and created a video of highlights from the design fair.

As graduate fashion season kicked off, we rounded up our designers to watch from the UK’s University of Westminster.

Popular projects this week included Tham & Videgård Arkitekter’s austere Swedish holiday home, a ring-shaped retreat in a Spanish forest and a plant-covered walkway in Seoul by MVRDV.

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