The overlapping of biomaterials research, fashion design, & community-centered education as a multifaceted approach to rethinking fashion's systems
In Episode 342, Kestrel welcomes Olivia Cueva, a radical dreamer, designer, technologist, and researcher, to the show. Olivia’s work bridges creative technology, fashion, biomaterials, and storytelling to explore transformation, regeneration, and collective care. Her practice moves fluidly between community-centered education, speculative design, and research into sustainable and bio-based materials—always with the aim of sparking dialogue, nurturing resilience, and envisioning more just futures.
“A lot of the research that I do now is focused on natural dyes and working with plants and seeing how the natural dyes that we would maybe normally use on natural fibers actually translate to biomaterials. it's been a really amazing process of returning or like sort of remembering ancestry in a way … when I'm working with a certain plant, I'm actually not just looking at its color properties, but I'm also researching what is the story of this plant? How has it been used in different indigenous cultures?” -Olivia
THEME — Expansions around MATERIALITY to rethink FASHION’S SYSTEMS
Before we dive in this week, I want to share a massive thank you and shout out to my friend Denali Joie, who was featured back on episode 312. Denali helped connect me with this week’s guest after meeting her in Brazil at a conference. You can listen to my episode with Denali here >
I am so grateful for this connection as it led to this week’s guest’s cofounder attending the Design For Compliance workshop Gabi and I hosted at UC Berkeley through Fashion Is Outrageous, and led to the amazing conversation that you’re about to hear.
Sometimes, we don’t slow down enough to realize how these tiny links lead to really beautiful future moments, and I just wanted to take a moment to honor Denali and the way that she instigated this beautiful unfolding.
This week, we’re talking about a super intriguing overlapping of biomaterials research with community-centered education. My guest, Olivia, has woven these seemingly diverse practices into her extremely expansive work.
However, when we get into it, and she talks about using “Future-Facing Innovation” to reimagine our relationships with garments and the systems around us, or she shares more on how her biomaterials research links with Oakland Style Lab, a sustainable fashion education program and community cultural hub dedicated to building a more inclusive and resilient fashion ecosystem in the Bay Area – the correlations are beautifully seamless.
She shares with us how ancestral knowledge and intergenerational learning drive her work and how throughout it all, she focuses on slowing down in order to better reclaim critical thinking amidst the current world we live in.
Amidst the consistently depressing political times we are existing within, it’s a refreshingly grounded take that definitely helped me feel optimistic and further motivated.
Quotes and links from our conversation:
“Fashion is so interesting because we’re all connected to this industry, whether we care about what we wear or not. Right? Like we all wear clothes for the most part. It’s something that touches every society. Whether we shop fast fashion, we only shop thrift, we only shop sustainable fashion brands or we shop at Target — you know, we all are participating in this system and the system is generating so many clothes and textiles and so much waste, and so many people are not aware of that.” -Olivia
