On 22 April, annual Earth Day, London-based designer Christopher Raeburn and his team staged a virtual intervention. This involved an intense internal questioning of the Ræburn label’s own practices. “We wanted to challenge ourselves to think about the future of Ræburn — how to make it more disruptive, innovative and inspiring, with the wellbeing of our team in mind,” the designer says.
A week later, they emerged with a manifesto, which declared that the company would prioritise actions over words, make less but better, and use radical transparency to empower the next generation of responsible creatives.
Ræburn stands as a direct provocation to the broader fashion industry, where sustainability is still often an afterthought, a marginalised department or a capsule collection. Operating on a small scale outside the conventional fashion system, Ræburn is able to road test a more holistic blueprint for sustainability — with potential lessons for mainstream brands.
His mentor Susanne Tide-Frater, board director of London luxury retailer Browns Fashion, says Ræburn is a “brand of the future”, navigating tough times by adapting rather than compromising, and turning problems into opportunities. “His collections are full of new approaches to sustainability, exploding the framework of what an ecological brand is,” she says.
Raeburn has been turning discarded fabrics such as military parachutes and silk maps into functional menswear and womenswear since 2009, scooping the British Fashion Award for Emerging Talent Menswear just one year after launch. The Royal College of Art graduate’s label is a subversive presence in British fashion, now occupying the old Burberry textile factory in Hackney.
Even before April’s so-called “Ræstart”, every product fulfilled at least one sustainability criteria: reworked materials fall into “Ræmade”, existing materials and green technologies are “Ræcycled”, and the few virgin products have a “Ræduced” waste or carbon footprint. Community outreach projects such as studio tours and workshops invite others to share Ræburn’s knowledge and skills, simultaneously raising money for charity. Armed with a list of existing gaps and actions to resolve them, Ræburn hopes to certify as a B Corp by 2021.
Changes made in the first three months since the “Ræstart” spanned design, charity and logistics. Ræburn was one of six brands to design a face mask for the British Fashion Council’s charity face mask initiative, collectively raising £500,000. Its collaboration with Depop made a bucket hat pattern freely available to the public, with fabric available to purchase alongside the patterns or through Ræburn’s new deadstock fabric shop. The same deadstock will be crafted into the SS21 collection, while AW20 repurposes unworn military apparel. All travel is being carbon offset with Green Perk, air quality is being improved with the Zero Emissions Network, and one per cent of sales goes to environmental organisations per the 1% for the Planet pledge.
Small but agile: The Raeburn philosophy
Staying small has stood Christopher Raeburn in good stead, says Tide-Frater. “Many young British designers overexpanded, took on huge overheads and management, only to lack the cash flow to survive. Christopher stayed under the radar, constructing his vision.”
Intentionally limiting growth has allowed the brand to pivot quickly, adds former managing director Alex McIntosh. “The brand is agile by design and by necessity,” he says. “Newness is critical to fashion, there’s no getting around that. But Ræburn offers new experiences rather than new products.”
Ræburn plays down consumption, engaging fans through learning opportunities. The brand shares free patterns, sells affordable fabrics and runs workshops on remaking and repairing. The goal is to democratise responsible design, shifting the relationship between brand and customer from seller-buyer to long-term collaborators. This may seem counterintuitive for a fashion brand, but it invites loyalty, says Andrew Groves, professor of fashion design at London’s University of Westminster and curator of “Invisible Men”, a menswear exhibition staged in 2019. “Menswear works when it’s a dialogue. On Savile Row, you’re not buying a suit, you’re buying a relationship with the designer. People wear those clothes for decades; Christopher understands that.”
The approaching holiday season will demonstrate this. “Black Friday can only be a race to the bottom,” says Raeburn. “Last year, we said ‘buy nothing, repair something’, inviting people to come and learn how to repair their clothes, whichever brand they were from. A lot of our range has a lifetime guarantee, so it never goes on sale.”
McIntosh, now sustainability consultant to Selfridges and Net-a-Porter, says Ræburn is a more accessibly priced competitor to Stone Island or CP Company, while Groves positions the brand creatively next to Paul Smith or Massimo Osti — “menswear designers grounded in solving problems and generating ideas rather than imposing a vision on people”.
Igniting industry change through collaborations
Raeburn has used collaborations with mainstream businesses to bump up revenues. “This whole enterprise is still imbibed with risk throughout, but it’s balanced by other projects,” he says. The business, understood to be operating on sales of under £5 million, garners half its income from consultancy and collaboration, half from retail and wholesale. “The good news is that we’ve seen incremental growth in the last 11 years aside from one year. It’s measured growth,” says Raeburn. “We’re small but very robust.”
Financial sustainability did not come easily. “Christopher is a man of enormous integrity, almost to a fault,” says McIntosh, who worked directly with Ræburn from 2012 to 2016. Big retailers wanted uniform products and big margins, but Ræburn struggled to find manufacturers capable of cutting from parachutes instead of flat pieces of fabric, and willing to do so in small quantities. “The slow and considered approach didn’t always translate into solid commercial sell-through, but it does now,” adds McIntosh, pointing to the functional unisex garments that now complement limited-edition collectible designs and the in-house studio team. “Fashion has to be uncompromising to a degree, but Raeburn has an uncompromising focus on his values as well as aesthetic output.”
Raeburn calls the brand a “Trojan horse of responsible design”. Orsola de Castro, co-founder of Fashion Revolution and also of Estethica, the London Fashion Week sustainability showcase (2006-14) that facilitated Raeburn’s debut back in 2009, says he is the most referenced designer in the sustainable fashion sphere. His offcut workshops inspired Fashion Revolution’s annual Fashion Open Studio event series, where designers such as Marques Almeida and Kevin Germanier show people their processes to encourage transparency.
By Raeburn’s own admission, no product is ever completely sustainable and no brand is ever perfect, but his commitment to responsible design and long-term thinking has garnered the attention of bigger brands hoping to learn lessons. His portfolio of collaborations stretches from The North Face and MCM to Barbour and Disney. Two led to creative director roles, at Swiss Army knife maker Victorinox and, currently, at footwear brand Timberland.
The DIY bucket hat video that accompanied his recent Depop collaboration attracted 8,000 views, primarily younger creatives with an interest in sustainability. A partnership with Moncler (2012-13) emphasised Ræburn’s strength in outerwear. Looking for global reach, he has now connected with Timberland, a brand which has a goal for its products to have a net positive impact on nature by 2030.
“He’s showing companies how to collaborate with a responsibly minded designer and transition to more sustainable practices,” says veteran fashion consultant Julie Gilhart, who helped launch the inaugural LVMH Prize for emerging talent. Raeburn’s business model clearly cannot be adopted by the broader industry overnight. “One of the biggest problems we have bringing sustainability into mainstream fashion is scale,” says McIntosh. “Changing a big company means moving people out of jobs, reengineering and reorganising — painful stuff. You can’t do a skid-turn in a huge truck.”
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