‘Deadstock’ fabric finds second life
As Givenchy’s fabric buyer, Romain Brabo often visited the French couture house’s fabric warehouses, seeing bolts of leftover silk, lace, tulle, cashmere, wool and more piled up, all forgotten. The most exquisite were from past couture collections by Christian Dior or Givenchy, when a studio would use material for a runway look and possibly a few made-tomeasure orders, then ship the remainder off to storage.
“I thought, ‘Why not offer this to everyone?’ ” Brabo said as he stood in the center of a small room of La Caserne, a former firehouse in northern Paris that has been converted into a fashion incubator. The room was lined with racks of fabric swatches.
“That’s how I came up with this,” he said, sweeping his arm around the space.
Brabo was referring to Nona Source, a showroom named for the Roman goddess of textiles. He helped found the showroom to offer unused fabric — or “deadstock” — from LVMH brands like Christian Dior, Givenchy, Celine and Fendi to in-house design teams for capsule collections, special orders or marketing projects, as well as emerging independent designers, at a steeply discounted price. Nona Source’s deadstock is up to 70% off wholesale prices, Brabo said. In May, Nona Source opened a second showroom at the Mills Fabrica, a tech-style co-working space and incubator in Kings Cross in London. And there is talk about expanding to Southeast Asia — most likely Hong Kong or Singapore — and the United States.
“We wanted to incentivize creative reuse and do so at a super-competitive price,” Brabo said. “We revalue all of our materials, so nothing goes in the
trash.”
As some fashion companies transition to a more sustainable business model, there has been much talk of circularity — the shift from a linear way of producing and selling products, known as “makeuse-waste,” to one that makes recycling and zero waste priorities. For global brands, that has meant rethinking and reshaping wasteful policies; for independent, and often young, companies, eco-conscious practices like circularity are often a founding principle.
These two segments of the industry rarely work in tandem. With Nona Source, Brabo is trying to change that.
In 2019, Brabo joined LVMH’s innovation program, DARE (Disrupt, Act, Risk to be an Entrepreneur), and transformed his deadstock idea “into a concrete project,” he said. The platform debuted online in April 2021, and the showroom followed in September.
“The COVID-19 lockdowns actually accelerated Nona,” Brabo said. Because the fashion industry was nearly at a standstill, with no shows or store openings, “we could push it
through fast. The doors were all open.”
In the first season, Nona Source had 300 customers, and 90% were young designers, according to Brabo; by May, that figure had doubled to 600 throughout Europe. The platform is open only to registered businesses, and there are roughly 1,000 samples to peruse.
Designers usually begin by scrolling through the offerings online, with photos and films of the materials in high definition.
Arturo Obegero, a 28-year-old Spanish designer who was an early tester of the project, began by buying small rolls, which he used for samples that he sewed at home. He was so pleased with the result, he bought bigger rolls of “a black wool that looked like denim — lots of structure — and black lace” for his fall-winter 2022-2023 collection of sharply tailored menswear and womenswear, which he showed during fashion week in February.
“Sustainability is treated like a marketing tool in fashion, but it should be a rule to follow,” Obegero said. “Everyone should be sourcing this way.”