The need to move away from fast fashion and develop a more sustainable and positive fashion landscape is clear. However, when it comes to practice, the path towards sustainable fashion remains ambiguous and hard to achieve. We all know the fashion industry creates massive amounts of waste that negatively impacts the environment. From textile scraps, leftover fabric, to excess thread and paper waste, there’s a whole lot that could be reduced, reused and recycled when creating garments.

What is zero waste fashion?

Zero waste fashion isn’t a new technology or material. Instead, it’s a new way of thinking — a philosophy that forces designers to challenge existing techniques. Wasted fabric = wasted money and a wasted planet, and some savvy designers are doing their best to not only reduce garbage in their production cycle but to recycle whatever scraps they may have.

There are generally two strategies for zero-waste fashion: creative pattern making that uses 100% of a given material, and upcycling when you generate garments from remnant materials.