Clothing announces itself in countless ways. In the midst of summer, I sat on the corner of a London street for two hours looking at the clothes passing by: pleated olive trousers, pale pink T-shirts, faded denims, loose ribbed knitwear, chore jackets. Nothing looked exactly new. But neither loved nor lived in. Not of the moment nor beyond it. It occurred to me that the clothes you see on the streets of international cities wilfully defy categorisation. How long have they been in the wearer’s wardrobe, and how long will they stay there?

Sitting there, wearing a linen jacket that’s around three decades old, I thought about the hundreds of the things I had either written or read about buying better and repair culture. The vogue for darning. Knitting! Mending! The mountains of our waste creating monstrous landscapes in Nigeria, Ghana, Bangladesh. Thousand-word features about the “new” way to wear a jumper and videos about how to turn T-shirts into bias-cut dresses. There is – we know – an urgent need for us to rekindle our relationship to old stuff and to rethink what already exists, but what should we call it?

“Upcycling is a collective word for an ideology of working,” the designer Ellen Hodakova Larsson wrote to me. Upcycling is an easily thrown around, convivial and non-threatening word. A word that thrums with the zeal of an exclamation mark, even when there isn’t one in sight.

But the term has lost some of its urgency. On Instagram it is shorthand for a stodgy tote bag made from an old pair of jeans or three men’s cotton shirts buttoned together around the waist to form a ruffle skirt. It is patchworked, dyed, felted and embroidered band T-shirts, table linens and curtains. Old stuff refreshed in a rehearsed way.

The act of upcycling – or “creative reuse” – is a common and ancient practice across much of the global south, yet more recently it has been seized upon as a cure for fashion’s fixation with overproduction. While its meaning is elusive, it announces an ethical and moral point of view according to the whims of the moment. “When that happens,” the designer and Sarabande scholar Carson Lovett told me, “it’s placed within a timeframe that eventually ends in its decline in popularity.”

The desire for and interest in upcycling oscillates in and out of its own trend cycle. “I think the industry embraces some of its potential when it appears, but the demand for newness outweighs the demand for sustainable techniques,” Lovett says. “The moment a style, technique, colour, silhouette is considered in fashion, it’s already out.” The practice is one of minimums, craftsmanship, idiosyncratic fit, quirk and nonconformity. It is the truest expression of what it feels like to be alive in these times, defying the neat categorisation that the global corporatised fashion industry favours.

“The term ‘upcycling’ doesn’t paint the right picture for the amount of craftsmanship that the ideology requires. It forces a focus on a poor description of sustainability of the product rather than the design itself,” Ellen Larsson says. Her work – shown under the 2024 LVMH Prize-winning label Hodakova – channels a kind of avant-garde colloquialism. It’s cool, direct. It relishes a new way of doing things and isn’t anxious about it.

Upcycling offers a new way of “doing clothes”, the Chilean artist and designer Sebastian A de Ruffray agrees. As a student he began splicing and unpicking vintage garments, trying to understand their properties and limitations. “I’ve always had a strong aesthetic attraction to working in this way because the pieces you make have more of a story, a previous life.”

Presented under the name Sevali, discarded items are given a couture treatment: sweaters are made from mattresses, sneakers are made into corsets. Second-hand materials are sewn together and stretched on to wooden frames, becoming part furniture, part soft sculpture. Sevali is organised around the principles of ongoing experimentation and is an opulent antidote to obsolescence. “Upcycling gives meaning to what I do. I’m not going to say it’s not complex, but for me it’s all about remaining authentic to my origins and what I want to say as a creative person,” de Ruffray says.