Rissanen, Timo

Timo Rissanen is the Assistant Professor of Fashion Design and Sustainability at Parsons The New School for Design. He previously taught fashion design in Australia for seven years. Timo's fashion design practice is informed by inquisitive patterncutting. From 2001 to 2004 he owned and designed for Usvsu, a menswear label in Sydney, selling in Australia, Italy and Russia. In 2003 Usvsu was the winner of the Mercedes-Benz Start-Up award at Mercedes-Benz Australian Fashion Week. His PhD project is titled Fashion Creation Without Fabric Waste Creation and Rissanen presented a collection of menswear from the project in Bad Dogs, an exhibition in Sydney in 2008. Rissanen has presented at many international conferences and contributed a chapter to Sustainable Fashion. Why Now? (Fairchild Books, 2008). In 2009 he co-curated 'Fashioning Now' in Australia with Alison Gwilt; 'Shaping Sustainable Fashion', a book drawing from the project was published by Earthscan in January 2011. Yield, a survey exhibition of zero-waste fashion design curated by Rissanen and Holly McQuillan opened in New Zealand in March 2011, coming to New York in September 2011.