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Asked what the future of retail looks like, Australian fashion designer Kit Willow imagined a store that could showcase a product’s entire life cycle from start to finish, waste and labour and all.
“[Property developer] Beulah came to me and said, ‘Kit, what is the future of fashion retail? We are using this beautiful building in Melbourne as a testing ground for future ideas’,” says Willow, whose fashion brand Kitx is one of the most prominent in Australia. With a chuckle, she recalls saying she didn’t know the answer to that question. “I said, ‘What I do know is we have an enormous waste issue in fashion globally. Why don’t we set up a lab where the entire process, from waste to finished good, is transparent — waste fashion arriving, being washed, cutting it open, making it, machining it, shooting it on a model. And that’s what the Future From Waste Lab is. We’ve made it happen.”
The retail space, created in collaboration with Melbourne-based urban developers Beulah International, is aimed at reimagining fashion retail for a sustainable future. The Future From Waste Lab sells upcycled garments, from tops to dresses to trench coats. It’s also part designer studio and sewing factory, with a team that does everything on site from cutting used clothes to sewing the fabric fragments into new garments. And, it’s part modelling and photo studio as well as, effectively, part clothing dump — the raw materials coming in are garments that were otherwise destined for a landfill.
Used textiles arrive from a local organisation, Upparel, that diverts clothes from landfill; those clothes get washed, deconstructed and redesigned into new garments; those garments are then modelled and photographed to be uploaded for e-commerce — and it all happens on-site, in one physical space that is open for anyone passing by to experience and witness the entire process. It opened in November, and has since hosted residencies with four of Australia’s leading designers, who have spent six weeks designing their own garments following that same process.
Long a fringe practice in the fashion industry, upcycling, or repurposing waste garments into new ones, is now gaining traction among mainstream designers and retailers. By keeping clothes out of landfill — and making new clothes without extracting new resources from the Earth — upcycling has clear and direct benefits for the environment. However, in the context of the global $2.5 trillion fashion industry, the potential for large-scale impact is currently limited — individual designers practising upcycling here and there are not going to shift the entire ecosystem. The real promise of a space like the lab, according to experts, is its potential to change the way people, designers and consumers alike, think about fashion.
Experts say the experience of seeing the end-to-end process — the would-be waste, the amount of time it takes to process it all and the amount of effort that a seamstress, working right there in front of them, puts into making a new garment — has the potential to change how people think about clothes. Visiting the lab could spur a deeper appreciation for what people already own or a more mindful approach to shopping for new clothes — including, perhaps, a willingness to pay more for them or a reevaluation of whether they need new clothes at all.
The mindset shift is exactly what Natalie Ho, a Future From Waste Lab customer, says she observed when a group of teenagers stepped in one day, looking confused at first because they were prepared to shop a typical collection. They took in what was happening around them — the piles of waste, the arduous sewing process — and she could almost see the gears turning inside their heads.
“Once they walked in and started to understand what’s involved — how many hours of engagement it takes just to produce that one garment — that opened that conversation, of: ‘What are we doing and how are we doing it, and really for what reason? Why are we just ordering, ordering without thinking about it?’” says Ho.
Even Adelene Teh, executive director and co-founder of Beulah International noticed, despite being involved in the project from the start, that the experience of being in the lab had an impact on her as well. “We're starting to see people being really engaged with the concept of it — not just circular fashion, but also being educated,” says Teh. “I’m not usually a denim jacket kind of person, but I started to appreciate — wow, this jacket is not just a denim jacket. It has meaning to it. It made me more conscious and aware of what kind of decisions I'm making with my clothing.”
Restoring connections with process and people
Some liken the concept of opening the doors to a clothing production facility, and its potential to change the way people think about clothes, to the shifts that have emerged in the food sector in the last decade or so. Just as farmers markets and open-kitchen restaurants have transformed how people eat and think about food — making choices for better health or to support local farmers, for example, and being more willing to pay higher prices for better quality — there may be potential for similar connections to be made between fashion’s producers and consumers.
That may not mean meeting a clothing vendor at a farmer’s market (although it could), but it can cultivate a deeper understanding of and appreciation for all that goes into making an individual garment. “If you never cook, then you don't appreciate that getting that flavour is going to mean you're cooking for hours. It's the same thing with fashion,” says London designer Patrick McDowell.
That parallel is not a coincidence, says David Monaghan, general manager of commercial and culture at Beulah. When they were planning out a roadmap for the Melbourne project — which also includes a hotel, restaurants, pop-ups and other stores focused more on experiences than physical goods alone — he says macro trends played into the process significantly, and that included the growing interest from consumers in connecting more with their purchases. “We've seen it in food for a long time, with people interested in local miles, where things are coming from and how healthy things are — and I think that's just moving naturally into some of these other categories,” he says.
Willow’s larger hope for the lab is to scale the concept and spark a ripple-effect change across the industry.
“Now that it’s working so well and Beulah is happy with it, I said to them, ‘Imagine if we can pick the model up and take it to London, for instance, and do a pop-up for 12 weeks, and call in all the local denim waste. Any denim you don't want, send it to the lab’,” she says. “And do the same process, fully transparent, in London. Then go to LA; then pick it up and take it somewhere else — with the view really to show designers and the community the power of using waste as a resource.”
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