Walk into Zero Waste Daniel or Grant Blvd’s ateliers in New York City and Philadelphia, respectively, and you’ll see endless bins of fabric scraps. I don’t mean the trash bins filled with discarded fabric that you’d find at any other fashion studio, but rather storage bins that hold onto each and every piece of unused fabric that comes through their doors, where they await being creatively added into a piece of upcycled fashion in the future. This is in stark contrast to the policies of most major fashion brands, several of which have been the subjects of backlash for incinerating, trashing, or otherwise destroying leftover stock and fabric rather than donate, reuse, or even sell it at discounted prices.
In direct opposition to fast fashion and its wasteful tendencies, the sustainable fashion movement has grown in recent years — but there are two ends of the spectrum. On one end you have major fashion brands with shiny sustainability initiatives that lean more towards greenwashing than genuine advancement; on the other end, you have companies like Zero Waste Daniel, who transforms fabric scraps that would otherwise go to waste into “reroll” to make new, classic, gender-neutral garments, and Grant Blvd, who “remixes” thrifted pieces into new looks that play with the gender construct and address social justice.
If it’s possible to turn a profit while being legitimately sustainable, zero-waste, animal-free, ethical, and essentially checking off everything on a mindful consumer’s list, as these growing brands are proving, why does the fast fashion industry fall so far behind when it comes to sustainability? As consumer demand for mindful, low-impact garments continues to grow, fast fashion brands will eventually have to change their ways — but how will the trends that have grown out of a need for genuinely sustainable fashion impact the industry as a whole?
Is upcycled and remixed fashion just a passing trend, or is it the future of fashion?
Fast fashion is more wasteful than you think.
Fashion is responsible for 92 million tons of global waste every year — that’s about 4 percent of the world’s entire waste, according to a report by Pulse Of The Fashion Industry via Forbes. Most of that comes from leftover fabric unaccounted for by clothing patterns, which most brands simply toss. But one’s trash is another’s treasure — and there are a few designers who have turned that perspective into a business.
Zero Waste Daniel pioneered turning fabric scraps into fashion.
While studying design at FIT, Daniel Silverstein found himself tossing endless fabric scrapsinto the trash — and it reminded him of the fabric scraps his mother bought him to practice sewing when he was a design-obsessed 5-year-old.
“Those metal bins that I was pulling scraps out of as a kid, looked awful similar to the ones I was throwing scraps into in school,” Silverstein tells Green Matters over the phone, adding that he saw the wasteful nature of making clothing as a “missed opportunity” before he even realized the economic or ecological impact of that waste.
“When I was a student, sustainability was a club you could join. It certainly wasn’t anything you could major or minor in,” he recalled. “It really didn’t surpass more than the organic cotton, natural dye conversation.”
In 2010, Silverstein founded his eponymous fashion line, which was created from zero-waste patterns — something that no one seemed to care about a decade ago.
“It was challenging to get people interested in that aspect of the designs. People mostly wanted to just talk about what they looked like,” he explains, adding that at the time, people were just not ready for the buzzword “zero waste.”
Zero Waste Daniel changed direction to shake up the industry.
After five years of designing under his own name, he was looking for a new approach that would make “more noise in the industry.” At the time, Stella McCartney was possibly the only mainstream designer talking about sustainability in the fashion industry, according to Silverstein, and he wanted to be the next designer to add to the conversation.
Many of Zero Waste Daniel’s designs today still incorporate “reroll,” his signature fabric composed entirely of fabric scraps; but at the same time, over the past five years, the brand has expanded in various directions, all while keeping sustainability and upcycling at the core.
Upcycling fabric has become a trend.
In March 2015, the designer made his first patchwork shirt out of a collection of small black fabric scraps. Silverstein shared his creation to Instagram — “I really wanted a new shirt, so I made one!” read the caption — and the post received a positive response. Soon after, he launched Zero Waste Daniel.