The Designers Who Decided Waste Was Not Inevitable
Surbhi ChadhaSome people look at a pile of fabric scraps and see rubbish. Others see the beginning of something.
The designers in this piece belong to the second group. They come from different countries, work at different scales, and have taken very different paths. But each of them pondered over what if waste was not something to manage after the fact, but something to design out entirely.
It turns out the answer changes everything about how you make clothes.
#1 Eileen Fisher
Eileen Fisher has been making simple, well-made womenswear since 1984. The brand has always leaned towards quality over quantity, but the programme that sets it apart is Renew.
Renew takes back worn Eileen Fisher garments from customers, whatever their condition. Pieces that can be resold are cleaned and put back on the market. Pieces that cannot are repaired, overdyed, or cut into new designs.
Fisher also transferred majority ownership of the company to its employees and became a certified B Corporation in 2015.
Renew is not merely a recycling scheme. It is a different way of thinking about what a brand owes the things it makes. Not just to sell them well, but to take responsibility for what happens to them afterwards.
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DID YOU KNOW? The Renew programme has collected over 2.3 million garments since 2009. By Eileen Fisher's own account, that represents just 5.4% of everything the brand has ever made. |
#2 Daniel Silverstein
Daniel Silverstein is a Brooklyn-based designer who built his entire brand around one rule. Nothing gets thrown away.
Most fashion studios generate piles of leftover fabric after cutting. Silverstein collects those scraps from his own studio and from other garment factories and sews them together into new fabric using a process he created called re-rolling. That new fabric becomes the garment.
Whatever small pieces remain after cutting go into patchwork or embellishment. Every last bit is used.
Each piece he makes saves roughly one pound of fabric from landfill. The clothes are bold, gender-neutral, and one of a kind. The scrap is not a problem he works around. It is the raw material he works with.
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DID YOU KNOW? The entire brand started from a single Instagram post. Silverstein used his own leftover fabric scraps to make a shirt for himself, posted a photo of it, and the response he got inspired him to build a business around it. |
#3 Holly McQuillan
Holly McQuillan is a designer and academic from New Zealand, now based at TU Delft in the Netherlands. Most designers in this space make things. McQuillan built the knowledge that helps others make them too.
She co-wrote the book Zero Waste Fashion Design, which is still the go-to reference in the field. She created Make/Use, a free open-source library of zero-waste patterns. She co-founded the Zero Waste Design Online Collective so that designers anywhere can access this education without a paywall.
Her core finding is worth sitting with. The fabric waste created during standard pattern cutting, typically 15 to 20 per cent of the total cloth, is not an accident. It is built into how patterns are drawn. McQuillan's work shows that if you design the pattern differently, the waste disappears. It was always a choice.
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DID YOU KNOW? In 2015, New Zealand's national museum Te Papa acquired a collection of her upcycled garments for its permanent collection, placing zero-waste fashion in the same institution that holds the country's most significant cultural treasures. |
#4 Orsola de Castro
Orsola de Castro has been upcycling fabric since the 1990s, long before the word was common in fashion. She built her design practice around the idea that discarded material is not the end of something. It is the beginning.
After the Rana Plaza factory collapse in Bangladesh in 2013, which killed over a thousand garment workers, she co-founded Fashion Revolution. The organisation now operates in over 90 countries. Its annual campaign asking brands "Who Made My Clothes?" has reached millions of people worldwide.
What makes de Castro different from most designers on this list is the scale of her influence. She did not just change how she makes clothes. She changed what the global industry feels obliged to answer for.
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DID YOU KNOW? The phrase "Who Made My Clothes?" almost never existed. The original hashtag was #InsideOut, but a Disney film with the same name came out that year and they changed it. Even then, the first version read "Who Made Your Clothes?" Making it first-person came later. |
#5 Kriti Tula
Kriti Tula started Doodlage in New Delhi in 2012. At that point, sustainable fashion was barely a conversation in India. She began it anyway.
Doodlage works with fabric waste collected from garment factories in Delhi, offcuts, rejected pieces, surplus material that would otherwise go to landfill. These become limited-edition collections, each piece different from the next because the source material is never the same. Fabric too small for clothing becomes paper for packaging and notebooks. What is left after that goes to NGOs.
The brand currently upcycles close to 30,000 metres of fabric waste every year. Tula has been recognised by the United Nations, awarded Vogue India's Force of Fashion, and spoken at TEDx. She is now pushing for textile waste policy change at a governmental level.
For anyone thinking about what zero waste fashion looks like in an Indian production context, Doodlage is the clearest answer available!
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DID YOU KNOW? In 2012, the same year she founded Doodlage, Tula was selected as one of only 17 climate champions worldwide by the United Nations, before the brand had any significant commercial footprint. |
#6 Stella McCartney
Stella McCartney launched her label in 2001 with a position that has not shifted since. No leather, no fur, no feathers, no animal skin. At a major luxury brand, that is not a simple preference. It means rebuilding how you source, what you use, and who you work with.
Her collections use regenerated cashmere, sustainable viscose, organic cotton, and newer materials like Mylo, a leather alternative grown from mushroom roots. PVC was removed entirely in 2010. The brand publishes environmental accounts and commits to public carbon and circularity targets.
McCartney is not a zero-waste designer in the way others on this list are. But she has done something they have not. She proved that luxury fashion can work at scale without its most damaging defaults. For an industry where luxury and excess have long been treated as the same thing, that is a meaningful break.
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DID YOU KNOW? In 2021, McCartney became the first designer in the world to create garments from Mylo, a leather alternative grown from mushroom mycelium that takes less than two weeks to produce compared to the years needed to raise livestock for conventional leather. |
What They Share
These designers work differently, at different scales, in different countries, with different focuses. What they share is a refusal to treat waste as a given.
The fashion industry's waste problem is not a natural condition. It is the result of choices made at the design stage, the sourcing stage, the production stage, and the end of a garment's life. Each of these designers has intervened at one or more of those points and shown that a different outcome is possible.
The pattern they have in common is also the one that has always underpinned good craft. Make things well, use materials fully, know where they come from, and do not discard what still has value. These are not new ideas.
In many craft traditions across the world, including the handloom and natural dye traditions that TuDuGu works within, they have simply always been the way things are done. What these designers have done is bring that logic into a global conversation that badly needed it.
