Why Luxury Brands Are Suddenly Embracing Upcycling

Upcycling is becoming mainstream not primarily because of environmental concerns, but because EU regulations on destroying unsold goods, improved supply chain infrastructure, and changing consumer desires for unique, story-driven products are making it commercially viable for major brands.

Summary of Why Upcycling Is Suddenly Everywhere in Fashion. Every timestamp links into the original audio.

The short version

• 00:00:39 — Swiss designer Kevin Germanier created a Paris Couture collection entirely from excess inventory across seven LVMH-owned brands, emphasizing these pieces were made from unsold goods rather than unused fabric scraps.
• 00:01:33 — Upcycling involves taking used or unsold garments and reworking them into new products, traditionally done by hand but increasingly using machinery and creative reconstruction methods.
• 00:06:03 — An EU ban on destroying unsold goods that took effect in July is pushing brands to reconsider how they handle excess inventory and find sustainable alternatives like upcycling.
• 00:07:24 — There’s a critical distinction between upcycling used clothing and using dead stock fabric; critics argue that upcycling used garments better addresses fashion’s overproduction problem than repurposing unused fabric rolls.
• 00:10:05 — Infrastructure improvements including AI-assisted sorting systems, better collecting mechanisms, and platforms connecting brands to excess materials are making upcycling more practical, though still not as streamlined as traditional production.
• 00:12:45 — Successful brands like Coach foreground creativity, innovation, and aesthetic appeal rather than environmental benefits, marketing upcycled products as unique and story-driven rather than just sustainable.
• 00:15:52 — Consumers now view upcycled items as cool and desirable rather than as compromises, wanting diverse closets that mix luxury, high street, and upcycled pieces without these choices defining their identity.
• 00:18:12 — The fashion system remains fundamentally designed for mass production; most brands currently upcycling operate at small scales, and the industry doesn’t support true scaling due to inventory inconsistencies and wholesale market preferences for standardization.
• 00:23:46 — Upcyclers in the Global South like those in Ghana and India have practiced this at scale for generations out of economic necessity, but Western regulations and brand partnerships typically exclude them from the conversation and don’t address textile waste flowing into their markets.

In depth

From niche virtue to marketing hook: what actually changed

Sheena Bertram-Young opens by noting that upcycling used to be shorthand for small independent labels and one-off capsule statements, and Shiza Waleed’s reporting traces a longer arc behind that shift. She recalls that sustainability messaging in fashion has moved through distinct phases over roughly a decade: first a wave of brands building entirely new “sustainable” facilities and product lines, then a pivot roughly five years ago toward reuse and re-commerce — squeezing more value out of what already existed rather than manufacturing anew 00:02:30. Upcycling, in Waleed’s account, is the newest iteration of that lineage, but what’s notable now is its migration from the fringes into mainstream marketing vocabulary 00:03:38.

Waleed pinpoints the trigger for writing the story not to any single event but to a accumulation of signals across the year: smaller upcycling-native labels like ELV Denim, Conner Ives, and Marine Serre increasingly striking collaborations with major players — Nike, Patagonia — and the term itself becoming ubiquitous in brand marketing 00:03:25. She frames this as a claiming of vocabulary that once belonged to a specific sustainability-minded consumer segment, now being absorbed into much broader commercial strategy 00:03:47. Miu Miu’s evolution serves as a telling data point: the brand has run upcycled collections since 2020, but only this year did it pair the concept with a recognizable celebrity face (Suki Waterhouse) and expand from vintage dresses into denim and leather — a signal, Waleed suggests, of scaling ambition rather than niche experimentation 00:04:23.

The Kevin Germanier couture show anchors this shift symbolically. Waleed emphasizes that what struck her wasn’t just the spectacle of building an entire couture collection from excess inventory across seven LVMH-owned brands, but a specific distinction Germanier drew on stage — unreported in her original story — that the pieces were built from unsold goods, not dead stock fabric 00:05:41. That distinction turns out to be load-bearing for the rest of the conversation.

The dead stock fight: does upcycling actually address overproduction?

A recurring tension in the episode is whether all upcycling is created equal. Waleed lays out a bifurcation that emerged repeatedly in her reporting: critics distinguish between brands using genuine textile waste — used clothing pulled from secondhand markets, donation streams, or unsold inventory that already exists as finished garments — and brands using dead stock, meaning unused rolls of fabric left over from production 00:06:59. The two are often marketed under the same upcycling banner, but the sustainability logic differs sharply. Dead stock is still “new” material in the sense that it hasn’t been transformed into a garment yet; critics argue that repurposing it doesn’t meaningfully address fashion’s core overproduction problem, because it effectively assigns commercial value to excess fabric and then produces more clothing from it 00:07:48.

This is precisely why Germanier’s on-stage clarification mattered to Waleed: distancing the LVMH couture project from dead stock was a deliberate positioning move, aligning it with the more rigorous, waste-reducing version of upcycling rather than the more permissive one 00:05:41. Yet Waleed resists treating this as a clean moral hierarchy. She cites the CEO of I Was a Sari, an Indian upcycling brand, who argued that any method keeping existing material in circulation — dead stock included — represents a net win over producing from virgin fabric 00:08:32. That’s a genuine disagreement embedded in the industry itself, not just an outside critique: practitioners who’ve built businesses on strict textile-waste reuse, like Bobby Kolade or ELV Denim, sit in implicit tension with brands and voices who see dead stock reuse as an acceptable, even necessary, complement 00:08:49.

The unresolved question is really about scale and intent. Dead stock upcycling is logistically harder in some ways — sourcing scattered fabric lots is time-consuming — but it doesn’t force brands to grapple with the volume of unsold and discarded clothing that keeps accumulating. Waleed’s own read, offered later in the conversation, is that dead stock and unsold-goods upcycling may actually be the version that scales fastest precisely because it’s the version regulation incentivizes, not necessarily because it’s the more radical intervention 00:27:04.

Why regulation, not conscience, is doing the heavy lifting

Waleed is notably blunt that she doesn’t attribute this upsurge primarily to corporate ethics. She states directly that sustainability has fallen down the priority list for many companies, and that the more plausible driver is the EU’s ban on destroying unsold goods, which took effect in July 00:06:0300:26:14. That regulation forces brands to find EU-sanctioned outlets for excess inventory rather than incinerating or landfilling it, and upcycling is one of the few creative, marketable options available. Waleed notes there are exemptions and loopholes still allowing some destruction, which she’s reported on separately, but the general direction of travel is that brands now need a defensible answer for what happens to unsold stock 00:06:18.

This reframes brand storytelling around figures like Kevin Germanier: being backed by LVMH and showcasing an upcycled couture collection isn’t just a creative flex, it’s also a compliance signal, demonstrating adherence to incoming rules while getting ahead of reputational risk 00:06:33. Waleed extends this logic forward, predicting that in five years brands will face growing pressure to publicly report waste and unsold-inventory figures to regulators, making high destruction numbers a visible liability 00:26:42. That transparency requirement, more than moral conviction, is what she expects to push more companies toward upcycling dead stock and unsold goods specifically — the categories regulation touches most directly — while textile waste at large, and the overproduction problem underlying it, remains comparatively unaddressed 00:27:09.

This is one of the more pointed hedges in the episode: Waleed isn’t arguing upcycling is a hollow trend, but she is skeptical that its current momentum reflects an industry rethink of production volumes. She distinguishes between upcycling becoming commercially normalized and the deeper systemic issue — that fashion still manufactures far more than it needs — being resolved. Bobby Kolade’s critique, which she cites, makes the same point from the design and culture side: without a fundamental shift in how fashion produces, upcycling risks staying tethered to hype and remaining a boutique add-on for a limited set of brands rather than a structural correction 00:18:30.

Selling desire, not guilt: the consumer and brand psychology behind the shift

Bertram-Young draws an explicit parallel between sustainability marketing and diversity marketing, suggesting both have historically needed an additional hook — beyond the moral case — to actually move purchases 00:11:59. Waleed agrees and extends the point: Coach’s success reflects a calculated read of where consumers now connect emotionally with product, prioritizing creativity, individuality, and narrative over an environmental pitch 00:12:51. She distinguishes Coachtopia, Coach’s original upcycling-focused sub-brand built around leather scraps, from the newer move of folding upcycled denim pieces directly into Coach’s core, mainstream product lines and iconic silhouettes — a sign the company sees upcycling as viable beyond a niche side project 00:13:54.

Underlying this is a claimed shift in consumer psychology that Waleed frames as symbiotic rather than brand-driven alone: shoppers, especially younger ones, increasingly want provenance and story attached to items, and are drawn to the idea that no two upcycled pieces are quite identical even when built on a familiar silhouette 00:13:25. Owning something with a described history — a garment that carries traces of a prior life, like a jacket loosely tied to “someone’s grandmother” — has become a selling point rather than a mark of compromise, reversing the older assumption that visibly recycled or reworked goods were a lesser or niche category 00:14:19. Waleed also flags a broader consumer desire for closet diversity: shoppers now want the ability to hold Gucci, Zara, and an upcycled piece simultaneously without any single category defining their identity or taste 00:15:57.

A smaller but telling data point Waleed shares, which didn’t make it into her published story, involves I Was a Sari, the Indian upcycling brand: most of its customers are outside India entirely 00:17:11. She reads this as evidence that cultural storytelling and provenance carry cross-border appeal independent of sustainability messaging per se — people are drawn to the narrative of transformation and craft, not simply a green label. This nuance complicates a simple story about ethical consumerism; it suggests the appeal is aesthetic and cultural as much as environmental, which is exactly the pivot brands like Coach appear to have made deliberately.

Scaling problems, logistics, and an uncomfortable global divide

Despite the momentum, Waleed is careful to enumerate real structural barriers to upcycling becoming a mainstream production method rather than boutique practice. The most basic is inconsistency: upcycled goods inherently vary in color, cut, and sizing because they’re built from irregular source material, which clashes with wholesale and retail expectations of standardized, repeatable stock 00:18:59. Brands like Bonnetie in Denmark and ELV Denim have developed workarounds — deliberately seeking similar fabric cuts and colors to make output more repeatable while preserving uniqueness — but Waleed frames this as a craft solution to a systemic mismatch, not evidence the mismatch has disappeared 00:19:39.

Logistics compound the problem internationally. Waleed points out that many countries, including Bangladesh, ban the import of used textiles altogether, restricting secondhand markets to domestic factory discards, while countries like India, Ghana, and Chile absorb enormous volumes of exported textile waste from Europe and the US 00:21:05. Anyone trying to build a cross-border upcycling supply chain has to navigate this patchwork of import rules, and Waleed stresses that speed matters commercially — the longer it takes to get reclaimed material to a cutting floor, the more it costs relative to using new material, and upcycling is inherently more design- and labor-intensive regardless of logistics 00:21:50.

The most pointed critique in the episode concerns who gets credit and investment. Waleed highlights that secondhand markets in places like Kantamanto in Ghana have practiced sophisticated reworking of Western textile waste for generations, out of economic necessity, yet remain almost entirely outside the formal Western fashion system and its supply deals 00:24:13. Regulation designed in Europe and the US doesn’t account for these downstream markets, and brand partnerships rarely flow resources or recognition to them, even as those same brands’ waste continues to land there 00:23:41. Waleed frames this asymmetry as the industry’s unresolved moral debt: genuinely elevating upcycling, in her view, would mean investing in and crediting the communities that pioneered it at scale, not just the couture houses and premium brands now adopting the label — and she’s doubtful that shift will happen without a change in who upcycling’s economic value actually flows to 00:24:54.

Summarised automatically. Listen to the original for the full conversation — this is not a substitute for it.