Repurposed Fabrics As Couture

Image: Amelia Allen

This season, designers at London Fashion Week made recycling and repurposing mainstream. More or Less Magazine celebrated with an exhibition of repurposed fabrics as couture. We visited Left Over’s at Matchesfashion.com Townhouse to explore the collection.

Once a dirty word in the fashion world, recycling has become something of a hot topic. Designers at London Fashion Week showed collections for AW19 that were perfect mashups of found materials. More or Less Magazine are celebrating our new found love of recycling by pushing it into the high fashion consciousness. They teamed up with 11 London based designers who created couture dresses using only fabric offcuts from their Atelier floors. The result is an eclectic collection of other worldly creations.

We’ve chosen four of our favourite dresses here but don’t miss the rest of the collection. It is available to view at Matchesfashion.com 5 Carlos Place, London from now until Saturday 2nd March.

“Buy Less, Dress Up is a motto I often use, and it inspired me here. The gown features my signature 18th-century flat corsets, and are lifted from the original Wake-Up Cave Girl A/W ’07 collection, but are one-of-a-kind: created here in a tartan silk and candy-stripe silk jacquard selected from surplus fabric out of my archive.”

Vivienne Westwood

“Using a silhouette lifted from my S/S ’19 collection, I thought up this one-of-a-kind piece, making it out of a spare sample fabric. It’s particularly special, as the silhouette will never be reproduced in the same red rose print.” 

Richard Quinn

“The chunky garlands which make up this garment and drape over the body are made up of countless pieces of surplus and scrap fabric, piled up and cut into small squares, which are then individually threaded on to lengths of fine cord.”

Phoebe English

“I reinterpreted the high-collared silhouettes and extreme proportions of Victorian nurse uniforms for this piece, replacing the traditional starched and scrubbed fabrics with a lacquered wet-lace fabric from my archive that I originally used in my S/S ’14 collection.”

Simone Rocha

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