Sustainable style innovation

Upcycled fashion is on the upswing and it looks good!

Upcycled fashion mostly conjures up images of cringe-worthy garments because it’s often so badly done. Thankfully that is changing and more importantly it looks good too. More important you say? Yes, because unless something makes us look and feel fabulous the majority won’t wear it. As British model Lily Cole rightly observes, “while people are beginning to make ethical choices about their transportation and what they eat it’s funny how few are shopping green for clothes”. Something has to change.

The good news is fashionable sustainable fashion, including upcycling, is on the upswing. As Tamsin Blanchard, author of Green is

the New Black, penned in a recent article for Australian Vogue, even LVMH now has an eco-design handbook for its designers and is working with colleges like London’s Central Saint Martins for whom creativity and sustainability go hand in hand.

Closer to home sustainability is a big focus for fashion students at Massey University, Wellington. Its College of Arts has birthed a collective initiative Space Between that supports and encourages the next wave of designers to take action and respond to the social, environmental issues in society. It addresses the wastefulness of the current textile/clothing system using design thinking, and works collaboratively with private and not-for profit partners to develop a new kind of sustainable fashion system, one that can create value for people, planet and profit.

Massey student Talia Betham recently won three awards, including the supreme, at the ECC New Zealand Student Craft/Design Awards for her collection of dresses made from old blankets. Fellow student Olivia Chitty is working on a ‘design for disassembly’ model. “The fashion industry is the second most polluting industry worldwide; billions of tonnes of textile waste are sent to the landfill each year but almost 100 per cent of this could have been reused or recycled,” says Chitty. “The way they are constructed makes it very difficult and time consuming to take them apart and recycle.” Her concept is to design a primary garment in such a way that it can be returned to the manufacturer and professionally made into another look.

Denim brand Levi’s Strauss & Co is already doing something similar with its RE/DONE range crafted from re-worked vintage Levi’s jeans. Each pair is hand-cut and re-sewn. In 2015 Levi’s also launched a recycling initiative in the US that enabled consumers to recycle clothing and shoes in store in aid of reducing the volume of waste sent to landfills. Its recycling initiative is now available in the UK and Levi’s plans to roll it out across Europe in 2017.

“We’re thinking about sustainability across all facets of our business and how to shift consumer behaviour to make recycling clothing the norm… we consider all phases of our product life cycle, including stages beyond our direct control like the product’s end point,” says Michael Kobori, vice president of sustainability at Levi’s Strauss & Co. High street store H&M, which features in the book Brands With a

Conscience (see page 23) and recently opened its first New Zealand store at Sylvia Park, Auckland, runs a garment collection service worldwide whereby customers can bring in unwanted clothes and textiles (even if it doesn’t have an H&M tag) to be re-worn, re-used and recycled. In return H&M offers the incentive of 15 per cent off a single item with their next purchase. At Levi’s you get 10 per cent off a single, regular-priced item. One could argue that this is just a ploy to get you into the store to buy more stuff but the idea of the circular economy is to recycle old garments into new ones, closing the loop. H&M recycles as much as 97 per cent of the clothing it collects and since 2013 has gathered more than 32,000 tonnes of garments. Not only has it introduced fashion recycling to the high street but also a long list of new sustainable materials including recycled polyester chiffon, crepe and tulle, as well as organic cotton, organic hemp sateen and organic cellulose. H&M has also developed a wash care label Clevercare which shows how you can wash and care for your garments with a reduced environmental impact.

In NZ Offcut Caps is doing its bit to keep fabric out of landfill, particularly new fabrics destined to be dumped. These fabrics are good as new because they are new. They’re discarded as offcuts too