Marine Serre
Upcycling Her Way To Fashion Stardom
Marine Serre's first collection, for fall 2017, came in the wake of terrorist attacks in Brussels, where she was studying fashion, and in Paris, where she held internships. Sourcing materials from vintage carpets and old bedsheets, she transformed them into pieces across the collection, some imprinted with the crescent moon of Islam. Titled “Radical Call for Love,” the collection was a powerful response to an apocalyptic moment, a debut that emphasized rebirth in both its materials and its message.
That simple decision to repurpose old material has become a full-blown commitment to upcycling—or to use Serre's much cooler term, regenerating—and her brand of eco “futurewear” is now leading the sustainability movement. Serre may reject the label of eco-pioneer—“I'm not here to educate anyone,” she says—but her clothes are pointing the way forward.
Sourcing the raw materials required to make clothing is what often causes the worst environmental harm—producing anything new at all is inherently wasteful—and Serre's approach has been widely celebrated as the chic and eco-conscious alternative. In recent collections, her designs have given fresh life to T-shirts, blankets and towels, wet suits, and, most notably, denim.
Cutting up existing garments to make new ones is not exactly radical. Serre worked with designers who have famously deconstructed and repurposed existing garments: She interned at Margiela and Dior (the latter when Raf Simons was creative director) and was working for Balenciaga under Vetements designer Demna Gvasalia when she won the LVMH Prize. But Serre, unlike her contemporaries, has been labeled a sustainable designer—perhaps because the spirit of rebirth is so much a part of her work. After the Paris climate strike last summer, one fashion critic went so far as to compare her to the young environmental activist Greta Thunberg.
But Serre demurs. “I don't think so much about sustainability in fashion,” she says. “It's part of my aesthetic. It's just my countryside vibe, or maybe my generation.”
Serre grew up in a tiny village in the South of France that she has described as having no more than five houses. She left home at 14 to study art and later played tennis competitively. By the time she was in fashion school, the world around her was engulfed in political, cultural, and environmental conflict. Her work is a natural by-product of that turmoil and an emblem of a sustainability-minded generation.
Now Serre is thinking about closing the circle—regenerating endlessly, without the need for new material. Considering some reports that say consumers globally buy more than 80 billion new articles of clothing each year, maybe that idea isn't so far-fetched. And who better to redesign our future than Marine Serre?
“You just have to convince everyone,” she says. “One by one.”
Phoebe English
The Tiny British Brand Waging War On Waste
In 2018, London-based designer Phoebe English walked into her studio and announced to her staff: “We're going to have a war on plastic.” And so it began.
Her first battle was against packaging, so she figured out how to use biodegradable and recyclable materials. “Once you've found a solution for something,” she says, “it gets quite addictive.”
She moved on to developing a system of zero-waste pattern cutting, a difficult and time-consuming process that uses entire pieces of fabric, from edge to edge, so that no scraps are left on the table. Then she scrutinized the raw materials she was using—zippers and elastic were out; biodegradable buttons made from milk protein and reclaimed fishing nets were in.
English launched her label in 2011, but over the course of three seasons, she says, “we rewrote the company.” The goal was to reinvent her brand—without sacrificing the quality or integrity of the clothes, which have become deceptively complex as her eco-practice has evolved, revealing their seams to showcase the intricacies of her patternmaking.
Unwittingly, her start as a tiny, craft-based U.K. fashion business has become her competitive advantage—to be small is to be nimble—and turned her outfit into a global leader in progressive, eco-conscious fashion design. “I realized that we have abilities that larger companies don't have,” English says. “If you're in a company where you have that ability to make changes quickly, it's really your responsibility to be doing it.”
GmbH
Farm-To-Closet Clubwear From Berlin
“We always wanted GmbH to be something a bit sexy,” says Benjamin A. Huseby, who cofounded the Berlin-based brand with his partner, Serhat Isik, in 2016, “and sustainability has never really been sexy.”
Huseby and Isik are changing that, and sustainability has never looked so good on the dance floor. They launched their brand as a response to the big sociopolitical and environmental issues of the day, from plastic-filled oceans to rising global temperatures. The duo's early collections were made entirely from deadstock and upcycled materials that would have otherwise been dumped in landfills, and soon they found an enthusiastic following for their slick take on “sustainable clubwear.” Berlin's famous electronic-music-fueled nightlife informed the clothes as much as Huseby and Isik's utilitarian aesthetic did. Their most recent collections add another dimension, making innovative use of sustainably sourced materials: batting made from recycled plastic bottles, vegan leather created from apple cores, and laser-printed denim that eschews bleach and other toxic-chemical treatments.
All GmbH garments come with a hangtag listing specific information about the materials used—whether they are biodegradable, recycled, or deadstock—and where the fabric and piece were made. Huseby and Isik keep production local to minimize shipping emissions and use recycled and biodegradable packaging. Isik adds that these measures aren't the result of a plan. “It's just something that grew organically from our lived lives,” he says.
To that end, each day they prepare organic vegetarian staff meals at the studio using ingredients from local farms. “It's absurd that luxury fashion companies didn't take on sustainability as a goal earlier,” says Huseby. “If you think about the best food, it's organic food, local food. It's strange that people don't think about fashion in the same way.”
Eckhaus Latta
The RISD Grads Making Refuse Into Art
A lot of things you read about luxury fashion becoming sustainable,” says Mike Eckhaus of Eckhaus Latta, the label he started with Zoe Latta in 2011, “there's a lot of bullshit to that.”
If there is a sustainable future for fashion at all, it will never be as easy to implement as the current trend toward eco-fashion makes it seem. The problems are too big, too complex, and too deeply ingrained. And sustainability is too often reduced to a marketing strategy, offering a false air of virtue in place of meaningful action. That's what makes Eckhaus and Latta wary.
“There are definitely sustainable elements to our practice,” says Eckhaus, “but we never have been like, ‘We are a sustainable brand,’ and I think that's important.”
Eckhaus and Latta met at the Rhode Island School of Design, where they studied sculpture and textile design, respectively, and bonded over thrift shopping. Early Eckhaus Latta collections were made almost entirely from deadstock fabrics, upcycled material, and refuse—all stuff that was cheap and easy to find in Providence. The duo's approach was born out of art-school resourcefulness, not environmental activism, but their techniques have made them pioneers of sustainable design—even if they've never quite embraced the role.
“We didn't want to get pigeonholed as an eco-brand,” says Latta. “We didn't want to make clothes that would be sold in Whole Foods. We wanted the clothes to stand for themselves.”
People love Eckhaus Latta because of what the brand makes, not how the designers make it. The clothes have the mix of sensible functionality and freaky ingenuity that art kids and other hyper-cool downtowners find irresistible. The label has been described as post-gender, with runway shows that feature men and women wearing the brand's signature sheer knitwear and fluid suiting. An exhibition Eckhaus Latta staged at the Whitney Museum in 2018 included garments crocheted using plastic shopping bags and a series of old-stock T-shirts and sweatshirts that had been dyed, deconstructed, and reconfigured.
As Eckhaus and Latta get to work on their 20th collection, their eco-practices have shifted. They continue to incorporate deadstock and waste materials into their work, but only as part of small, limited collections. Instead, they're focusing on retaining their sustainable practices as their manufacturing scales up. “We still have a cottage-knitting setup,” Latta says. “This way we can hold on to how we like to work and still comply with wanting to grow the business.”
Expanding their production abroad has led to some interesting discoveries. “In Peru we saw our tee factory that uses Peruvian pima cotton, and they have tons of leftovers, warehouses full,” Latta says. Other, less resourceful designers may not have even noticed an opportunity in the discarded material. “Part of the problem now is that we try to explain to our factories, ‘No, we're interested in your leftovers,’ and they're like, ‘Why?’ ”
Thanks to this new generation of designers, the answer is finally becoming obvious.
A version of this story originally appeared in the April 2020 issue with the title “Redefining Sustainability.”
PRODUCTION CREDITS:
Photographs for Marine Serre by Piotr Niepsuj
Photographs for Phoebe English by Sophie Green
Photographs for GmbH by Maxime Ballesteros
Production for GmbH by Iconoclast Image Germany
Photographs for Eckhaus Latta by Corey Olsen
Grooming for Eckhaus Latta by Juliette Perreux at The Wall Group using Charlotte Tillbury
