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Once the domain of craft enthusiasts and thrifty grandmothers turning old curtains into dresses, upcycling is in the midst of a luxury makeover.
Spurred by the economic downturn, the growing concern for environmentalism, and an influx of DIY tutorials on social media, emerging and established brands are embracing upcycling, as a slew of new business models are popping up to engage the masses. Countless emerging brands — from Re/Done to ELV Denim — work with deadstock and upcycled materials. Miu Miu and Mulberry have each dabbled in upcycled capsules, while Coach and Hermès have whole sub-brands dedicated to repurposing their waste (Coachtopia and Hermès Petit H). And companies like Loom and Alterist are hoping to channel this momentum into new circular ecosystems. But is fashion ready to upcycle at scale?
Regulation could push businesses to do so. For brands selling into the European Union, extended producer responsibility (EPR) regulations are coming into force, meaning they have to consider what happens to their products after purchase, and help clean up the mess those products create. This waste is what upcyclists consider their raw materials, so shifts in demand will undoubtedly affect the budding ecosystem.
But scaling upcycling isn’t just a matter of compliance or logistics. At its core, upcycling is about converting discarded materials or products into items of higher value. Beyond that, it’s a systemic shift. It would mean slowing down operations and disrupting the current fashion system at almost every juncture, says Fashion Revolution co-founder and Estethica creative director Orsola de Castro, who ran an upcycled brand called From Somewhere between 1997 and 2014. “Upcycling is anti-industry,” she explains. “To upcycle properly, you have to locate your waste, employ and train people to utilise that waste, and rebalance the system that created it in the first place. This is how the fashion industry operated before fast fashion — but today’s industry is not interested in recuperating the old.”
As upcycling enters the mainstream, its definition is becoming murkier. Established brands often apply the term to limited-edition capsule collections that put a creative spin on unsold or ‘archive’ styles. It’s commonplace now for emerging brands to claim the term ‘upcycling’ on the basis that they work with deadstock fabric, but experts point out that buying rolls of unused fabric is very different to sourcing, sorting, cleaning, disassembling and reimagining products that have been damaged or discarded. “A lot of what is being sold as deadstock is actually last season’s surplus or overproduction,” says de Castro.
Historically, upcycling was used in times of scarcity. Today, brands are attempting to use upcycling as a solution for abundance. However, without addressing the scale of new fashion production — which is what created the renewed interest in upcycling in the first place — the potential for impact will be limited, says Turkish academic Sanem Odabaşı and author of Fashion, Upcycling, and Memory. “It’s like putting a bandage on a huge scar. At some point, you need to address scale and stop producing so many new clothes.”
Still, upcycling is a vital component of the circular economy. According to the waste hierarchy that guides the EU’s waste framework directive, upcycling should come after reuse, where brands find a new life for old garments, ideally without spending additional energy or resources on it. Recycling — in which fashion has invested millions without a real breakthrough, and which still faces myriad limitations — comes next (after upcycling). Only if those avenues prove fruitless, there is downcycling and then disposal.
Intercepting the production process
Many upcyclists extol the virtue of craft and artisanship in the process, but industrialising upcycling is one of the key steps towards scaling it, says Jocelyn Wilkinson, partner and associate director of Boston Consulting Group (BCG).
Part of the problem is that fashion has lacked a proper collection and sorting infrastructure for textile waste, which is the feedstock for upcycling. Brands’ pre-consumer and industrial waste is often spread across factories, retail sites and distribution centres, while post-consumer waste tends to accumulate in waste disposal sites, charity retail and waste sorting facilities, despite (troubled) brand take-back programmes. There have been some government efforts to ease the collecting and sorting processes — early adopter France aims to collect 60 per cent of used textiles by 2028 — but these have so far proved insufficient.
Even if all the waste was in one place, it would be difficult to sort: many used textiles lack care labels, so sorting by composition is difficult, and fixtures, embellishments and finishings make the process hard to standardise and inventorise, adds Wilkinson.
In northeastern Italy, social enterprise Insieme is working to manage and repurpose 350 tonnes of textile waste each year. Insieme is one of very few organisations in Italy that has an official permit to process waste and prepare it for reuse, either through repair, recycling, resale or upcycling (for lower grade or damaged items, there is the option of shredding or downcycling). Since 1 January 2022, Italians have been required by law to gather and separate their textile waste at home, in theory easing the recovery and reuse process. But the supply chain wasn’t ready, so questions remain over where the waste goes once it’s been separated, says Insieme president Marina Fornasier. As a result, these scant facilities are overrun with textile waste and are struggling to cope with the rising cost of landfill. Insieme’s upcycling arm transforms the items it receives in bulk but cannot resell — at its Vicenza headquarters, a collection of upcycled men’s blazers sit next to patchworked fleeces, reworked hospital scrubs, firefighter uniforms remodelled as bags and T-shirts emblazoned with the slogan “new is over”. But the process is still largely manual, and the margins are tight.
Brazilian designer Renata Brenha has built her brand by splicing, smocking and pleating football shirts, a nod to the Brazilian concept of gambiarra — loosely translated to making do or improvising in imaginative ways with limited resources. She has struggled to find manufacturers that are willing to work with upcycled materials, because post-consumer garments cannot be cut in bulk (each one is different) and reassembling them requires a level of creative input most factories are not set up for. Attempts to create production packs and give more detailed instructions for disassembly have yielded mixed results. “There is very little support and, in many places, the system is working against us,” she says. “A lot of this work is very hard to delegate.”
Ideally, brands would integrate the upcycling process into their own vertical production lines, says Wilkinson. Ugandan upcycling brand Buzigahill is hoping to open its own factory to process textile waste while offering greener jobs to local workers. “In the last four years, we have been able to identify the work surfaces, equipment and production processes that make upcycling easier, but it’s not like normal fashion production,” says founder Bobby Kolade. “You can’t cut 30 pattern pieces at once. It’s much more unique. So we’re looking to scale our own production facility that specialises in this.”
Slightly further along in this process is Bank Vogue (no connection to Vogue), the parent company of UK vintage reseller Beyond Retro, which sells four million secondhand garments each week. The company built its first upcycling plant 15 years ago to deal with the garments it couldn’t resell, and now has five facilities up and running. President Steven Bethell says the secret is making upcycling as consistent as possible, and getting design teams speaking the same language. To do this, his team creates swatchbooks with samples cut from various secondhand garments to show the breadth and depth of available waste. Each sample comes with detailed notes about the size of the garment it was cut from, which dictates the maximum size of pattern pieces. So the pattern is made to fit the waste, not vice versa. “I feel like we’ve cracked the Da Vinci code,” he says of the process, which was used to create both the Converse x Beyond Retro Chuck 70, made from pre-loved handmade crochet blankets, and the Coach Soho Flap bag in repurposed denim.
Shifting consumer perceptions
Taking upcycling mainstream means shifting consumer perceptions, from redefining retail to valuing craft.
Buzigahill made a splash on the international market with its ‘return to sender’ model, redesigning secondhand clothes exported to Uganda as luxury products and selling them back to the same consumers that discarded them. The brand now has 11 wholesale stockists between Japan and Belgium, but selling one-off upcycled products in a setting where consumers and buyers alike expect conformity brings its own challenges. “We work with what we can buy at the market, so we don’t know the materials we will be working with in advance,” says Kolade. “If the stockist isn’t on board and doesn’t accept variation, there’s no chance of upcycling succeeding on a commercial scale.”
Selling upcycled garments also means reckoning with modern consumers’ warped understandings of cost and value, adds London-based upcyclist Helen Kirkum. For her eponymous label, Kirkum sources single shoes donated to charity retailer Traid (shoes often get separated when they aren’t tied together before being donated). Six years in, she has found ways to accelerate the time-heavy and cost-intensive process of upcycling, notably by creating patchworked fabrics that can be slotted into conventional production processes more easily. This includes a mishmash of leather made from sneaker uppers, a quilted mesh made from the inside of sneaker tongues and a woven fabric crafted from shoelaces. Still, her profit margins are less than two times, where traditional sneakers might be closer to four times. “Sometimes it’s hard for people to understand why it costs more than something made from virgin materials,” she says. “And it’s really difficult to keep up with the big boys when you’ve got no budget.”
ELV Denim is finding a way around this by supplementing product sales with consulting services, helping more established brands venture into upcycling and raising consumer awareness of it in the process. ELV Denim founder and creative director Anna Foster says this upskilling is essential to scaling upcycling. “There’s no point telling people how to do upcycling and then taking all the knowledge with you when the contract ends,” she explains. “We have to collaborate and not be afraid to share what we see as proprietary information, because we need to help everyone along the way. When we talk about scaling upcycling, people think about scaling individual upcycling businesses. But the most effective way to scale upcycling is to scale the amount of people who have these skills and can do it meaningfully in their own niche.”
New business models, new ways to engage with fashion
Brands upcycling textile waste are just one side of the ecosystem. Supporting them is a growing wave of businesses that disrupt the linear fashion system and encourage consumers to engage with their own textile waste in new ways. There’s a lot for larger brands to learn from.
Alterist, founded by Hannah Standen and Martina Sorghi, combines a consumer-facing marketplace where upcyclists can sell their wares, with in-person ‘customisation station’ events for on-the-spot upcycling and a B2B offering that match-makes businesses’ textile waste with upcyclists who can convert it. Over 120 designers in 18 countries have signed up so far. One of the biggest challenges is measuring the environmental impact, so B2B clients can shout about their efforts, says Sorghi. Alterist now asks upcyclists to track the weight of their input materials versus the final product, as well as the material composition, so it can work out the displacement rate (the rate at which circular fashion transactions directly prevent a new item from being manufactured and bought), similar to how resale businesses have attempted to quantify their own impact.
For more established companies with larger budgets, there’s the potential to bring in a third party to help quantify the impact of upcycling and conduct original life cycle assessments, as Coach has for its upcycling work with Bank Vogue.
The Loom app, founded by Daisy Harvey and launching 18 February, will also seek to connect consumers with upcyclists, but will focus on custom upcycling jobs rather than selling pre-made upcycled garments. Similar to repair and alterations apps such as Sojo and The Seam, Loom connects consumers with local craftspeople so they have the option of in-person fittings, which can then reduce transport emissions. Prices start from £50, so commissions tend to cluster around higher value items like wedding dresses, says Harvey, which can be dyed, shortened or even turned into two pieces. There is also a growing trend towards sentimental upcycles — one customer had her dad’s ties made into a bag — but everyday items remain elusive. In a bid to encourage this and combat the choice paralysis that often comes with custom commissions, the app will offer a ‘menu’ of inspiration pictures from each designer it features. Sojo did something similar with repairs, limiting the options to streamline the customer experience and make the process more cost effective on the backend.
Having road tested their in-store upcycling offering with Selfridges over the last two years (during which over 260 garments were upcycled), London-based upcyclist Chloe Baines is now opening a more permanent upcycling service called Up Yours at design studio Imprint Works. “As a working-class person, my work is directed towards making sustainability accessible, so I’ll be offering revamps and upgrades on a sliding scale of affordability,” they say. Prices will range from £20 to £150, with a minimum deposit of £10. Brands have already begun to integrate similar services into physical retail on the repair side: sneaker brand Veja has launched 10 cobbler spaces since 2020, while Uniqlo offers ‘Re.Uniqlo’ circular services (including remaking and repairing) in almost 60 retail locations around the world.
Setting upcyclists up for success
In order to scale upcycling, brands need to understand the persistent challenges at play.
Many small upcyclists report running into legal challenges from the more established brands whose waste they work with. To avoid this, upcyclists need to understand the difference between trademarks and copyrights, says Susan Scafidi, academic director of the Fashion Law Institute at Fordham University in New York. Trademarked products could include signs and symbols that indicate origin, from logos to signature prints like the Burberry Nova check, Adidas three stripe and Gucci Quattro G, as well as whole products like the Hermès Birkin. Where copyrighted products are covered by the first sale doctrine (also known internationally as exhaustion of rights), which means the original maker’s rights are “exhausted” after the first sale, this doesn’t apply to trademarked products, Scafidi explains. When a product is upcycled or reworked, a copyright owner cannot act, but a trademark owner can.
Another challenge is reckoning with the chemical heritage of upcycled garments, which can be difficult to assess if care labels are removed, faded, or offer limited disclosures. There have been cases where counterfeit products — which are also open to upcycling — have caused skin irritation or rashes, due to the use of chemicals like formaldehyde being used as a fixative for dyes or a stabilising agent for wool, notes Scafidi. Likewise, Bank Vogue’s Bethell says older leather garments and waterproof products are “no-fly zones” for Beyond Retro, because of the potential presence of harmful chemicals that would not pass safety regulations today. The best way upcyclists can cover themselves — and their customers — against this risk is to test fabric or include a disclaimer that they are unaware of the material and chemical composition, adds Scafidi.
One of the main challenges for upcyclists is the never-ending flow of new textile waste. Much has been written about the environmental and social impacts of this in recent years, largely owing to the activism around secondhand markets in the Global South that receive regular and overwhelming shipments from the Global North. One example is Ghana’s Kantamanto Market — one of the largest secondhand markets in the world, which suffered a devastating fire in January. The Revival is one of the upcycling companies based at Kantamanto Market that has broken onto the global stage. It recently launched a training programme to upskill local workers in upcycling and support other upcycling businesses, and has drop-off spots where secondhand traders can donate their unsold goods. However, founder Yayra Agbofah says the system is flooding with too much low-quality textile waste.
To combat this, brands can start to implement circular design principles, considering end of life and ease of disassembly from the beginning, to avoid problems downstream. Educators are already getting the next generation of designers to think about this: at London’s Royal College of Art, fashion research tutor Joyce Addai-Davis has added landfill and waste to the marking criteria for students, alongside systems, biomaterials and digital.
“Upcycling is an essential part of the fashion ecosystem, but it isn’t regarded this way by brands,” says Agbofah. “They need to design in a way that makes upcycling more viable, and consumers need to donate good stuff, which has been repaired and looked after. The worse the quality of the clothing entering the waste stream, the shorter the lifespan of the upcycled product, too.”
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