Fashion labels, like From Somewhere, are upcycling discarded textile materials to turn waste into beautiful, unique garments. 

Upcycling is defined as the act of turning waste materials into a desirable and usable quality objects. This method of manufacturing is right in line with the cradle-to-cradle philosophy, and engages the consumer in an understanding of how their responsible purchase has kept the landfill from growing a little bigger. In the world of fashion, garment designers are realizing the wealth of opportunities in the realm of upcycling and are doing a fine job of proving that style definitely doesn’t have to be sacrificed for the sake of sustainability.

Fashion has become a commodity in modern times, as fast fashion makes the latest runway trends available to almost anyone with a wallet within days of collection show on the catwalks. But with so much fashion constantly produced and consumed, huge waste piles of perfectly usable textiles are forming in landfills, alongside all the other negative effects of an exploitative and far too rapid fashion process. As a response to this destructive behavior, the designers and labels featured below are turning trash into treasures by utilizing waste from car interiors, discarded fabric rolls, used clothing, upholstery materials, and even swimsuits. Their philosophies for waste-reducing fashion processes are inspirational, and offer their supporters the benefits of local production and a fantastically colorful and unique wardrobe.

Piece x Piece

Defining itself as a “thoughtful disruption to the traditional path one usually takes in the apparel industry from fabric mill to land fill”, Piece x Piece creates one-of-a-kind garments from luxury fabric swatches. Their mission is to create beauty from waste, hopefully inspiring reconsideration of our relationship to waste. With a collection of beautiful and elegant, but slightly quirky patchwork style garments, Piece x Piece aims to provide seasonless, timeless clothes that allow us to “progress toward new philosophy about what waste really means and how we address it.”

Goodone

Fashion-forward, sexy, block colors and body hugging silhouettes all define the collection of London based fashion label Goodone. The independent and eco-conscious label is “reinventing the potential of what upcycled garments can be” by utilizing reclaimed fabrics in almost all parts of the design process. The end result is a highly coveted collection of defined, feminine garments that are suitable for almost any occasion. With the mission of achieving positive change from within by visually blending with the mainstream fashion industry, Goodone ultimately aims “to give women the opportunity to feel good about their clothes and work with what already exists to achieve more.”

Platinum Dirt

Platinum Dirt is designer Dustin Page’s creative response to discarded leather materials generated by the automobile industry. He sources material from cars such as Mercedes-Benz, Cadillac, Lincoln, BMW and Volvo to re-fashion it into quality leather gear. Platinum Dirt’s handcrafted VIN jackets incorporate the vehicle identification number (VIN) plate from the resource providing car, as well as hood ornaments and zipper pulls made from car logo emblems. The likes of luxurious silk brocade are used for lining and pockets, adding a polished touch to each of these, sleek and structured, one-of-a-kind jackets.

Looptworks

Based in Portland, OR, Looptworks is a consciously minded business that repurposes pre-consumer waste to create limited edition accessories and garments. “From concept to your closet, we can assure you that no new materials were used to create our clothing and that each item is as individual as the person who wears it,” says co-founder Gary Peck. Because the label depends on excess material from other manufacturers for the production of their items, Looptworks only makes up to 500 of any given style, hand-numbering each one to signify its uniqueness. Looptworks is putting forth a new manufacturing method for the fashion industry by cutting down on emissions, production costs, design time and resource use when compared to traditional fashion production. As Peck asserts, “we hope people start to think about what they buy, where it came from, and what natural resources it required to produce it.”

From Somewhere

From Somewhere is one of the first fashion labels that turned upcycling into a real trend, and has been addressing the balance between consumption and disposal since 1997. Run by Orsola de Castro and Filippo Ricci, the label reuses luxury, designer textile waste to make gorgeous clothes that have been featured in upper-scale departments stores, the red carpet and several books on sustainable fashion. The label has even collaborated with Speedo, turning discarded swimsuits into amazing evening gowns and dresses, like the Unity Dress designed to sponsor Speedo’s athletes at the 2012 London Olympics. From Somewhere collections are a vibrant mix of colorful production off-cuts, damaged fabrics and end-of rolls that have been turned into exquisite, high quality garments. Make sure to stay posted for the new collection due out in April!

Images: From Somewhere, Gregoire Vandebussche, Goodone, Platinum Dirt, Looptworks

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Gorgeous red carpet-worthy dresses made from upcycled Speedo fabric, from suits worn by Olympic swimmers.

Now that the Olympics are over, and the American swimmers nabbed more gold medals in swimming than ever before, what happens to all those old Speedos? UK-based designer Orsola de Castro has been making high-end fashion from recycled materials since 1997, through the fashion label From Somewhere. One of the brand’s newest collections is made from, you guessed it, upcycled Speedo fabric.

The high tech quality and intense accent colors of the fabric lends a strange, yet very fashion forward quality to de Castro’s elegantly tailored dresses. If it wasn’t for the small logo that makes an appearance on some of the garments, you would never guess what they were made from.

De Castro runs From Somewhere with her partner Filippo Ricci, and the two are also the founders and curators of The British Council Estethica during London Fashion Week. They want to use their fashion label to further the discussion about overproduction and waste, two very urgent issues that the fashion industry needs to figure out how to deal with. To de Castro and Ricci, upcycling becomes a design solution to this environmental problem.

The label originally began their collaboration with Speedo in 2010 when a stock of their LZR Racer Elite suit became redundant following FINA regulations regarding competitive swimwear. The company contacted From Somewhere to help create something with the waste, and that’s how the first collection, which debuted at Estethica, was born.

The new colorblocked “Unity” gown is made from offcuts produced in the making of Speedo’s Fastskin3 Super Elite swimsuit, which was used by the athletes at this summer’s Olympic Games in London. All the colors in the “Unity” dress represent all nations coming together in a non-competitive way and are also a reference to water. De Castro used the stretch of the fabric to emphasize different parts of the female body, and she also utilized Pinterest to gather inspiration and visual references.

“The idea was to combine sportswear and fashion in a way that it is 100% fashion but also 100% sportswear,” says de Castro. She also wants this dress to inspire the confidence of an Olympic athlete in any woman that wears it.

Watch the video below to hear de Castro talk about the inspiration and process behind the dress.

We like, and it seems Ryan Lochte does too.

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Will Anthropologie’s new online platform inspire the kind of innovation the fashion industry desperately needs?

Anthropologie debuts an intriguing new website today, called Made in Kind, to showcase its take on the popular trend for designer collaborations. In a release, Anthropologie states the new online platform will function as a gallery “housing multiple exhibitions per month, each dedicated to a single designer or concept.”  Presenting editorial content to go along with the eleven new lines – priced in the $120-$300 range – the collaborations will be available in some stores, online and via the catalog.

Despite featuring small, emerging designers and sustainable brands, including British bohemian brand Place Nationale – makers of one-off garments using European antique fabrics – Brooklyn-based eco fashion designer, Samantha Pleet and John Patrick of Organic, the launch is ambiguous on the subject of it’s sustainability.

Treasure by Samantha Pleet

The eco credentials of the designer’s collaborations with the brand are yet unclear, the decision to avoid tagging the new venture, “ethical,” “conscious” or “sustainable” by Urban Outfitter Inc. owned Anthropologie is interesting.

In contrast, other chain stores are loudly launching eco lines left, right and center. H&M’s exclusive Glamour Conscious Collection – which will be available April 12 in around 100 H&M stores across the globe – has been widely promoted, coming across as an act of contrition for its past year offenses that saw the mega chain accused of not performing proper clothing disposal practices, destroying damaged or unsold clothes that could easily be used elsewhere or recycled for other items.

Place Nationale

Why would a company not shout its eco-friendliness from the rooftops? It happens more than you might think. Because of the difficulty in greening every part of the supply chain, the inability to guarantee every factory involved or fabric used (a small amount of bias tape required, for example) along with ethical fashion’s former “granola” reputation – many brands have been shy of admitting their behind-the-scenes green involvement.

Marketing is often accused of selling something people don’t need but the reverse can also be true. Smart companies restructure their offerings to suit customer demand. Hopefully it is only a matter of time before all businesses are competing to be the most ethical. By tapping into the “zeitgeist” that supporting independent designers keeps America’s workers working, Anthropologie is focusing on the growing preference and appreciation for smaller brands.

In her recent article, Could Small be the New Big for the fashion Industry?, Ilaria Pasquinelli explains the recent shift and how “the era of big” has come to an end.” She writes, “Small organisations are often led by visionary product specialists or designers, particularly in the fashion industry. The small scale allows companies to be flexible, this is crucial in order to adapt to very diverse market conditions and economic turbulence.”

Pasquinelli documents case studies where large corporations have successfully collaborated with small fashion businesses as pioneers in sustainability, such as British supermarket Tesco’s in-house brand F&F, which partnered with the pioneering upcycle fashion brand From Somewhere; Levi’s campaign to refit vintage Levi’s 501 in collaboration with Reformation, a fashion brand that repurposes vintage clothing and materials in their studios in New York and Los Angeles; and Worn Again, a tiny company that successfully worked with large corporations such as Virgin, Royal Mail and Eurostar to help them re-use textiles, such as disused uniforms, they would otherwise discard.

Small companies have proven themselves to be leaders in innovation – something desperately needed in order to green the monolithic fashion industry – Made In Kind may well bring a whole new meaning to the popular concept of “designer collaboration.”

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Trashion. If you’re green and fashionable, you’ve no doubt noticed it’s everywhere you look these days. And this “creative reuse” in fashion may have finally gone too far. It’s time to question, for the sake of eco fashion’s future viability, the plethora of “trash to treasure” initiatives touted as sustainable fashion genius.

It is time to do more with less, and this includes reducing our predilection for “trash to treasure” designs and stories that glorify less than marketable fashion.

The thing that concerns me as someone who also observes how trash is now utilized in eco-art and gallery installations is the message suggesting that we can increasingly find a tidy place for the trash in our lives. Creative reuse needs to move beyond the glorification of trashion and recycled art projects in order to address long term solutions for waste reduction and sustainable economic development. Our primary focus should be on managing this toxic bloom via critically important economic, environmental, and health initiatives.

For sure, timeless design has a transcendent and culturally revealing quality, particularly when it comes to the innovative reuse of materials and cast-off bits. Are we currently aiding or hindering the sustainable fashion movement if we do not make a distinction between designs that measure up as genuine fashion innovation and those that are clever, eye-catching creations that make “trashion” seem fashionable?

Junky Styling’s recycled men’s suit coats: an empowering approach

Creative reuse projects can be large or small. In the case of fashion, several bold designer initiatives have genuinely overhauled the industry’s patterns of waste and excess via the resourceful recycling of textile surplus and unsold stock. Standout labels like From Somewhere, Junky Styling, Goodone, and Reet Aus, to name a few, effectively take yesterday’s unwanted goods and artfully re-shape them into tomorrow’s covetable items. This design strategy is genuinely empowering for the fashion lover who is investing in environmentally sound and fashion-forward design.

From Somewhere‘s upcycling of Speedo’s LZR Racer designs

The recent collaboration of From Somewhere with Speedo to create a capsule collection upcycled from unsold and obsolete Speedo LZR Racer designs might seem like an odd pairing to some. However, an industrial fabric challenge like this clearly demonstrates how unwanted waste can be transformed into eco-luxe couture.

Recycling should and must be an engaging activity, particularly when it comes to labor-intensive DIY projects. Some of the most rewarding fashion moments are definitely those where something useless or outdated takes on new life with imaginative tinkering and whimsy. As Kate Black of Magnifeco recently shared with us:

“When it comes to recycling, we have obviously been doing it for years, in all cultures. Textiles that can no longer be used as garments are incorporated into household items like quilts and pillows and now it’s not just recycled textiles making the news in eco-fashion: candy wrapper handbags, pull-tab accessories are front and center, too.  When recycling or upcycling in fashion falls short, though, I generally find that it is from a taste perspective, not necessarily a design perspective.”

I wholeheartedly support projects that provide fair-trade jobs to artisans who create one-of-a-kind accessories and art-objects out of dumpster and landfill pickings, so I am certainly not attacking these folks for the honest craft and handwork that they do.

Ecoist ‘Botero’ handbag crafted out of candywrappers

I do think, however, that we should exercise caution regarding what is an increasing inclination to sanitize and incorporate trash into art, fashion, and design projects for our own aesthetic amusement. Let’s not forget that this everyday refuse should not exist in the first place, at least not in the volume that we are now grappling with. We need to ensure that we do not become de-sensitized to just how out of control our garbage epidemic is. It is one thing to source from surplus textile stock, recycle trash in the waste stream, and get one’s hands dirty with some gritty DIY projects, but not at the expense of garbage becoming a part of our ongoing design lexicon, much less the focus of our attention.

Via Trendhunter: A condom hat may be great for ginning up clicks, but it’s bad for eco fashion progress.

‘Trash to treasure’ is a dangerous term, and one that might soon need to be upgraded or upcycled within the sustainable fashion glossary. Our long term efforts should continue to be focused on cradle-to-cradle design initiatives, zero-waste garment production, acknowledgment of indigenous technologies and crafts that actually aid specific regions, and sustainable economic development that improves the lives of people everywhere so that they can move beyond having to rely on garbage as a means of livelihood.

Chris Jordan photography

The ready-made object is a surrealist phenomenon. Fashion is about personal expression and the ability to be transported to new layers and states of being. Let’s not allow ourselves to get swept up by “quirky” design projects that demonstrate how clever we can be with Coke tabs, Barbie doll heads, condoms, or heaps of televisions and computer monitors, all in the name of recycling – but in reality only keep our movement one step further from legitimate entree into mainstream fashion or, worse, from being taken seriously by leaders in the fashion world.

‘Household goods’… deceased Estate by Claire Healey and Shaun Cordelro

This is not meant as an attack on the resourceful re-purposing of waste materials for home, fashion, and personal use. Recycling is definitely a significant part of the sustainable fashion story, but recycling without an ability to edit is doing us no good.

There is a time and a place for trashion and art of this nature, but we have a responsibility to shift away from scenes that mimic the dying “portraits of global mass culture” (a la work of photographer Chris Jordan) as we look to a greener future.

Lead image courtesy of Goodone; Household goods images via The Sydney Morning Herald.

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While the New Year has provided the typical fashion media’s pause for reflection, coverage for the sustainable fashion movement is enjoying a few more toasts and moments of celebration.

Champagne Lifestyles. Don’t you think the Golden Globes’ red carpet fashion could have used a little more green? And I’m not talking about the emerald dresses sported by Angelina Jolie, Catherine Zeta Jones, and Elizabeth Moss. The best news about Colin Firth’s win for the Kings Speech? The spotlight will be more brightly focused on his dedicated green-living wife, Livia Firth, and her Eco Age store which offers sustainable fashion and domestic solutions.

Congrats! Along with mentoring the newly launched Awamaki Lab Initiative, Study NY designer Tara St. James won the Ecco Domani Fashion Foundation Award for Sustainable Design. Along with seven New York-based designers who will each receive the $25,000 grant towards production of their runway show at February’s New York Fashion Week.

Hitting the big TIME. Discussions about the need for greener fashion are increasingly penetrating the mainstream media. Levi’s Water Less Jeans have garnered a steady stream of discussion-provoking coverage since the advance news of their launch hit the airways culminating in this week’s issue of TIME.

Bottoms up! Three U.K. mass market chains are broadening the reach of ethical fashion. After the well-received upcycled line From Somewhere, the popular supermarket chain Tesco announced the launch of a capsule collection from Goodone, made from factory surplus and off cuts.

Pharrell Williams’s sustainable Fabric company, Bionic Yarn, is teaming up with retailer Topshop to launch a three-piece denim collection with this season’s 70s style detailing. Retailer M&S is also launching a 70s influenced sustainable line, Indigo Green. The 15-piece collection will be made from organic, fair trade and sustainable sourced fabrics.

Image: Matt From London

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Summer has been so chilly this year that it seems everyone forgot about wearing a Little White Dress and instead opted for its raven sister. Luckily, the tides have turned and some of our A-list celebs are leading the way in fashionably white attire. From movie premiers to private parties in the Hamptons, the LWD is making its comeback.

Of course you can always find a superbly tailored dress from Linda Loudermilk and this season she offers us a cool ivory hue. From Somewhere also churned out an elegant little number that has a playful side. An easy piece that is classically understated, sophisticated and accessorizes well – the LWD is here to stay!

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The new Sex and The City 2 movie delivers two hours of fashion-packed drama with witty interludes and an exotic getaway – pretty much fulfilling every woman’s fantasy. It comes as no surprise, then, that this week the fashion industry is literally obsessed with the SATC 2 motif. It goes without saying that the fabulous four each exhibit their strong sense of style, that usually involves a plethora of dresses and an equally extravagant shoe and accessory wardrobe.

With easy dresses and interesting prints incorporating statement accessories, it looks like SATC stylist Patricia Field nailed it once again, giving women everywhere the inspiration for a steamy summer. The new collections from Suno, Jonano, and From Somewhere are fit to take the order of these sexy summer essential.

Finish off your look with a pair of blue-toed shoes from the vegan line Cri de Coeur, and a pair of eclectic earrings made from girls rescued out of human trafficking in Vietnam. Sexy summer style has never done so much good while making you look good.

And don’t forget to take a peek at some fashion lessons we’ve learned from Carrie Bradshaw!

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