For Thommy Douglass the assignment was a test
of grit. He had just five hours to whip up a men’s coat made from a heap of
castoffs: jeans, an old wedding dress, and threadbare tweed jackets.
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The task, set by the producers of “Upcycle Nation”,
a new television fashion competition, rattled him. Douglass, 35, a contestant
on the show, which is set to begin streaming on Wednesday on Fuse TV, has been
making and selling elaborate corsets, silk tops, and denim skirts from scraps
for the past two years. He sells them on Depop and ReMuse, his e-commerce site
on
Etsy. But he had never designed clothes for men or worked in a television
studio.
“You are catapulted into an environment you’re not
used to,” he said. “You’re working with machinery that isn’t yours. So the
level of nerves really kicks in.”
He tackled the project, as one of two dozen
contestants culled from a pool of aspiring designers and artists known for
reworking and reinventing second-hand finds into wearable clothes on
YouTube,
TikTok, and Instagram.
The series, a variation on “Project Runway”, is
framed, in part, as a rebuke to unthinking consumerism.
“During the last couple of years all of our lives
have kind of shifted,” said John Scarlett, the head of in-house production at
Fuse. The protracted pause of the pandemic “allowed us to reconsider how much
we’re buying from a fashion and retail standpoint — and how much we waste.”
In packaging sustainability as entertainment, the
producers are tapping a rising interest in upcycling.
“This is not just
another fashion competition,” said Karrueche Tran, an actress and model who is
the show’s host and executive producer. “We hope the show will be informative
and inspire people to reuse household items in a creative way.”
Avoiding waste by repurposing remnants is not new.
But it is timely.
Some luxury houses, including Balenciaga,
Alexander McQueen, Gucci, Marni, and Coach have embraced this trend, though later than
many environmental advocates would have liked. And labels including the upscale
Stella McCartney and Marine Serre, as well as Re/Done, Zero Waste Daniel and
the Canadian company Preloved, have been built partly or entirely around
upcycling.
The tag #Upcycled clothing has more than 363,000
posts on Instagram. On TikTok, #upcyclingfashion has over 52 million views.
According to a 2021 study from First Insight and the
Baker Retailing Center at the Wharton School of the
University of Pennsylvania,
the notion of breathing new life into old clothes chimes with a new generation.
These are people who have never set foot in a luxury store, some three-quarters
of whom value sustainability over brand logos when shopping.
Contestants on the show range in age, background and
experience. There is 18-year-old Jonas King, entering his first year at the
Fashion Institute of Technology in New York City; and Andrew Burgess, 21, whose
quilt hoodie drew a large following on TikTok and Instagram, and who, through
his upcycled streetwear label, Wandy the Maker, has collaborated with brands
including Panasonic and Guess. Georgia Culp, 49, a single mother, experiments
with punk horror and rockabilly themes in “Scrap the Runway”, her design company.
Contestants share a commitment to sustainability. In
King’s upcycling practice, fashion and social responsibility converge. He aims,
he said, “to find ways of keeping things in the world instead of dumping them
in the desert in Chile.” (The Atacama Desert in Chile is a notorious graveyard
for scrapped clothing.)
The producers are looking for a radical, even
subversive, display of creativity and improvisational skills using a needle,
staples, glue gun, or shears. The challenge goes well beyond slashing or
knotting an old T-shirt or fusing two high-end logos in the same garment. In
each episode, three contestants are asked to assemble a montage from scraps or
household staples, items as unlikely as an air mattress, a deflated exercise
ball, or an old rug.
“In designing, my goal is always for you to see the
life that my materials have lived,” King said. “If there is a little hole or a
little discoloration, you know the piece has come from something else. It has
personality, individuality, and a story.”
On the show, his assignment was to make a full
outfit out of three satchels of randomly selected materials, mostly leather and
canvas. “I immediately leaned toward the natural fabric,” he said. “You can see
the fibers.”
Peder Cho, a judge on the show who founded the
upcycle label Utopia, looks for polish. “If I’m making something myself, I
don’t like a lot of rawness showing,” said Cho, an accountant-turned-designer
who has collaborated with Target, True Religion, and other brands.
“I want the work to
look like it came from the store,” he said. He is a stickler for detail. “I’m
looking at all the elements the contestants use from the original piece,” he
said, “the belt loops, the buttons, the zipper.”
Jerome LaMaar, another judge, places a premium on originality.
“I want to see something that stimulates,” said LaMaar, a designer, brand
consultant, and trend forecaster. “That’s what pushes me to become a kind of
Cruella de Vil.”
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