【人文科学-时尚】The future of fashion is old clothes (Financial Times - 1035字 长精读)
For her debut Chloé show this month, the designer Gabriela Hearst acquired 50 second-hand versions of the brand’s once-popular Edith bag from eBay and, using scraps of yarn, leather and wool left over from previous Chloé collections, reworked them by hand into refreshingly original, one-of-a-kind creations.
With prices at €2,500 to €3,100 per bag, the customer response was wild, Hearst says in an interview back home in New York 10 days later. Whereas well-heeled buyers might once have turned up their noses at the idea of carrying someone else’s old handbag, today some of the most in-demand items at luxury houses are unique items crafted from worn or leftover materials. Often patchworked and made opulent through layers of printing or embroidery, these “upcycled” pieces have an artisanal feel lacking in many luxury goods. Buyers can also feel good about putting their money towards items that might have otherwise ended up in landfill. “This is the first time I can remember in my life that upcycling is actually a desirable trend,” says Caroline Brown, a former chief executive of Donna Karan and DKNY who is now managing director of sustainability-focused investment group Closed Loop Partners. “There are now consumers choosing to buy second-hand over new.”
The Edith bags were not a one-off for Hearst, who has been using recycled and deadstock fabrics and reworking last season’s unsold stock into her namesake collections for years. She has pledged to make 80 per cent of her products from non-virgin materials by the end of next year. “It’s really exciting that this is now exciting,” she says. “From my very first show in 2017 we used upcycled materials, and it was controversial. It was not a thing that was considered luxury.”
Once a novelty associated with fashion students and cash-poor teenagers with charity shop habits and home sewing machines, repurposed garments and materials have become almost ubiquitous in luxury collections over the past year. Often this was driven by necessity: with seasonal collections to produce and many European suppliers shut down because of the pandemic, designers have been forced to hunt down unused buttons, yarns and fabrics from their own storage facilities. It is no longer rare to see last season’s print on this season’s runways.
The shift is not limited to high fashion. In recent years, high street brands including H&M-owned Cos and Arket have introduced capsule collections with materials sourced from e-commerce returns and worn garments gathered from customers via in-store recycling bins. Outdoor clothing purveyors Patagonia and The North Face both sell refurbished garments and bags that have been traded in by customers. These pieces are often available at a fraction of the price, and look much cooler. A new 1996 Retro Nuptse puffer jacket from The North Face costs $280 online; a “Remade” version in red, with a nifty floral-print panel on the front, is $186.
Even though the raw materials are often inexpensive, creating one-of-a-kind pieces can be labour-intensive and therefore costly. For her Autumn/Winter 2021 show, Paris-based designer Marine Serre ran video footage showing the unglamorous reality of producing her patchwork dresses, jackets and jeans, which require sifting through piles of discarded denim, tablecloths, silk scarves and towels. Colville designers Lucinda Chambers and Molly Molloy trawl through local charity shops for old puffers and ‘80s ski suits needed to make their quilted coats and colourful patchwork bags.
To make her recent capsule collection of upcycled wool blanket coats for Selfridges, designer Bethany Williams scoured vintage markets for six months. The coats were washed, recut and pieced together by hand, while the buttons were carved from fallen trees in an electricity-free workshop in east London. Priced starting at £1,380, 20 per cent of proceeds are going to the Magpie Project, a charity that provides temporary housing for women and children in the London borough of Newham. “Virgin [materials] would be cheaper,” she acknowledges.
Anna Foster, founder of four-year-old label ELV Denim, specialises in upcycled jeans starting around £250 per pair. She and executive creative lead Hannah Busby seek out discarded pairs at vintage warehouses and textile associations, focusing on the larger sizes that are the least in-demand from other upcyclers. “Hannah and I literally wade through dumps of fabric,” says Foster. “It takes time and effort; everything is washed in the local launderette, unstitched, recut and resewn; and I want to pay the people who work at my [UK] factories a proper wage.”
Foster decided to start her label after learning about the enormous levels of overproduction and water usage in the denim industry. “The damage has already been done,” she says. “By upcycling it, we’re at least preventing it from degrading or being burnt or further damaging the environment.”
While her business is profitable, most designers I spoke to said they have difficulty making money on garments made from charity shop finds or other companies’ waste —even when the resulting pieces are priced in the thousands of euros. “Everything is hand-picked and hand-sewn; we haven’t managed to commercialise them,” Molloy says of Colville’s upcycled T-shirts and puffers.
Jeff Denby is on a mission to help fashion companies transition from a linear to a circular business model — and to do it profitably. His company powers all of the back-end operations that enable brands including Tommy Hilfiger and The North Face to collect, repair and resell goods that might otherwise have gone to landfill. “We work with product that has already been made, stuff that has gone back because it was defective, or it was returned to an e-commerce website. We collect, sort, clean, refurbish and bring it back to a like-new condition so it can be sold again. Anything we don’t renew, we manage out to textile recyclers.”
Hearst doesn’t believe virgin materials will ever entirely disappear from the fashion industry. But she thinks most will. “We need to rapidly move to circularity if we are going to survive. We are going to be more than 8 billion people [soon], we have [a limited] amount of space to plant and grow food,” she says. “We as a culture have to decide what is important to have new and what is important to not have new. This buying and discarding [of clothing] seems obsolete.”
【人文科学-文学】Travel Literature（ WSY -257 字 短精读）