“I always loved Blade Runner as a movie and I suddenly had this realisation a few years ago that we live in a retrofit world,” she says, speaking over FaceTime from Paris the day before her spring/summer 2021 show takes place in the city. “We have an air purifier in the house, we have ways to clean our water. We are always retrofitting and fixing everything that we are screwing up on this planet.” It made her think of the way she works at Gabriela Hearst, the eponymous womenswear line she founded in 2015, which is worn by women as discerning as the Duchess of Cambridge, who recently debuted a repurposed denim Hearst dress to meet David Attenborough, and Jill Biden, who wore a three-year-old silk dress for the presidential debate on 29 September. “In the last show we took existing coats from current inventory, cut them up and pieced them back together, reshaped and remade them. And nobody noticed that they were older coats.”
Retrofit, then, is a new label from Hearst made entirely from upcycled pieces of existing stock. “It’s about looking at what you have and giving it a new life,” she says. “We have been looking at our inventory and thinking about what we can dye, what we can embroider, can we change the belt, can we change the length – something we all used to do before we had access to cheaply made clothes.” The accompanying Selfridges installation will contain pieces of ex-display furniture from De La Espada, the Portuguese furniture brand with whom she also worked on her Mayfair store. “The directive was: it has to look great, not like an airport lounge. No overuse of mid-century! But we wanted to work with things that already exist and that we have access to.”
As for the clothes, headline pieces in the line-up include cashmere wraps and skirts that have been hand embroidered with new statement stitching; linen-silk shirt dresses (Hearst is a major fan of linen for its sustainable properties) that have been dip-dyed by hand in new colourways; and cashmere rollneck dresses that have been cut and re-tailored to become tunics. Plus, there’s a new limited-edition bucket bag, the Ana, which “basically looks like two of our bags had a baby,” as Hearst puts it. Made up of old stock from two existing bags, only seven will be available (she is famously controlled about her distribution when it comes to accessories). She laughs: “I thought, if it looks like a mess then we’re not doing it. But when I saw the bags in person, I was like, ‘These are cute! I’d like to wear them! We’re good!’”
“Upcycling” is a much-used word this strange old catwalk season, with numerous designers using deadstock fabrics and reworking existing stock after a disastrous season of sales in the wake of the coronavirus. But Hearst has always done this out of choice, rather than financial necessity (though she’s quick to point out that one happy upside is that it’s far kinder on the purse to make environmentally-friendly choices, such as switching the transportation of clothes to being shipped by boat rather than plane). When she staged the first carbon-neutral runway show in New York, for her spring/summer 2020 collection, other major brands followed suit. “I’m happy,” she says, when I ask if it grates that so many designers are co-opting language and ideas she has been promoting for years. “We are not going to have any new natural resources – we need to work out how to work in a circular economy sooner rather than later.”
Hearst has worked hard to make her sustainable clothes desirable – and though it’s been a tough year financially, the wholesale business in particular has held up well. “We were extremely surprised to see that wholesale was even to last year – it would have been up if we hadn’t been caught in the pandemic during spring shipping. So, it was a huge boost to know that people still want to invest in the product. I am full of gratitude.”
Her other challenge is to figure out how to continue to support the craftspeople whose work she continues to spotlight in her collections. One particular coat from her autumn/winter 2020 collection, which she calls “the dream” coat (as in, Joseph and his technicolour variety), and which retails at a not inconsiderable £6,590, sold out instantly. Now, she’s taking orders directly from customers and putting them in with the cashmere weavers in Uruguay who hand-make them.
She is intrigued, too, to see what other designers come up with when it comes to upcycling. As she points out, there is an inherent challenge in making old clothes look new. “From a creative perspective it shows what your taste level is – it can be a hot mess to do something with deadstock fabrics!” She takes her phone through the showroom and flips the camera around to show me a dress from her spring/summer 2021 catwalk, where two deadstock fabrics have been joined in the middle with hand-knotted leather. “This has been hand-worked. It’s all about how you put it together to make it look good. And it’s not so easy!”
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