Today we are beginning to think about fashion in the same way that we think about food: where is it sourced, how is it made, and what are we doing with what we throw away? At the heart of discussions on the future of fashion is the importance of sustainability. The charge rests heavily on the idea of a closed-circuit clothing ecosystem that at an individual level involves a move away from fast fashion to keeping our clothes for longer: reusing, mending, upcyling and repurposing.

The young UK-based designers featured here are storytellers for whom sustainability manifests in very personal ways. They confront and interrogate different points of the fashion lifecycle in order to weave their own narratives.

My research for this project started at Brighton’s Silo, the UK’s first zero waste restaurant. The conversations I had there were with educators who are laying the conceptual groundwork for how to effect change in the way we consume fashion. In many ways, the clothes we wear are as fundamental to us as the food we eat. But ultimately, it is the fusion of wellbeing, mindfulness and slow making that will revolutionise the way we consume our fashion.

TRAID: A RECIPE FOR RE-USE

Every conversation that I had concerning the second-hand clothing landscape in London involved the mention of TRAID. For the past 20 years this organisation has been collecting donated clothes from across England to resell in its charity shops throughout the city. What sets TRAID apart from other players in the industry is the bespoke manner in which it sorts its clothes, the retail aesthetic with which it present the garments for re-sale, and its commitment to recycling within the UK. With such care and attention to detail it is not surprising that TRAID has an integral connection to many of the designers I met, as either a site for resourcing materials or a mainstay of their personal shopping rituals. My journey began at TRAID’s Wembley factory, with a tour led by recycling development manager Jose Baladron. “Every piece of clothing that has been donated to TRAID comes to this place. This is the heart,” he explained.

Ingredients:
15 vans
Over 1,000 distribution banks across England
2,500 tonnes of clothing
1 warehouse
10 charity shops across London

Method:
Each year, clothing is collected from TRAID textile banks (1,900 tonnes), home collections (450 tonnes) and donations made directly to TRAID charity shops (150 tonnes). Once they reach the factory, items are initially pre-sorted so that only clothes and shoes go up to the main belt. The first two sorters are TRAID charity shop managers who come to choose items according to their customers’ tastes. The next four sorters will categorise general clothing according to label and season: premium for designer goods, and basic for high street wear.

On the secondary, quality control belt, items are sorted further: clothing that is not damaged but cannot sell at the TRAID charity shop market value is sold to other Textile Recycling Association members who grade it, primarily to export it to eastern European and African markets. Items that are too damaged will go to recycling factories where they are sorted according to fibre and material. Around 6 to 7 tonnes of clothing passes through the main belt every day. Nevertheless, beyond TRAID, roughly half a million tonnes of clothing will go to landfill across the UK every year.

MADDIE MCGHEE: UNDONE

Maddie McGhee creates menswear inspired by vintage utilitarian work apparel and made out of repurposed fabrics. The London-based designer’s 2018 graduate collection, ‘Undone’, was influenced by Brutalist architecture, the ubiquitous construction sites around London and the deconstructive practice of labels such as Maison Margiela. She also looked to archives of American denim work wear, as well as the design durability and history of the Japanese Boro method of stitching, which was originally developed by peasant farmers with restricted access to cotton fabric to maintain garments often handed down over generations. McGhee co-opts these formal qualities into the aesthetic and functionality of her pieces in order to make them last.

McGhee comes from a family of avid thrifters, a trait rooted in her grandmother’s ethos of repair and reuse birthed from the realities of wartime austerity. So even before being spurred by a formal understanding of unsustainable practices in the fashion industry, her own mode of working always involved this subconscious re-enactment of her beloved and deep-seated family ritual. She won the Levi’s X Arts Thread Design Competition 2018 and since graduating, she has been freelancing on commissioned pieces. She is also working on the formation of a fashion collective coming soon called ACB7_ (A Creative Collection By 7).

Ingredients:
BA Menswear (Middlesex University North London, 2018)
Second hand fabrics
Faulty fabrics
Deconstructed second-hand clothes
Cobra buckles

Method:
McGhee’s approach for sourcing fabric works in reverse, often beginning with found fabric and garments that she reconstructs into her own material. “You go and get what you get, then you work from there to come up with new ideas,” she says. At TRAID’s warehouse she found denim jeans and men’s shirts that were not fit for resale. She also selected the end-of-line fabric rolls received from manufacturers, as well as sourcing from other organisations such as Bysshe, a company that uses organic cotton and hemp.

For McGhee, collaging images is the start of the design process. She then draws and makes swatches from her sourced materials. Next she experiments with the process of hand sewing to see how she can build elements up into fabrics. From this, she creates checks using different patchwork methods, and then moves onto making clothes: jeans built from second-hand jeans, patchworked and boilwashed so that they fray; a shirt repurposed from second-hand shirts, incorporating unexpected elements such as a button stand on the sleeve, which she says is “quite a nice feature that you can undo if you want to have your shoulder out.”

Detail is everything. She uses Cobra buckles, which are designed to withstand very high tensile loads, to add to the armour-like, utilitarian sensibility that the pieces evoke. To create the pinstripes, she measures the lines out onto the fabric and follows them on a sewing machine, incorporating the ‘mistakes’ that give the garment character and altering the direction of stitching to avoid warps. And many of the hems are 10 or 15 cm as opposed to the standard 5cm, all part of the idea of being able to grow with and customise the garment.

HELEN KIRKUM: OUR PUBLIC YOUTH

Shoe designer and consultant Helen Kirkum makes original shoes out of old footwear. Her finished works are amalgamations of reclaimed pieces infused with layered histories. “You have the design lines of the first designer that thought about the shoe - I try and keep those still intact - and then you have the wear and tear of the person that wore and enjoyed it, that took the product on a journey,” she explains.

Her 2016 Master’s collection ‘Our Public Youth’ has set the tone for her practice today. It was a presentation of radical trainer design constructed using traditional methods. Her process is entirely analogue and very tactile, using just a sander, a sewing machine, and a cutting board. Moreover, as a self-described non-sneakerhead, there is a respectful naiveté that Kirkum attaches to the original shoes and brands in a way that lends a raw, honest and striking energy to her fantastical creations.

It is precisely this type of honesty that reflects itself in a sincere affection for her collection of otherwise estranged, abandoned footwear—the single blue children’s croc, or the black leather boot with a worn outsole. She’s interested in the treasure to be found in the often ignored and dismissed, such as the in-between shapes under the branding and the linings. “Those pieces that no one likes are always my favourite.”

Her recent accolades include making a happy and colourful pair of shoes for Japanese artist Takashi Murakami and a collaboration with Reebok in Shanghai.

Ingredients:
MA Footwear (Royal College of Art, 2016)

From the second hand shoe:
Toe cap/toe-bumper
Eyelets
Tongue and tongue branding
Quarter piece
Branding
Strap
Heel counter
Heel piece/heel moustache
Laces
Outsole

For the new inner shoe:
Neoprene base
Heel counter stiffener
Water-based glue

Method:
Kirkum forages through the reject single shoe bins at warehouses such as TRAID’s, often picking out monochrome colours and looking for shoes with lots of components. Once the shoes are in studio, she cleans the outside using household bleach, in a way that is thorough enough to be sanitary, but that still preserves a sense of character. Using at sharp 10A blade, Kirkum starts unpicking the shoes making sure to conserve as much of the original pattern as possible: just ripping the stitching. She collects all mesh parts, linings and tongues into a delicates laundry wash bag and loads them on a regular cycle.

By thinking of the shoe parts more as shapes rather than functional elements, and placing them in positions they wouldn’t usually be in, she opens herself up to new creative possibilities. “What I’ve found is the most successful way of working for me is to really just give the control over to the process, to the pieces.” Once she has isolated a choice selection, she fuses them together using a zigzag stitch. For sanitary measures, the inner lining of the shoe is constructed with new material to avoid contact between the wearer’s bare skin and second hand materials.

NAOMI ADJEI: CONCEPTURAL BURIAL

Naomi Adjei is a footwear designer who gears her interventions towards the end of the product life cycle. A recent Masters graduate whose currently developing her own label, she’s primarily concerned with how her products will decompose after you have done wearing them. “We consume footwear in the same way we consume our clothes: we don’t really know how to recycle them and what we end up doing is throwing them in landfills,” she explains.

Dating back to the Middle Ages, many homes in the English countryside had shoes buried in them to ward off evil and bring good luck to the household. For Adjei, the conceptual idea of buried footwear has provided the inspiration for how to commercialise a sustainable footwear line. The materials and processes she has investigated are all in a bid to counter the use of less desirable mainstays of footwear production such as petrochemicals and plastics. She has experimenting with burying textile samples and seeing their transformations. She’s also looked at linen and hemp as they have a gentler impact on the environment compared to cotton production. The linen upper of a shoe will also degrade in a month into biomass once buried, producing water, oxygen and nutrients for the ground.

Ingredients:
MA Footwear (London College of Fashion, 2018)
Flax linen shoe upper
Bio-plastic heels for the shoe that contains wood
Soil
Wooden incubator
A room or area to keep the shoes

Method:
The traditional Japanese Boro method played a large part in the construction of her shoes, allowing her to connect the tissues of the fabric together without a need for glue. This type of stitching also provided the rigidity necessary to keep the foot in place. Using heels made from bio-plastic that have wood in them offers the kind of elegant wearable look that she espouses.

After constructing her pair of shoes, Naomi did some experiments to prove that they were fully decomposable. She buried them in a wooden incubator filled with soil, placing the vitrine in an attic with poor temperature control to best mimic the outside atmosphere. Warmer weather temperatures produced faster decomposition, while cooler temperatures slowed down the process. Each week, she unearthed the shoes, lightly cleaned them and took a picture of the decomposition results, repeating the process over the course of six weeks. “People are not always thinking responsibly about what happens next. After a product has been used, they just don’t care. And I do care. For the consumer and for the environment.”

JAWARA ALLEYNE: LAYERS OF SELF

“I don’t want to design for the sake of designing, because the world doesn’t really need designers,” says MA student Jawara Alleyne. “They need people who are telling a story, who are going to get people to think about things, and that’s what I want to do.” The energy involved in Alleyne’s process is extensive and intense: the immersion, the archiving, the labour, the meditation, the retracing. His ‘Layers Of Self’ collection presents a different type of luxury design, one that is not tethered to any sort of commercial intent, providing him with the privilege of exploring his ideas in a way that is true to himself. “I wanted to see how I could use the male body as an abstract shape creating for that form as if it were a sculpture.”

It is his uprooting from the Cayman Islands to study in the UK that has ultimately brought him closer to home: the opportunity to detach into a space away from and outside of his culture has returned him to it, dressed in a new and spectacular consciousness: “It’s not just that I care because I should, it’s that I care, because I do.”

Crucial to his process is foraging; engaged in walkabouts in which he is on the lookout for potential materials such as fabric scraps and bric-a-brac from charity shops. The incessant sourcing and archiving has become a way of life. “You have to keep looking, even when you’re not intending to look, so you know when the opportunity comes,” he says. Beyond his studies, he has also co-founded Nii model agency with photographer Campbell Addy and worked with Peter Pilotto.

Ingredients:
MA Fashion Menswear (Central Saint Martins, 2020)
Lace from long-standing curtain shop on Ridley Road market
Foraged tulles, chiffons and light silks
Self-awareness

Method:
We meet up at Ridley Road market in South East London, one of the few and oldest Afro-Caribbean markets in the city. It has become paramount for Alleyne to actively seek out these “access points into our own sense of self and the stuff that we care about and think about as creative.” For now, the food, for example, may simply evoke a particular feeling tied to his identity or it may become a direct feature of a future body of work. Using materials such as lace and chiffon, that commonly stand as feminine signifiers, Alleyne subverts notions of black male Caribbean sensibility with his gender fluid and delicate designs. The lace of the curtain shop further locates the male subject within the language of everyday domesticity.

“I wanted to create in a way that was more intuitive than strategic: pinning to create shape then using hook and eye closures or pearl buttons to keep the drapes in place, creating pieces that speak on their own in relation to the body. I approached this collection not as a maker of clothes, but as an artist creating a story,” Alleyne says.

‘Layers of Self’ was presented in Barbados in 2017 at Carifesta, the Caribbean Festival of the Arts. The images of the collection were styled and shot there by himself. “It’s not just the act of doing, it’s the act of you doing that’s important. You have to use yourself as an ingredient in the whole process rather than just sitting on the outside and putting all these things together,” he says. At its root, the conversation about sustainability ultimately becomes a conversation about honesty.

This commitment to honesty is part of the alchemy at work in his collections: the financial commitment to source fabric from specific communities in London; travelling across the Atlantic into contexts where sourcing models or collaborators is much harder. It becomes a necessary labour and ultimately, the project idea and perception change because of the difference in perspective and context: “The stories that you are telling are not just about your culture but are talking to your culture.”

MATTHEW NEEDHAM: MAN-MADE FUTURE

“I don’t like to use the word sustainability around my work, because I feel that it should be inherent in everyone’s practice. That is the future,” says Matthew Needham. The MA student upcycles industrial materials as part of a practice that is about celebrating value in creative rather than materialistic terms. Not yet graduated, he’s collaborated with Nike, Fashion Revolution and Charles Jeffery and been profiled in i-D magazine.

Needham uses couture skills learnt working at fashion houses in Paris and applies them to dead stock luxury fabrics and discarded materials as a subversive response to the waste generated in the fashion industry and its impact on the environment. He might pair roofing asphalt with embroidery techniques, for example. “This story telling with the trash and where something came from, that’s the world I’m creating, it’s about entering into that world with me.”

The world he created in his BA final collection, entitled ‘Man and His Man-Made Future’, presents the idea of a post-apocalyptic race of people that adorn themselves with the waste materials they have found—waste generated out of man’s all-consuming and patriarchal curation of the world around him for ease and convenience. This trash transforms from just a side effect to perhaps the only lasting trace.

Ingredients:
MA Fashion Menswear (Central Saint Martins, 2020)
Environmental waste
Fly-tipped rubbish
Luxury fashion deadstock

Method:
The collection of waste is an international expedition for Needham. “If I’m in a place, I will automatically think, I need to find something here. And so I have bags at home: the New York bag, the Greece bag, the Prague, the Paris bag… containing things that I find in those specific places.” Once he gathers up his materials, his artisanal construction methods add a new value and depth to them.

Much of the aesthetic of Matthew’s highly textured and sculptural BA collection was rooted in a nostalgia of his childhood - his father being a builder, so Matthew sews the nuts and bolts from his father’s workshop as jewels onto the pieces. The strong sense of fantastical escape comes from memories of his annual childhood trips to his mother’s hometown of Prague, complete with the old animations based on Czech fairy tales that he would watch with his grandmother. It is in this same way that fashion functions for him now, as a way to escape into a different reality.

RECIPE FOR A REVOLUTION
While sustainability is often spoken about in terms of environmental impact, transparency is equally as important, and it’s this aspect that has drawn designers like Needham to Fashion Revolution, an organisation that promotes openness in the fashion industry. Needham spearheads the creative direction and production of DiscoMAKE, a series of upcycling mixers that have taken place in the UK and in Greece.

It is the conversation I had with designer and Fashion Revolution country coordinator for Zimbabwe Rudo Nondo, that for me brings the ideas around sustainability full circle. It is not merely about the lifecycle of our clothes, but also our position in the fashion ecosystem and at what points we are affecting change.

And very possibly, I think to myself, the repurposed leftovers with which I witnessed Nondo conduct her Fashion Revolution workshop training in Zimbabwe may have indeed come from a previous life, having started a new, current chapter that began on the sorting belt of a TRAID factory warehouse in Wembley.

What’s my takeaway? Never underestimate the change you can make on a personal level as part of a global movement fuelled by a greater consciousness towards a sustainable future.

Acknowledgements:
I would like to thank both Lilia Yip and Georgina Hooper, whose invaluable conversations in Brighton helped to draw a contextual framework through which I could begin to digest the slow fashion landscape in the UK. I am also indebted to Wangui wa Kamonji, for contextualising the conversation on fashion within the larger environmental and geopolitical questions of sustainability. And for the charge to constantly think about what small things we can do now as we work towards the bigger goals: “Chewing on the locust’s leg while hunting for the elephant.”