There’s a haunting photograph of Chile’s Atacama Desert that went viral earlier this year. It shows a sea of clothes dumped in the dunes, the labels still on them. They were no longer in demand by the time they hit the shelves, and were simply thrown away.
The scale of waste and pollution is so vast in the clothes industry that it accounts for 10% of global carbon emissions, according to data from the United Nations Environment Programme and the circular-economy-focused Ellen MacArthur Foundation. Attempts at sustainability either start out as greenwashing or end up there, with efforts largely diffused and disorganised.
Trashion is a lifestyle and fashion philosophy that hopes to change this. What started as a group of experimental initiatives is gradually going mainstream, in what is the most organised attempt yet to cut waste and improve sustainability in the fashion industry.
The philosophy hinges on a three-pronged approach: using existing material (preused fabric, manufacturing scrap, actual trash such as bottlecaps and plastic wrappers); reducing waste (by using some of the vast amounts of scrap generated by the fashion industry); and moving away from the idea of fast fashion, to promote long-term use.
The idea of trashion can be traced to 1998, when American fashion designer Nancy Judd launched the Recycle Santa Fe Art Market and Trash Fashion Show (now in its 23rd year). It invites local designers to showcase outfits made from waste materials.
Amid the growing ecological concerns of the early Aughts, the idea began to catch on at fashion institutes and experimental independent labels.
By 2010, Bates College in the US had launched an annual trashion show. In 2011, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) followed suit. At its event, students from the Boston area present designs using materials as diverse as network cables and electrical wires, leaves, bags and old clothes. Also in 2011, students from the College of Economics at Ritsumeikan University, Japan, made news for creating a T-shirt fabric from used cigarette butts, in association with the Kyoto Institute of Technology.
Since then, trashion has moved out of the costume zone and gradually become part of the wearable mainstream.
Gucci used Econyl, a fabric made entirely from ocean and landfill waste, in its 2017 collection. It has also committed to replacing all virgin plastic and PVC in its collections with engineered fabrics from recycled plastic and metal.
Designer Akshat Bansal has been using Econyl at his label, Bloni, since 2018. His latest collection, Preamble, featured recycled-steel-mesh trousers and bodysuits made of Econyl, and featured prominently at this month’s Paris Fashion Week. “One of the reasons I think it got the attention it did is because I was doing modern and contemporary items with these materials,” Bansal says.
His philosophy reflects an important shift: All Bloni designs are gender-neutral and size-agnostic, partly because one crucial way to cut waste is to stop playing to gender and size constraints that necessitate multiple lines, models and silhouettes, he says. His clothes are designed so that the same outfit can be adapted to different body types.
On the retail front in India, brands such as Doodlage (set up in 2012), Pomogrenade (2015) and Paiwand (2018) have committed to sourcing all raw material from pre-consumer and post-consumer textile waste.
Doodlage creates limited-edition collections using rejected and waste fabric from textile production lines. The textile scrap they generate is in turn used in the making of their accessories and packaging materials. “As environmental problems become more real, consumer mindsets are changing,” says founder Kriti Tula. She believes it helps her brand to show that it is “saving tonnes of fabric from heading into landfills”.
India, of course, has a rich tradition of low-footprint fashion, with entire industries (such as the recycled “shoddy” yarn industry based in Panipat, Bihar) built out of turning textile scrap into fresh raw material. But trashion as a movement is being integrated into formal fashion education as well.
Since 2021, the National Institute of Fashion Technology has offered a general elective course on the larger mission of design innovation for sustainable fashion (sustainable design has been on the curriculum for some years). “One fashion technology student is working on treating fabric waste from the garment industry to convert it into a hard, rigid material that could replace plastics used in fashion, accessories and footwear,” says Jonalee Bajpai, a professor at NIFT Bengaluru who heads industry and alumni affairs pan-India.
When it comes to sustainable fashion, Bajpai adds, we would all do well to start at the sari. “From traditional weaves to the fact that it’s an open, unstitched fabric, which makes passing it on from generation to generation so easy, the sari is the perfect example to draw from.”
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