Clothes Compromise
--
Reusing and upcycling are the new frontier in sustainable fashion, but consumers may not want to pay the price to save the planet.
^Noor Zakka’s Noorism is changing how we think about discarded denim.
Noor Zakka pulls the sweatshirt off a metal hanger and holds the garment up by the shoulders, spreading the fabric so the full torso is in view. Across the body of the sweatshirt and between terry raglan sleeves are squares of pieced together denim. Dark rinse, light rinse, and acid wash shades cascade in rows, a patchwork sunset over a cotton outline of the NYC skyline. Her prospective customer reaches forward to show his interest. He feels the ripple of stitched together denim with his fingers. “I love it!” he says. Then he steps back, quizzical. “But what is it?” Zakka smiles. She’s answered this question hundreds of times, dozens of which were just tonight. “It’s reroll,” she says. The sweatshirt, a collaboration with Zero Waste Daniel, is entirely upcycled using discarded denim and production scraps, or reroll.
Upcycling, or reusing, is a form of sustainable (read: eco-friendly) fashion that reduces environmental waste by collecting, recycling, and selling used clothing or fibers. Zakka’s brand, Noorism, rescues deadstock fabrics from the cutting room floor or salvages secondhand and vintage denim. And it’s not the only brand making the old new. On Etsy, products tagged as “upcycled” spiked from 7,900 in 2010 to nearly 30,000 in 2011. Today, there’s 308,886. Not Just a Label, a fashion collective and e-commerce retailer, sold only four upcycling and reuse brands in 2009. Now they’re up to 130. And with more brands comes more consumer attention: a 2015 Nielsen study says 66% of global respondents aged 15–20 are willing to pay more for products from environmentally committed companies, up from 55% in 2014 and 50% in 2013.
Reuse brands like Noorism are taking on environmental sustainability to slow down fashion production and waste. Zakka, who will present her FW18 designs this February, started Noorism in 2015 after being disheartened by the industry’s disposability. “It turned me off, the shallowness that can exist when you’re working for somebody that’s making junk that ends up in a landfill after one or two wears,” she says. Due to the rise in fast fashion and throwaway trends, Greenpeace reports the average person buys 60% more garments than they did 15 years ago — and keeps them for half as long. According to the EPA, this adds up to 15 million tons of annual textile waste. That’s 80 pounds of used clothing per person clogging landfills and creating carbon emissions. Most consumers have no idea the waste fast fashion creates, or are too distracted by the price to care. Despite the increased cost to consumers, upcycling wasted fabric could be the most sustainable route for fashion, says Fashion Institute of Technology (FIT) professor and author Bridgett Artise. “Designers can try switching to organic or sustainable fabrics, but they still need to manufacture them — we produce too many clothes as it is,” she says. “Let’s eliminate waste and reconstruct what we already have.”
Artise is, admittedly, an early adopter of reconstructing and upcycling clothes. She published her book, Born-Again Vintage: 25 Ways to Deconstruct, Reinvent, and Recycle Your Wardrobe, in 2008, just before the Etsy upcycling boom. While interest in reuse has been growing since, there was no urgency to embrace upcycling or sustainable fashion until the Rana Plaza Disaster of 2013.
On April 24, 2013, the Rana Plaza factory complex in Dhaka, Bangladesh collapsed, killing 1,130 people and injuring 2,500 more. Eight stories of insufficient construction buckled under industrial knitting machinery. Until the collapse, the building housed popular clothing companies and manufactured for mainly Western brands like Benetton, Bon Marche, Mango, and Primark.
Almost immediately, consumers and corporations alike took these brands to task for sourcing from Rana Plaza. The hashtag #whomademyclothes asked brands to acknowledge their human and environmental impact. Through this viral social media campaign, Fashion Revolution, a social enterprise and now the world’s largest fashion activism movement, was born.
Universities and their fashion programs followed. In 2014, FIT enlisted Artise to teach her Clothing Reconstruction class. Using her book 25 Ways as a guide, the course encourages students to recycle previously unwearable vintage or splice together old garments. That same year they introduced an Environmental Sustainability minor. Today, there are 92 students enrolled in the minor — one of the highest enrollments in FIT’s School of Art & Design.
As more designers and graduates showed interest in sustainability, incubators formed to provide funding and developmental support. In the last 5 years alone, 13 incubators opened their doors to sustainable brands. The Pratt Institute launched the Brooklyn Fashion and Design Accelerator (BFDA) in 2014 to work exclusively with designers and graduates interested in slow fashion. “There’s a whole new breed of designers right now understanding sustainability a bit more than somebody who came out of a design school ten years ago, even five, and they need certain resources” says Amy DuFault, Communications Coordinator at the BFDA.
Zakka needed those resources. When she launched Noorism two years ago, she started with just two hat styles — one in reconstructed light-wash denim and one in dark-wash denim. Now a venture fellow at the BFDA, she’s selling her designs at the accelerator’s third annual Positive Impact Awards, a wall of her merchandise behind her and a rack to her left. Her blazer, the Jane Jacket, is made out of two pairs of jeans, as are the tote bags on the shelf behind her and the tank tops hanging against the wall. The wrap coat gracing a mannequin to her right is a veritable mosaic of scraps. She gestures to it as she explains to the man interested in her Skyline Sweatshirt how reroll and upcycling works. “It’s this idea of trying to use up every piece of the garment,” she says. The sweatshirt, unfortunately, didn’t come in his size, so she offers to make a custom version out of scraps.
Part award ceremony and part shoppable bazaar, the BFDA awards invites venture fellows, friends, and former graduates to open their studios and sell their sustainable merchandise to the public. Like Zakka, five of the 12 current live-in designers are solely focused on upcycling. Other brands at the awards try to incorporate reuse techniques wherever they can.
Across the floor, the BFDA’s Production Coordinator & Research Fellow Tara St. James adjusts a display of upcycled notebooks produced by her brand, Study NY. Manufactured in India, the notebooks use recycled paper and the covers are wrapped in excess shirt fabric. Pinned along the wall of her studio space are “scrap studies,” or geometric collages of textile scraps she plans to turn into luxury tote bags. A mentor for the BFDA brands on sustainability best practices, St. James says designers should be responsible for their textile waste from the beginning. “I think a majority of the new brands that are starting are incorporating sustainability strategies directly into their ethos right away,” she says. “But it’s a lot easier to do when you’re just out of the gate rather than trying to shift your business strategy later on.”
Two studios over, designer Suzanne Rae Pelaez, founder of eponymous brand Suzanne Rae and a graduate of the BFDA, agrees. “Sustainability is in the details and choices you make at the start of the design process,” she says. She leafs through a rack of cream, mustard, and navy separates until landing on a white floor length dress. It’s light to the touch, like silk. “This — ” she lifts the dress to display the fabric, “is recycled plastic bottles.”
Every effort, from upcycling denim to breaking down plastic bottles, reduces waste. On average, about 15% of fabric intended for clothing winds up wasted on the cutting room floor, says Holly McQuillan, co-author of Zero Waste Fashion Design. Added together across the volumes of clothing the industry makes every year, that ends up being over 400 billion square meters. That’s almost enough to cover the state of California.
In March 2010, McQuillan was sitting in her New Zealand office when she received an email on a new report from Levi’s. Titled Fashion Futures 2025, the report looked at the fashion industry’s waste statistics and what might happen if brands and consumers don’t reduce consumption. By 2025, Levi’s predicted a “Patchwork Planet” punctuated by geopolitical tension, high resource prices, rampant waste and consumption, and disruptive climate events. Now, post-the fall out of the Paris Climate Accord, the US presidential election, and Hurricanes Irma, Harvey, and Maria, most of these predictions aren’t far off. McQuillan says the current environmental crisis is the wakeup call designers needed. “We are starting to actually feel the impacts of waste and climate change,” she says. “Right now, people don’t feel like they can change the government, but they can change how they design and where they purchase things from.”
Designers might be turning their attention to reducing waste, but consumers aren’t quite on board. Textile waste will increase by about 60% by 2030, says The Global Fashion Agenda and Boston Consulting Group. And most of that will come from overconsumption and fast fashion. Fast fashion consists of low-cost clothing collections based on current trends. It relies on a rapid response and a rabid consumer. Upcycling and reuse, on the other hand, are forms of slow fashion: they encourage transparent production, waste reduction, and recycling. Artise, who often lectures on upcycling at universities and sustainability summits, says upcycling brands are a response to fast fashion. “Once you realize the statistics, once you’ve done your research, once you switch that button, it’s impossible to go back to waste,” she says. “You’re having this flux of people turning toward reuse and sustainability because if you’re not in the fast fashion craze, the alternative is the complete opposite.”
On September 20, Artise participated in The Cornwall Center City Dialogues: Fast Fashion panel. “Show me the hands of people who don’t already know about fast fashion,” she requested. Not a single hand went up. A handful of industry professionals and intellectuals, all who studied sustainability for a living, lightly sprinkled a room on the 4th floor of a Newark library. According to Facebook, three people attended and only six were interested. And those who went already knew about the problem.
Artise says this is typical. More often than not, her audience is like-minded members of the fashion industry, not consumers. But it’s consumers who need the information most. Without it, there’s no incentive not to buy fast fashion.
“It’s easy to shop fast fashion when you don’t know the impact of the clothes being made,” says Artise.
Consumers can’t see the impact, but they can see the price, says Sarah Kelley, author of Common Threads: US Foundation Opportunities in Sustainable Fiber and Textiles. According to this report, the textile industry, fast fashion brands included, accounts for 5–10% of global greenhouse gas emissions. But that’s not listed anywhere consumers can see. “The price is right there. As a consumer that’s the only information you’re getting,” Kelley says. “You’re not getting the information about gas emissions or labor abuse or waste on the tag. Just the low cost to you.”
Cost is often what keeps consumers from switching to sustainable brands. When designers create upcycled garments or use recycled fabrics, they are competing at luxury price points with tags often listing triple digits. Slowing down fashion means taking more steps in production, often adding up on the bottom line. Consumers have to be willing to accept that added cost, says FIT knitwear professor Asta Skocir. “If I’m a consumer, I’m wondering, ‘Do I have to buy it at $475 when I could get the $50 knock-off at Zara?’ The product has to be cost-effective and cost competitive,” she says.
In July 2015, Skocir participated in “Rebirth,” a program at SUNY Korea where FIT students were challenged to take existing garments that weren’t selling and upcycle them into marketable products. A trench coat became a dress. A jacket was given a new lining and bellow pockets. A t-shirt was dyed in the parking lot and refashioned. In the process, the students worked with manufacturers to redesign their garments. But with each sustainable choice made, the costs went up. “If the material’s more expensive, if slower production strains the manufacturer, if being sustainable means it takes longer to make, that all ends up being part of the cost,” Skocir says. “Everything trickles down to the consumer.”
Back at the BFDA, Pelaez reflected a similar sentiment on her brand Suzanne Rae. Standing in her own mustard trousers and loafers, she points to the navy crew-neck sweater she’s wearing. It’s recycled cashmere, but that’s not the selling point, she says. It turns out recycled cashmere costs less — both to the designer and consumer. And the sweater’s price reflects that. “If it were recycled and the same price as virgin fabric, it wouldn’t have sold as well,” she says. The sweater is one of her best sellers, but its sustainability is a nice-to-have, not a have-to-have.
Later, Pelaez’s rack of merchandise is close to empty. Where half-price tops hung at the start of the night now sits a row of mostly empty hangers. The adjacent shoe boxes that began as a stack have whittled down to a single row. Pelaez was selling last season merchandise for $30 to $50, prices consumers were willing to — and could actually — pay.
In contrast, each Noorism tote cost a cool $175 and the Skyline Sweatshirt an even cooler $475. Zakka’s rack is still full of born-again denim, including the Skyline Sweatshirt. But she ends the night having exchanged emails with the male customer. It’s not concrete, but it’s a compromise.
Shop reuse without breaking the bank!
Shopping sustainably is expensive — we get it. But cutting the cost to the planet doesn’t have to mean doubling it for your wallet:
Buy less and save for one piece you know you’ll wear. Think of it as waiting on the 15 fast fashion pieces you’ll throw away in a month and instead buying one garment you’ll keep for years. Try skipping your next Zara binge and heading to Noorism for an upcycled denim tote, instead.
Buyback programs at upcycling brands help you save. Big brands and small alike have buy back programs to encourage you to reuse. Levis partnered with Give Back Box to make it easy to ship old clothes and recycle them. Or, if you’re in a city, bring textile waste or empty beauty containers to your local & Other Stories for 10% off your next purchase.
Hit up a sample sale — last season’s clothes need saving, too. While these are fewer and farther between, sample sales are a great way to save unsold merchandise from the landfill — and get luxury goods for up to 70% off! Brands like Suzanne Rae and Creatures of Comfort hold biannual sample sales, and big brands are always looking to get rid of merchandise around the holidays.
If all else fails, thrift! If luxury upcycling designers are still too much for you, shop at thrift and vintage stores. The prices are typically between $20 and $70 for off brand merchandise and luxury goods can go for as little as $200. Beacon’s Closet is a great go-to for low-cost consignment, while The Break houses more high-end wares.
