This article first appeared in our COP29 special issue of My Green Pod Magazine. Click here to subscribe to our digital edition and get each issue delivered straight to your inbox
When asked how to fix the harm caused by fast fashion, ALLSAINTS founder Stuart Trevor had a novel response for his daughter: ‘We’re gonna create a clothing brand that doesn’t produce any clothing!’
This line of thinking is a step beyond Patagonia’s Black Friday 2011 advert, but the thinking behind Stuart’s new venture and the Patagonia campaign – ‘Don’t Buy This Jacket’ – is the same.
‘There’s far too much clothing in production all around the world’, Stuart acknowledges; ‘100 to 150 billion garments are produced every year!’
For Stuart, one of the many charges against fast fashion is the way huge clothing brands are brainwashing people into believing they don’t have enough and constantly need more.
‘Social media fed into that narrative by influencing people to buy clothing they don’t need – often simply to wear for social media posts’, Stuart tells us. ‘They return the clothes the next day and it’s cheaper for huge corporations to send their returns off to landfill than to reprocess them back into their own warehouses.’
Much of this unwanted clothing is made from polyester – a cheap fabric that isn’t made to last, but that will persist in landfill for hundreds of years.
‘Multi-billion dollar corporations are chasing multi-billion dollar increases and they often get it completely wrong’, Stuart tells us. ‘Overproduction is greater now than ever before; every seven minutes a pile of clothes the height of Everest goes into landfill. The world cannot afford fast fashion – it’s killing the planet. Now is the time to act.’
Stuart started customising vintage and hand-me-down clothes at the age of nine, in a bid ‘to become Bowie’. He realised he could turn this passion into a career when, at the age of 16, he discovered the fashion department at college on the first day of his Art Foundation course.
After completing a Fashion Design degree and working as head of design at REISS for 10 years after graduation, Stuart founded ALLSAINTS in 1994.
Throughout his hugely successful career in fashion design, Stuart has always been guided by the same philosophy: ‘change your image, change your life, change your world’.
Now Stuart’s bringing that same conviction to his new sustainable brand, STUART TREVOR. ‘I want to create something that brings the same joy, even more pleasure to people while doing what’s right for our planet’, he explains.
The mission with STUART TREVOR is to make it easier and more fun to buy sustainable fashion and wear ‘non-destructive clothing’ – by which Stuart means clothing that doesn’t end up in landfill.
Think clothes that have been reworked, rebranded, cut up, distressed and reimagined with care – patched, printed, hand painted, sprayed, washed and embroidered, often with ‘less is more’ in mind.
‘We take other people’s waste and try to create something unique, cool and exciting that people want to get involved with’, Stuart explains. ‘There’s a huge supply of vintage and charity shop finds as well as unwanted inventory from other brands – clothing that’s ready to be given new life.’
There are also millions of metres of ‘dead stock’ – unwanted stock that can be left sitting around for years. ‘It’s often just the leftovers from huge corporations that don’t know what to do with it’, Stuart tells us. ‘It can end up being sent off to landfill or even burned, which is an environmental disaster. We turn this ‘dead stock’ into ‘living stock’.’
While many small designers are trying to make a success from a similar approach, STUART TREVOR may well be the first to completely close the loop, and deliver a circular commercial product that can be scaled to help more people satisfy their needs without harming the planet.
‘We believe that we can make this a huge success’, Stuart tells us. ‘There’s more excess stock on the planet than you could ever imagine – enough stock that we could go several generations without producing anything else. It’s our goal to make everyone change their current shopping habits and buy only from sustainable sources.’
For Stuart there will always be a place for fashion; ‘We will never stop people from wanting to make themselves look more attractive’, he says. ‘After food, I believe fashion is possibly the second most important thing that people do every single day. If you eat healthy food you’ll live a healthy life. If you dress interestingly, you’ll live an interesting life.’
The challenge for Stuart is around the way we shop; we need to stop buying things we don’t need and instead buy better quality products, from secondhand or vintage shops.
‘Swap clothes with family and friends and wear things longer’, Stuart advises; ‘wear them for life. We all used to have favourites and we need to go back to that – owning fewer clothes, but clothes we actually love. Less is definitely more!’
As well as helping to lift the burden of unwanted stock in warehouse all over the world, Stuart is encouraging people to clear out their wardrobes and exchange anything they no longer need for a credit note for a STUART TREVOR creation.
‘We are looking to open experiential event spaces and retail outlets where we introduce people to how we create something unique from other people’s waste’, Stuart reveals. ‘We’ll be working with artists, tailors and designers to show people how they can create their own products from existing things they no longer love.’
Stuart’s timing couldn’t be better; sustainability is a growing concern for younger generations and questions around fashion’s contribution to social and environmental harms are equally high on the agenda.
‘Eco-anxiety is higher than ever before’, Stuart acknowledges. ‘People are starting to realise that the world cannot afford to carry on with this conspicuous consumption they’ve been brainwashed into believing makes them happy. It doesn’t – and it has made many people realise that they are addicted to something that’s killing the planet for future generations. Yet we still want that dopamine hit and will always want to treat ourselves and our loved ones.’
Stuart’s hope is that by producing exciting products from existing clothing, he can make a difference in the world by satisfying that desire in a way that creates a smaller environmental impact.
With all the challenges currently facing the fashion sector, does Stuart ever feel tempted to leave the industry? ‘Every single morning!’, he admits. ‘But I feel like I have to keep pushing forward and keep spreading the message; we can bring about change and make sure that everyone we meet knows what has been going on in the world and how they can help to change the world in a positive way.’
Anna Wintour once said ‘there is something about fashion that can make people really nervous’ – but with designers like Stuart Trevor, it feels like the sector could at last be in safe hands.
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Charity Shop Girl talks secondhand fashion on The Salvation Army podcast, The Sustainable Conversation.
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Ebay identifies single-season wear as the habit to ditch in 2024.
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