June 15, 2012

Conscious Fashion: Reclaim to Wear

So you’ve bought an amazing new dress- it’s fresh, bright and perfect for summer. All you can think about is how you’re going to accessorize it and what shoes will go well with it, but you never really think about how exactly it’s made in the factory, right? For every one of those dresses made on the factory line, just think of all that wasted material lying on the factory floor- bits of beautiful dresses and fabric from any number of fabulous pieces. The company Reclaim to Wear has come up with a genius way of making sure these cast-offs and cut-offs have their time to shine too, and don’t end up in a far away landfill site. What better way to recycle and have the opportunity to be creative and reconstructing new clothes from pieces of old ones.

The company was the brainchild of Orsola de Castro and Filippo Ricci who set up a fashion label called From Somewhere in 1997 who created pieces via the same idea. According to their website, Reclaim to Wear say that “with the textile and fashion industry increasingly exposed as one of the biggest polluters, up-cycling helps to slow down unnecessary textile production, minimising further environmental damage and saving energy and water”.

Their most recent collaboration is with none-other than the high street giant itself, Topshop. Does this store ever put a foot wrong? The new collection is very sleek- lots of clean lines and block colours and impossible to fathom that it has essentially been created out of scraps!

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