High end Recycled Clothing

High end recycled clothing is the ultimate goal for discerning ecologically minded fashionistas. It’s a dilemma. You want to keep up with the trends, or look elegant, or you have your own style. Some days you want to walk down the street and have an impact. But you want that to be in a good way. Like, “They look great today! That skirt goes with the top in an unexpectedly wonderful way!” You don’t want to have the kind of impact on the world where rainforests are burning and creatures are becoming extinct because of your fashion choices.

So, the number 1 choice for high end recycled clothing has to be clothing that hasn’t been recycled at all. I’m not sure if I’m splitting hairs here, but recycling is a process that takes energy. It’s a whole thing. Companies take your old cloth, shred it up, spin it into thread, weave the thread into new cloth and then sew that cloth into new clothes. Or they take, say, plastic bottles, and melt them down into filaments. All that takes energy and resources, like electricity.

Therefore, I’m going to suggest that way you are looking for isn’t high end recycled clothing, it’s high end second hand clothing. We can call it vintage clothing, reused, charity shop or reclaimed clothing. Or even something that your friend no longer wanted and gave away. But really, we are looking for good quality clothes that already exist.

High end Recycled Clothing – How to find it?

There are so many clothes that have been produced over the years that I feel sure you are going to find what you are looking for. You want something that’s chic, not shabby, right? High end, not hippy.

Vintage stores tend to have collections that have already been curated for you. The buyer, with their keen eye, finds vintage clothing that will appeal to their customer base. They will look for designer clothing in great condition, and make sure it is clean and perfect. The shop might specialise in clothes from a particular era, or make sure to span all times. They may always keep amazing evening gowns in stock, perfect for something unusual for black tie events, or they might be known for the perfect pair of jeans.

Evening gown. Copyright free photo by Flickr user Barry Roths.

Dress Agencies

There are also designer dress agencies that do a similar thing, although their outfits are very likely to be more up-to-date. Again, agencies specialise in different things. Some have just handbags, others other accessories or mainly suits, or mainly just deal in one particular designer. Top tip: once you get to know them, they will hold pieces back for you that they think you will like, and give you a ring or email you to let you know.

High end Recycled Clothing – Other Ethical Clothing

Other ethical fashion options to avoid textile waste include recycled fabric, organic cotton, recycled materials, sustainable materials, deadstock fabric, and recycled polyester from plastic bottles or fishing nets. Ethical clothing companies for men and women avoiding fast fashion and producing sustainable clothes for the fashion industry,  like sustainable, upcycled fashion, upcycled materials, clothing and accessories.

Deadstock Fabric

It’s hard to believe, but there are still rolls of fabric in pristine, unused condition from the 1960s and 1970s. Very old fabric. A company can make wonderful vintage-inspired clothing from fabric like this, and it will look very authentic. Not all deadstock fabric is super old though. It just means fabric that is left over from a main collection, where they bought too much. Fabric is usually sold in bolts of a certain number of metres for economy of scale. If the number of clothes the company is planning doesn’t need as much as that, the leftover fabric is deadstock. It can be sold on to a company who will then sell it on by the metre to smaller companies, or kept in the original company’s own warehouse. They might unearth it years later and use it in a new collection so that it doesn’t go to waste.

High end Recycled Clothing – Sustainable materials

Sustainable materials refers to a number of things. There are a lot of different ways to make fabric which might ameliorate the toxicity of the process. A fabric could be labelled as sustainable if only organic pesticides were used on it. The fabric this is most often used for is cotton. Cotton is a plant, and like all plants requires careful husbandry to grow in sufficient quantities to meet demand. So farmers use pesticides on it. They don’t want the plants to get eaten by insects before it can be harvested.

However, traditional pesticides can kill off not only bugs but also other animals, and even be bad for human health. They can go into the nearest river when it rains and kill fish and other aquatic animals. When they are made and when they are sprayed they are not good news. However, organic pesticides and fertilisers, which help the plants to grow, have lower impact. They are still sprayed with chemicals, and the fabric still takes energy to make and produces waste. So you have to bear that in mind, but it will be less problematic.

Recycled Polyester

High end Recycled Clothing. Recycled polyester is like a fun science experiment. Most fabric (I think all fabric?) when you look at it up close is made from very fine fibres that are spun, woven, or matted together to form a continuous cloth. You know how if you accidentally melt something plastic, for example if you leave your plastic chopping board on a still-warm hob by accident, not that I’ve ever done that, obviously, when you pick it up you can stretch the melted plastic to make fine threads? Like melty cheese on a pizza?

That is how polyester is made. A certain type of plastic is melted and streched, and those fine filaments are then either spun into thread and woven or matted into fleece fabrics. Recycled polyester fabrics are no different. In this case they take a certain kind of plastic object, so bottles reclained from teh sea or fishing nets, and melt them down for the same result. It’s so funny to think of a water bottle ending up as a blouse. But a very neat way to use water bottles. It’s great that so many re-usable water bottles are used now, but looking at the vast amounts of water bottles that float in many rivers it feels like we will never run out of “raw” material for recycled polyester. Hopefully, though.

High end Recycled Clothing – Upcycled Clothing

Upcycled clothing is made from old clothing. These clothes are washed and sorted into types, and then picked apart to make new clothes. It is time consuming but very satisfying. This is mainly done by smaller companies or home hobbyists, as it’s difficult to scale up. Some denim companies may do it too, as there are vast amounts of very similarly coloured blue jeans ready to be re-used. Other fabrics and prints vary a lot.

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