Good intentions
Sustainable fashion brand Trad Collective turns abandoned Leeds Festival tents into super-stylish clothes and bags. Stephanie Smith meets the duo behind the venture. Main pictures by Simon Hulme.
THE graveyard of tents left behind at Bramham Park after Leeds Festival has become a familiar annual sight, yet one that still holds the power to shock, as James Fenwick found when he went to see it for himself in August. “It was all a bit grim,” he said. “I had been told by lots of other volunteers what to expect, but you look there and you see the sheer amount of waste and it’s shocking. There seem to be a lot of people with a single use mindset, but tents aren’t single use.”
It was thanks to the advice of The Library of Things, in Headingley – a community enterprise that allows people to borrow equipment and is now called Buy Nowt LS6 – that prompted James to contact the organisers and visit the
Leeds Festival site, with a view to seeing what recycling potential there might be. He took away 10 tents and 10 sleeping bags and brought them back to Headingley to Trad Collective, the sustainable fashion and lifestyle shop (with a repair and upcycling business) that he runs with his partner, fashion designer Josefin Wanner. She set about transforming them into super-cool bumbags, laptop cases, tote bags, coats, jackets, skirts, even a dog coat.
The magic happened in Trad Collective’s studio, which is actually in the shop and is where all the sewing, upcycling, altering and repair work is carried out by Jo and her colleagues Ruby and Emilie.
“We have adapted this area as we have gone along,” James said. “The disadvantage of secondhand clothes is that you can’t always get them in the size that you want, so if we are selling secondhand clothes that can be altered to fit you, you’ve got a lot more choice.”
Jo and James launched Trad Collective twoand-a-half years ago, a year after Jo started her fashion brand, Wanner Label. Now living in Kirkstall, Jo moved to Leeds three years ago. She is from Sweden and met James when they were both living in Milan, where she was studying as a fashion designer and James was working as a teacher.
James is from Northumberland and came to Leeds to study for his degree in physics, after which he became a physics teacher for eight years. He has just left teaching to join the business full time.
Tråd is the Swedish word for thread, and total sustainability is the thread that runs through and joins together all the strands of Trad Collective.
The concept came about after they made a New Year’s resolution together to shop only sustainably, quickly saw that this would, in reality, prove very difficult, with a lack of outlets in Leeds offering new sustainable fashion and lifestyle products, and secondhand outlets that required much trawling to dig out the quality stuff. So they decided to do something about it.
They began by selling on market stalls in and around Leeds, taking Wanner Label designs and their curated second