Waste with taste
The fashion designers transforming our trash
Fed up with the lightning-quick trend cycle, some designers are taking a second look at the things we leave behind. Kaya Martin reports.
Paulina Zamorano’s desk is littered with three years’ worth of bread clips: a hard plastic confetti neatly sorted into ziplock bags. Hanging on a rack are two metre-long strips, drilled down and woven together with butcher's twine.
“I think if I wasn’t an artist and a designer,” she says, “I would probably classify as a hoarder.” Her vision for the project, made for the upcoming Room to Reverse exhibition at the Maroondah City Council, is a jacket that diffuses into bread clip chainmail, enshrined in a bread clip curtain. From the kitchen bin to the gallery floor.
If beauty is in the eye of the beholder, perhaps waste is as well. Paulina is just one of the many designers who are rethinking fashion’s relationship with the things we throw away.
At a time when the effects of climate change are impossible to ignore, these designers are drawing inspiration from the unsettling feeling. Instead of adding to the ever-growing pile of trend-driven debris, they look at it and think, ‘I could do something with that’. Upcycling, as it’s called, is a certain alchemy: taking waste, adding care, creativity, and intention, and bringing it back to the world of the chic.
Paulina's bread clip jacket project plan. PIC: Kaya Martin
Paulina's bread clip jacket project plan. PIC: Kaya Martin
Most of Paulina’s wearables are made from garbage. Donated denim, salvaged Salvos sweaters – on the mannequin, a cerulean IKEA bedsheet has been re-imagined as a top, its fitted elastic turned to bountiful ruffles.
Her practice relies on her ability to see potential in items left unwanted. For her, this mindset shift was a conscious choice. She tells me at school, the teaching was “go to Spotlight, get your fabric, get your patterns, let’s sew this up.” When she started her first degree in multidisciplinary arts, she couldn’t help but feel haunted by the chain reaction caused by working with brand-new materials.
“My mum always says you can’t look at things so literal all the time otherwise you’re going to drive yourself crazy,” she tells me. “But how else am I supposed to look at it?”
Thrifting in her childhood gave her the buzzy feeling of finding something special, no matter that it was pre-loved. Bringing used textiles into her practice just felt right.
“I think it has given me another lens to re-imagine what that material should or could be,” she says, “and then give it that new life that allows it to be something else, and be appreciated.”
Paulina drills holes in the corners of the bread clips to weave them together. PIC: Kaya Martin
Paulina drills holes in the corners of the bread clips to weave them together. PIC: Kaya Martin
The first of many bread clip chainmail strips hang from the rack. PIC: Kaya Martin
The first of many bread clip chainmail strips hang from the rack. PIC: Kaya Martin
Paulina displays her upcycled "Humilde" jacket, PIC: Kaya Martin
Paulina displays her upcycled "Humilde" jacket, PIC: Kaya Martin
High fashion, like most things that come with a hefty price tag, tends to favour the new, the shiny, the luxurious. But pandemic-related closures and worker shortages forced even some of the most esteemed legacy brands, like Miu Miu, Chloé, Balenciaga, and Alexander McQueen, to dabble with unconventional materials.
From forgotten corners of their warehouses, they pulled rolls of old materials and found a way to make them feel new. Their embrace of reuse gave encouragement to those who have long been asking for more sustainable practices in the notoriously wasteful industry.
PIC: Sorrentino
PIC: Sorrentino
PIC: Sorrentino
PIC: Sorrentino
PIC: Sorrentino
PIC: Sorrentino
PIC: Sorrentino
PIC: Sorrentino
The pandemic made designer Bel Sorrentino get creative too. Like many others, she started selling handmade masks and was met with far more demand than she expected.
“I made hundreds of sales within a week, which was just giving me a taste of what it could be like to do this full-time,” she says. She used the profits to pay for startup costs to launch her eponymous brand.
Bel knew she wanted to do something different. Her experience working in retail had left her disheartened. Despite working for high-end brands that wouldn’t obviously fall into the fast fashion bucket, she describes seeing excess stock, plastic packaging and wasted garments.
“I had known for a long time that the industry had big problems, but seeing it in the flesh always strengthens my desire for change,” she says.
Upon viewing her pieces – edgy, androgynous, and meticulously crafted – one wouldn’t assume they’re made from trashed materials. She uses deadstock: the odds and ends left behind by other brands, imperfect rolls abandoned due to damage, or because they just don’t fit the vibe.
Using deadstock comes with a unique set of obstacles – for one, there’s a finite amount of fabric, making it tricky to make multiples of the same garment. There are often blemishes (Bel calls them “beauty spots”) that must be spot cleaned or cut around, adding extra parameters to the design process.
With three collections under her belt and fresh off a showing at New York Fashion Week, the limitations look good on Sorrentino Studios. But Bel doesn’t know if it’ll last forever – as her brand grows, she may have to start using virgin materials.
“You can find fabrics that are certified, that you can find out exactly how it’s made, if it’s made sustainably,” she says, “so I would still keep to that ethos.”
Dr Rebecca Van Amber, senior lecturer and manager of the RMIT bachelor of fashion and textiles sustainable innovation program, says the glaring impact of our wasteful practices has brought sustainability to centre stage for many fashion fans.
"In the last couple years we’ve seen devastating bushfires, devastating flooding in Australia," she tells me. "We’re seeing all of these ecological impacts firsthand around climate change, and I’d like to think that that's helping a lot of people in the general public be aware that our everyday actions can really impact our environment."
Although despite having the best intentions, it's not always easy for environmentally-conscious brands to turn a profit.
“I know of a lot of small brands that, especially if they’re working in the sustainability space, [that] we hold up as a paradigm. They’re doing the right thing, and they’re a small brand and leading the way,” she says. “When you actually talk to them, they’re not making any money.”
She finds it slightly strange how upcycling is being viewed as a trend, as it was once common practice for people to make and mend their own clothes. In the post-WW2 era, women's magazines came with patterns and government programs encouraged home sewing.
“Clothing was more expensive and people did a lot more repair," says Dr Van Amber, "If something didn’t fit, they would alter it, they would change it.”
Raised in Minnesota, her mum taught her how to sew, something she says was typical at the time. But that would change as clothing became cheaper and more accessible.
The mid-twentieth century saw the first synthetic fibres like nylon, lycra, and polyester, hung up on department store racks. They were lauded for their versatility, durability, and low price tag.
(They’re so durable, in fact, that some take centuries to decompose.)
Combined with the emergence of overseas factories offering low-cost labour and a late-century laissez-faire attitude towards global trade, and you’re left with a bunch of home sewing machines boxed up in dusty attics.
“I think for a lot of people, the thought of upcycling or doing anything to a garment is really scary and intimidating,” says Dr Van Amber. “It’s kind of in that ‘too hard’ basket.”
If we can get a new pair of jeans delivered to our front door for the price of a kale caesar salad, how likely are we to spend precious time learning how to patch up our old ones?
But as the prices of clothing descended, it seems our perceived value of them did as well.
What we may have lost when sewing fell out of favour was our understanding of the time and effort it takes to mend, adjust, and care for something.
For textile artist Chelsea Hickman, saving materials from the landfill is a labour of love. Her atelier consists of lab coats, camping tents, black-out curtains, and armfuls of teal tulle snagged from a dumpster (suspected to be the remnants of a gender reveal party). We spent a sun-drenched afternoon cruising through Melbourne's northside, hunting for things to salvage.
“It just feels like I’m saying a bit of a ‘fuck you’ to the fashion industry by taking this discarded stuff,” she tells me. “Because if everyone starts making new clothes out of discarded stuff, I mean, how long would the fashion industry last? There’s going to be someone at the top who’s not making money.”
Our first stop, a tip shop containing everything from vintage organs to rusty bicycles, is a bust – all of their textiles have just been picked up by another organisation. The next place we go seems to be an industrial laundry – Chelsea isn’t sure what it is exactly, but she often finds a bin full of discarded workwear.
“Maybe it’s a biohazard and that’s why they chuck it out?” she ponders cheerfully. Today, the bin is empty, so we settle on sifting through the toss-away bags at the back of a nearby Salvos.
She says charity shops, inundated with donations, typically lack the means to wash or fix their items. Any imperfect garments are sent away to be processed into industrial rags. Better than the incinerator, but still: a sad fate for a frayed cashmere sweater or a velvet coat with missing buttons.
Both her studio and her garage are filled with boxes of rescued fabrics. Next comes the washing, drying, deconstructing, and creative thinking.
It may seem like using free materials would make the process cheaper, but all the extra time it takes makes it hard for Chelsea to pay herself even minimum wage. She has a daily job at a fast fashion company, where she tries to seed in sustainable values when she can.
Her personal work, punk, proud, and full of intention, is a kind of antidote, a spanner in the tireless churn from factory to rack to wardrobe to trash heap. “I get a lot of fulfillment when I turn literal, actual garbage into something really beautiful,” she says.
Chelsea Hickman searches through a bin of old clothes at the Darebin Resource Recovery Centre. PIC: Kaya Martin
Chelsea Hickman searches through a bin of old clothes at the Darebin Resource Recovery Centre. PIC: Kaya Martin
In the back room of a Salvos, Chelsea Hickman sorts through stained and broken clothing for things salvage. PIC: Kaya Martin
In the back room of a Salvos, Chelsea Hickman sorts through stained and broken clothing for things salvage. PIC: Kaya Martin
In Chelsea Hickman's studio, a mood board sets the tone for her future projects. PIC: Kaya Martin
In Chelsea Hickman's studio, a mood board sets the tone for her future projects. PIC: Kaya Martin
Models Milo Love and Victoria Wang sport Chelsea Hickman's upcycled designs. PIC: Shelley Horan
Chelsea Hickman's upcycled textile artwork Danger Danger Danger Danger Danger was the Open Category Winner of the ‘Woods Street Youth Art Prize’. PIC: Chelsea Hickman
Melbourne musician Pookie wears a gown from the Chelsea Hickman's Ultimate collection. PIC: Chelsea Hickman
