Upcycling waste

In recent years, various designers have started working with deadstock materials or making upcycled garments, just as important luxury brands have pulled samples and old collections out of warehouses, reintroducing them in a new form. The practice of upcycling, after all, is not new to the fashion world (just think of designers such as Martin Margiela) but lately it became a real trend: from the pandemic onwards, thanks to the stocks generated by unsold goods and the scarcity of new materials available, there are many brands that have embraced this technique.

But what is upcycling? By upcycling we mean the use of old clothes or used textiles to create new garments with added value in terms of aesthetics, quality, or functionality. This is the main difference with downcycling, in which raw materials are instead transformed into products of lesser value (e.g. from textiles to building padding).

Designer  Rafael Kouto , Source: Lottozero, ph.Rachele Salvioli

For designers working with upcycling, waste materials such as old clothes, prototypes, fabrics, colour proofs become precious raw materials that are disassembled, reassembled, coloured, enriched with embroidery, printing, or other finishing techniques, leading to the creation of unique clothes and accessories.

While there are brands like Christopher Raeburn that have been dedicating their activity to up-cycling garments for decades, others luxury brands have just started to explore this world, looking at what is destined to be discarded and reinterpreting it.

For instance, Upcycled by Miu Miu is an exclusive and special collection of vintage pieces upcycled by the brand creative team. Built around unsigned vintage garments from the period between the 1930s and the 1980s, this collection comprises 80 unique and numbered dresses that have been restored, remodelled, and decorated with embroidery and details emblematic of the brand. Each dress is absolutely unique and entirely hand-finished, through Miu Miu’s typical codes. The life of garments worn and loved in the past is therefore extended, renewed, prolonged.

Talking about smaller brands, another example is Rafael Kouto . Swiss designer with a background in some prestigious couture fashion houses, he is using his deep expertise in artisanal techniques to reinvent pre-consumer and post-consumer textile waste and transform it into beautiful collections, showing how the system already has all the resources, both material and creative, to reinvent itself, collection after collection, directing creativity not only to the conception of new styles, but also to new virtuous practices.