up!

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.

Dutch-born designer Duran Lantink’s clothes are full of life; big jolly exploded shapes. He made Janelle Monáe’s vagina trousers for her Pynk video, and the oversized trench Beyoncé wears in her Tiffany & Co campaign. The latter is made from gold PVC that he salvaged from the bin. This commitment to recycled and deadstock fabrics earned him the runner-up 2023 Andam special prize for sustainability. And his business plan is as unique as the sculptural jackets and pant suits he makes. “I’m privileged and fortunate that I started out by being sustainable,” he said in an interview for More Or Less last year. Centring his creative practice on working with other brands (he has reimagined some of Browns’ deadstock), his website used to offer shoppers the opportunity to resell their one-off pieces, albeit with Lantink’s blessing, or arrange for them to be imagined into something new. It’s more than just upcycling, it’s a whole new way of thinking about the business of fashion. 

But through the process of upcycling, artisanal itches are scratched. Ideas and systems are challenged; the world – it is mooted – could become a better place. “I tend to use ‘repurpose’, for lack of a better term,” says the London-based designer and artist Ellen Poppy Hill. “I love to take pre-worn garments and recontextualise them into my language to a point where they are no longer recognisable in their original form.” For Hill, the practice of upcycling could and should be more expansive: “I think anything can become beautiful, it’s just about how much love you put into it.” 

This workflow is what the Brazilian-born, London-based designer Karoline Vitto tells me is a kind of hacking. It is an inherited part of her culture. “Although we use other terms for it, ultimately it’s about making use of something that already exists to create a new reality.” Vitto, an ambassador for the LVMH-backed platform Nona Source, a supplier of deadstock fabrics from luxury houses, put inclusivity and responsible use of resources at the heart of her label when she launched four years ago. “I think there’s something more beautiful about having some restrictions in the process, and creatively, my best work always came from a small swatch we repurposed, or an old toile that was deconstructed and transformed.” 

It’s not uncommon for designers to create collections repurposing textiles and garments at the early stages of their careers, but once they are squeezed into the rhythm of producing to a seasonal schedule, that seems to stop. “That’s not a surprise for me, because as designers we have to navigate a system that doesn’t necessarily allow for small runs,” Vitto says. “When we use deadstock, one of the main questions we receive is about production. What do you do if you receive hundreds of orders for this piece and then you can’t fulfil it?” Deadstock fabrics are allocated to pieces that will likely have smaller runs, she says, “but we’re often surprised by what actually performs well – sometimes it’s that piece made in a fabric that you only have 20 metres of.” 

The system of seasonal production and the word upcycling didn’t feel expansive enough to describe what Hill felt she was doing. She now has the confidence to call herself an artist: “I’m interested in how anything can be repurposed: ideas, feelings, artwork, objects. Having that mentality is keeping me from falling into the traps,” she says. “If the industry does welcome you, you’re put under a magnifying glass and placed inside a little chalk circle. There is space for embracing upcycling, but it’s something that needs to be built within a different framework.” 

Fashions change, but waste remains. No matter where they were in the world, and beyond the usual conceit of having a shared style or look, all the designers I spoke to agreed that their practices are driven by the cadence of customising, adapting, problem-solving. Whether producing maxi slip dresses from vintage T-shirts, hand-illustrated coats or what the Accra-based label Oldy Blaq calls “conscious human wearable art”, they all know that there’s another way of making fashion. 

“Not giving another chance to textiles and garments is not a question of fashion, it is a question of the human heart!” Felix Wahab Owusu, Oldy Blaq’s creative director, put it to me directly. “We envision a world where clothes are made without a sense of exploitation, without a sense of waste pollution and prejudice,” he says. It’s a world that we all have a stake in. 

Hair: Kim Rance. Make-up: Anthony Preel. Nails: Alex Feller.
Casting: Daniel von der Graf. Model: Olivia Petronella Palermo.
Production: Ana Esparza at Blanc Agency.
Photo assistants: Corentin Thevenet, Hermine Werner.
Styling assistants: Marie Poulmarch, Bianca Aponte.
Hair assistants: Edoardo Colasanti, Tsuyoshi Tamai. Make-up assistant:Azusa Kumakura.