Stop What You’re Doing and Watch Some Marine Serre ASMR

Take a deep breath for a second and hit play on the video depicting how designer Marine Serre‘s team turns a 1970’s crochet tablecloth into a sweater. Close your eyes for a second and just listen and take note of what you hear: the hum of a sewing machine, a pair of hands rifling through a bag. Now open them and notice that the pair of hands are wearing black and orange gloves, and that the bag is full of the softest and dustiest looking crocheted wares. In a factory in Italy, a cream=-colored tablecloth that probably had a past life as in the house of an old European lady becomes an undeniably chic sweater.

Marine Serre has built her entire career on sustainability and upcycling. In this new video series by Giulia Roman, we get to watch the people that make her vision come to life in action. The process is unique, yes, laborious, no doubt, but also, perhaps by accident, is freakishly soothing and may or may not produce ASMR tingles. There is something about seeing the everyday things around us come to life that is strangely hypnotic—think of those time lapse videos of mushrooms growing out of the ground, or that beloved crayon-making video from 1970’s Sesame Street. In one video of how Serre upcycles denim, we hear people who work in a factory in Portugal cut scraps of denim then, with a laser, burn on the little crescent moons that have become her trademark. In the background, workers talk amongst one another, and soft pop music plays. It’s the kind of thing you can leave playing while you do your work and find yourself actively calming down in the process.

In another video, which is for me the most satisfying, we watch scraps of floral home furnishing fabrics turn into futuristic, billowing dresses. Transformed at a factory in Italy, an industrial fan blows at high speeds as large swaths of fabric get spliced by an fabric cutting machine. Hands leaf through a huge pile of recently cut fabric, and reveal what appears to be a full rainbow of floral chintz. Once again we hear a familiar hum of sewing machines, scissors, muffled speech, and music. It’s the kind of visual information that is both aesthetically stimulating and quietly meditative.

Through watching these videos, it becomes clear that the upcycling Serre and her teams across Europe strive towards in unbelievably time consuming. From an outsider’s perspective, the work also feels cathartic. What a pleasure it is get to experience this young designer’s process.