Inspired by how the COVID-19 pandemic has shifted fashion consciousness regarding waste throughout the industry and the focus on trends toward versatile pieces, The R Collective unveiled its Susan Rockefeller-designed Enlightened Uniform.
Inspired by how the COVID-19 pandemic has shifted fashion consciousness regarding waste throughout the industry and the focus on trends toward versatile pieces, The R Collective unveiled its Susan Rockefeller-designed Enlightened Uniform. This ecologically aware piece is created using upcycled waste materials sourced from luxury brands, fitting within Rockefeller’s role as a conservationist, as she uses her platform to increase awareness regarding responsibility within fashion.
“As the pandemic continues to rock the world, 2020 has proved a major global wake-up call about how interconnected our ecosystem, economy and community is,” Rockefeller said.
Released last month as a piece that is as utilitarian as it is fashionable, the jumpsuit-style garment features pockets at the chest and on the sides, an elasticized belted waistline and a drawstring hood with a hidden, detachable face covering. Fabrics used to create the jumpsuit-style piece in different iterations include Lyocell and cashmere. Hues of heather grey, charcoal mélange and dark navy afford an array of options. Styles also feature a cluster of upcycled Swarovski crystals inspired by the North Star.
Upcycled Swarovski-crystal detail inspired by the North Star.
“Fashion is an extremely wasteful industry and the reality of the pandemic, during which women have radically changed their approach to dressing, fueled my desire to create a versatile, luxurious and comfortable uniform that we can feel protected in whilst also knowing that it has been ethically made,” Rockefeller explained. “This pandemic isn’t going away anytime soon and this jumpsuit is a great solid uniform for now and the future.”
Available at thercollective.com and created in XS-XL, the Enlightened Uniform retails for $425 with 25 percent of profits donated to Redress, the environmental charity that supports a circular economy and the reduction of the carbon footprint created by the fashion industry.
Bethany Williams has built far more than a fashion brand, she's built an NGO. Here's how she's setting a new standard for the fashion industry.
Bethany Williams has built more of an NGO than a fashion brand, that much was made extremely clear when we sat down to talk shortly after her International Woolmark Prize nomination was announced. That's not to say that her clothing isn't incredible, because it is, just that the social impact of her clothing carries as much weight as the design.
Williams grew up on the Isle of Man, an island between England and Ireland. "It's really small. There's a population of like 80,000 people. I grew up there with my mum and my grandparents — my mum was a pattern cutter for a factory and my nan taught me how to knit." It was a household of makers and she embraced upcycling from a young age, largely because the local offering was pretty dire. "There was one Topshop and one River Island and then nothing, especially not before internet shopping. So I'd always have to buy things from a charity shop and then remake them or change them or alter them just so I could have something that was unique."
Pairing upcycling with a quest for uniqueness and supporting charities has, over time, become the core of Williams' label. Except now she's selling her pieces via some of the biggest luxury retailers in the world, collaborating with sportswear giants, and setting a standard for what partnering with charitable projects could, and arguably should, look like within the fashion space. And she's doing a lot of that work with the help of donated and recycled textiles. "We have yarns donated from different suppliers in Italy and then we just use those materials. If one store has a different colorway to another store, it's because we've run out [of one particular yarn or material]."
Her recent adidas collab was built via donated textiles, too. "adidas has a campaign called Stuffstr where you sell your adidas stuff back to them and then they'll wash it or repair it or shred it. We've been taking that and making that into clothing." She also turned it into furniture for the brand's Carnaby Street store in London. "We worked with this artist called Melissa Kitty Jarram" who focused on "female sponsored athletes and adidas endorsed artists, and we patchworked them into big murals, which we then stretched over furniture."
Stuffstr is just one of the many social enterprises Williams has an active relationship with; the number of projects she lists over the course of our conversation was a task in itself to keep up with. "With each collection, we work with a charitable project in the UK and donate 20 percent of our profit to them. We work with social projects on our manufacturing, like San Patrignano in Italy. It's a drug rehabilitation center and has one of the highest recovery rates in the world. It's a community of 1,200 people and has 50 different sets of craftsmanship. We work with the handwoven textiles department; we make new textiles that are handwoven from recycled content.
"We've also been working with The Magpie Project for two collections; a charity that supports women and children under five in temporary, unsuitable or no accommodation [in London]. They have a playgroup, shoes, prams, nappies, and they know their rights for housing. It's a massive support network. 80 percent of the women who need the project are under legislation called No Recourse to Public Funds (that's the name of Williams' FW20 collection, btw), which affects your immigration status — you have the right to work, right to reside, but you don't have access to the welfare system."
"We've seen through COVID how that really affected families that can't access the furlough scheme, can't access sickness benefit, and can't access NHS. So we bring them into the project [to tell their story] through the collections, to raise money from the collections, and then also introduce them to our partners to seek further donations. It affects a hundred thousand children in the UK."
The brand has also worked to support women leaving prison, on building support networks that help reintroduction to life outside the system, and to reduce reoffending rates. "Moving forward we want to continue working with council projects and continue donating," Williams explains.
"I think activism needs to be speaking about issues but it also needs to be about tangible solutions and how to move things forward. So that's what we're trying to do, [cultivating] tangible change through employment and empowering people through the power of making. The people who make our clothes are really important."
Nerhol co-founder and designer Yoshihisa Tanaka has given an upcycled spin to New Balance's signature shoebox.
Much of Tanaka's work explores upcycled materials and transforms waste into new textiles. He decks the reimagined shoeboxes in textured washi paper, a material historically used by the Japanese for lampshades. The textile is formed by crushing paper scraps and other garbage into a raw paper mixture that was eventually shaped into the boxes. Each box boasts a distinctive pattern of blemishes, some resembling marble, above New Balance's signature branding.
The shoeboxes are currently one-of-one and will be showcased for Tokyo Design Studio's latest exhibition, “Cooperative Research Vol.01.” However, these prototypes are a reminder of the urgency of footwear's waste problem and that sneaker packaging is one of the most concerning aspects of that.
According to the US Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), packaging accounts for about 30% of America’s trash by volume, or around 78 million tons per year, of which only 53% gets recycled. Some brands are beginning to recognize the problem, but what to do about their environmental footprint is an entirely different issue. Tanaka's approach could be a stylish starting point.
The "Yoshihisa Tanaka × Tokyo Design Studio Cooperative Research Vol.01" installation kicks off on November 20 at New Balance's conceptual T-HOUSE shop in Tokyo.
PIECED TOGETHER WITH DELIBERATE PLACEMENT USING UPCYCLED FABRIC SCRAPS, THESE ARTISTIC PATCHWORK LOUNGE CHAIRS FROM DRX ARE TRULY ONE OF A KIND. A HIGHLY RESOURCEFUL AND INVENTIVE ALCHEMIST, DESIGNER DARREN ROMANELLI OFTEN EMPLOYS RECYCLED MATERIALS IN HIS WORK. ONE OF THESE PARTICULAR CUSHY CHAIRS WAS CONSTRUCTED FROM REPURPOSED MILITARY FATIGUES COLLECTED OVER THE YEARS. A VARIETY OF ARMY PRINTS, UTILITARIAN POCKETS, ZIPPERS AND DRAWSTRINGS CONTRIBUTE TO THE OVERALL DOCTORED EFFECT.
The hottest new street wear label in Los Angeles is more like a personal art project.
As the number of abandoned storefronts and closed retail outlets continues to mount, the once unremarkable activity of shopping at brick-and-mortar stores can feel like reality askew — like a stroll through the Twilight Zone. As this glum new normal becomes, well, the norm, signs of life can be almost as jarring.
Take, for instance, a pair of storefront windows on Beverly Boulevard in West Hollywood. Just recently they were lifeless reminders of an upscale furniture store, now defunct. Then, in August, they began to fill with seemingly unconnected objects: bluejeans piled in a chest-high mound, a lounge chair upholstered in denim, a mannequin in a jumpsuit with an eyeball for a head standing amid a sea of paint-splattered drop cloths.
Hand-painted signage in the other window offered only that this “Appointment Only” storefront with the cryptic displays, and the 6,000 square feet of retail space behind them, are the domain of Gallery Dept.
Despite the name, Gallery Dept. isn’t a gallery or a department store but a hybrid clothing label that sits somewhere in the Venn diagram overlap between street wear label, denim atelier, neighborhood tailor and vintage store. Just as accurately, you could call Gallery Dept. the personal art project of its founder Josué Thomas, a designer whose own creative urges are just as disparate and layered.
With so many small brands in a state of retreat this summer, Mr. Thomas’s label has not only weathered these spirit-crushing conditions but thrived. In less than two years, Gallery Dept. has moved from a crowded workshop a few blocks down Beverly Boulevard to its new space in part because its hoodies, logo tees, anoraks and flare-cut jeans — each designed and hand-painted by Mr. Thomas on upcycled or dead-stock garments — have become unlikely objets d’art in a crowded street wear market.
This corner of the fashion industry is a crowded one, and in recent years there have been a glut of collaborations and merch drops that have taken on a corporate cadence. In contrast, Gallery Dept. is something of a bespoke operation, offering street wear basics that are blessed with an artist’s (in this case Mr. Thomas’s) singular touch.
Mr. Thomas began to cut jeans and screen-print shirts as the mood struck in 2017, and since that time Gallery Dept. has grown from an underground cult label for collectors to one with atmospheric clout after being worn by Kendall Jenner, LeBron James, Kendrick Lamar and two of the three Migos (Offset and Quavo).
Those lucky enough to enter the appointment-only space, now booked with up to 20 appointments a day, are greeted inside by a 20-foot-tall span of wall that reads, “Art That Kills” in a large crawl text, and the occasional reference to Rod Serling’s seminal sci-fi program.
Throughout the sunlit store, Mr. Thomas’s abstract paintings and writings fill the spaces between clothing racks and bright brass shelves heavy with the brand's thick hoodies and sweatpants. Over the chug of sewing machines, one can hear snippets of bossa nova Muzak, a vinyl-only mix also made by Mr. Thomas. (There are also plans to release music by other artists, including the New York rapper Roc Marciano, under an Art That Kills imprint.)
Gallery Dept.’s new space was financed on the strength of e-commerce sales from this past spring, and not with the help of venture capital or outside investors, Mr. Thomas said on a recent walk-through. This freedom gives him and the label, which now employs 12 people, the freedom to operate on its own esoteric terms. And there are a few. In the store’s dressing rooms, there are no mirrors to survey a fit. (“We’re going to tell you if a piece works or not,” he said.) Nor are there price tags on its garments.
“If the first thing you look at is the price, it’s going to alter your thinking about a piece,” he said. “I’d rather people engage with the clothing first.”
The Gallery Dept. does not indulge pull requests from stylists or send its pieces to influencers, a practice Mr. Thomas explains with a trace of punk indignation.
“Kendall doesn’t get a discount,” he said. “We don’t seed. I don’t care who it is — we don’t cater to different markets.”
Wearing cutoff carpenter pants and a white T-shirt, each dusted in a fine rainbow splatter, Mr. Thomas looked every bit like an artist roused from his creative flow, complete with paint-stained hands and individually colored fingernails. Standing in a mauve-carpeted room, Mr. Thomas pointed out his latest ideas: pewter jewelry in eccentric shapes, like an earring in the shape of a zipper pull, made in collaboration with the Chrome Hearts offshoot, Lone Ones, and shorts cut from dead-stock military laundry bags — while explaining the origins of his own style.
“I liked my parent’s clothing growing up,” Mr. Thomas said. “As a teenager, I was able to fit into my dad’s leather jacket. The beat-up patina on it was perfect, and I realized that that was personal style. It was something you couldn’t go to a store and buy.”
Mr. Thomas, who turned 36 in September, never studied fashion or garment making, and he can’t work a sewing machine. But growing up as the son of immigrants from Venezuela and Trinidad, he watched as his parents subsisted on their raw artistic skills to create a life in Los Angeles. And he now uses those same talents as an artist and designer: sign-painting, tie-dying, screen printing. For a short time, his father, Stefan Gilbert, even ran a private women’s wear label.
Similarly, in his early 20s, Mr. Thomas worked at Ralph Lauren. As one of the few Black people in creative roles in a predominantly white company, he soon realized that the only way to survive in the fashion industry would have to be with a project of his own making.
“I was the ‘cool’ Black guy, but there was nowhere for me to go,” he said. “Best case would have been sourcing buttons for women’s outerwear or something.”
Gallery Dept.’s spontaneous inception came about in 2016 when Mr. Thomas sold a hand-sewn denim poncho off his own back to Johnny Depp’s stylist. At the time Mr. Thomas was focused on making beats and D.J.-ing, but after selling all of the pieces he’d designed for a small trunk show at the Chateau Marmont, he realized he’d discovered a new creative lane.
It had less to do with ponchos, which were dropped from subsequent collections, and more to do with old garments being remixed in the heat of artistic paroxysm, with as little second-guessing as possible. With the help of Jesse Jones, a veteran tailor, Mr. Thomas began churning out made-to-order pieces for customers who often were unaware of what, exactly, they had stumbled into.
“We were creating pieces while we were selling them,” he said.
Working with heavy vintage shirts, hoodies, trucker hats, bomber jackets, whatever was at hand, Mr. Thomas would frequently screen-print the brand’s logo, adding paint or other flourishes as the feeling struck.
Today that extends to long-sleeve tees, sweatpants and socks. At the time, he also began blowing out the silhouette of vintage Levi’s 501s and Carhartt work pants into a subtle flare, accented with patches and reinforced stitching, resulting in a streetwise update of the classic boot-cut jean.
Mr. Thomas christened this style of jeans the “LA Flare.” And where denim has so historically hewed to “his” and “her” categories, the LA Flare is the zeitgeist-y “they” of street wear denim. (The label labels its items as “unisex.”)
The jeans come with a luxury item’s price tag, with a basic version starting at $395. Custom tailoring and additional touches by Mr. Thomas, can push the price upward of $1,200. One early collaboration with Chrome Hearts, a pair of orange-dyed flares patched with that brand’s iconic gothic crosses, has gone for $5,000 on Grailed.
“There is nothing like Josue’s repurposed jeans,” said George Archer, a senior buyer at Mr Porter. “They are both a wearable piece and a work of art. No one else is doing what he’s doing.”
For Mr. Archer, who first noticed the Gallery Dept. logo popping on men in Tokyo in March, Mr. Thomas “interprets and creates” clothing as if it was an end in itself — and not a commodity to be monetized. (Nonetheless, Mr Porter hopes to monetize a collection of Gallery Dept. pieces via its e-commerce site later this year.)
“You can feel the warmth of Josue’s hands on each of the pieces,” said Motofumi Kogi, the creative director of the Japanese label United Arrows & Sons. An elder statesmen of Tokyo’s street wear scene, Mr. Kogi found the label on a trip to Los Angeles last year. It’s not only Mr. Thomas’s artistic touch that stands out to him but his vision for remaking a staid garment into something that Mr. Kogi believes has not been seen before.
“He took this staple of hip-hop culture and refreshed it,” he said, referring to Carhartt pants.
Getting the people who make that culture to buy in was another matter. “The first year we did the flare, in 2017, skinny jeans were in,” Mr. Thomas said. “Rappers would come into the shop and say they’d never wear a flare. Now, everyone is wearing it.”
On Instagram, fit pics by rappers like Rich the Kid, along with the aforementioned Migos, Quavo and Offset, Gallery Dept.’s flare has become a familiar silhouette, skinny jeans breaking loose below the knee, usually coiled up at the ankle around a pair of vintage Air Jordans.
One fan of the jeans, Virgil Abloh, sees Mr. Thomas’s “edit” of the classic garment as the next chapter of its history.
“Their flare cut is the most important new cut of denim in the last decade — since the skinny jean,” Mr. Abloh said. A self-described Levi’s “obsessive” who owns more than 20 pairs of Gallery Dept. jeans, he walked into Mr. Thomas’s workshop one day after a routine stop at the Erewhon Market across the street.
“I thought: ‘This is amazing. Here’s some guys editing their own clothes in a shop,’” he said. “It reminded me of what I was doing when I started out, painting over logos, making hand-personalized clothes.”
Mr. Abloh considers Mr. Thomas’s work to be the fashion equivalent of “ready-made” art, and he offers Shayne Oliver of Hood by Air as a distant contemporary. He suggested that he and Mr. Thomas come from a lineage of Black designers that is still in the process of defining itself.
“He’s a perfect example of someone creating their own path from a community that hasn’t traditionally participated in fashion,” Mr. Abloh said. “I see Josue as making a new canon of his own, showcasing what Black design can do.”
Mr. Thomas didn’t argue with that. But he was also a little preoccupied with whatever was taking place at the tips of fingers to get lost in the thought. The future of his brand, after all, depends on his ability to stay in that moment.
“People want things that aren’t contrived,” he said, pulling at his own shirt to drive the point home. “This paint came from me working. I wanted to recreate this feeling. Once something is contrived, when you can see through it, it’s ruined. There’s only so much you want to explain.”
Chinatown Market and Allbirds are engaging in a multi-dimensional partnership championing responsible creativity and design. To jumpstart the collaboration, they have called on designer Nicole McLaughlin to create a one-off collection of upcycled items.
Known for her bespoke upcycled pieces, McLaughlin has previously worked with the likes of Prada, PUMA, and Opening Ceremony, among others. Here, she has taken scrap materials from Allbirds and fashioned them into original, sustainable goods, including a vest and a chair. In total, the collection consists of six custom items, which will be auctioned off, as 100 percent of the proceeds will go to The Okra Project and Sunrise Movement. You can read more about the organizations in Allbirds’ Instagram post below.
The auction will be followed by a series of IGTV episodes — found on both Chinatown Market and Allbirds’ accounts — featuring digital sessions on sustainable design and DIY methods. Once the initiative is concluded, viewers will have the opportunity to submit their own projects for a chance to secure a digital mentorship with both brands.
The bespoke pieces by Nicole McLaughlin will be auctioned off on August 7 at 10 a.m. PST.
