Why Upcycling Has Moved From Niche to Mainstream Fashion

Regulatory pressure on unsold inventory and consumers’ desire for unique, storied products are driving luxury brands like LVMH and Coach to scale upcycling, though true mainstreaming requires addressing systemic overproduction.

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

The short version

• 00:00:39 — Kevin Germanier’s Paris Couture collection made entirely from unsold goods across seven LVMH brands signaled that upcycling has become a tool for major fashion conglomerates rather than just independent designers.
• 00:01:33 — Upcycling involves taking used or unsold clothes and reconstructing them into new products, historically done by hand but increasingly using machinery and creative manufacturing techniques.
• 00:02:30 — The conversation around sustainability shifted roughly five years ago from creating new sustainable products to reusing existing supply chain materials, with upcycling representing the latest evolution.
• 00:06:03 — The EU’s July ban on destruction of unsold goods forced brands to find approved sustainable uses for excess stock, making upcycling a regulatory compliance strategy rather than just an environmental choice.
• 00:12:28 — Brands successfully marketing upcycled items like Coach and Miu Miu forefront creativity, individuality, and provenance rather than leading with environmental benefits, which resonates better with consumers.
• 00:18:07 — Most brands currently practicing upcycling operate at small scale and the broader fashion system remains fundamentally misaligned with scaling the practice, as retailers reject sizing and color variations inherent to upcycled goods.
• 00:21:05 — International regulations create barriers for upcycling supply chains—some countries like Bangladesh ban used textiles while others like India and Ghana become dumping grounds for Western textile waste.
• 00:22:09 — Upcycling remains more time-consuming than virgin production because it requires substantial design thinking, labor, and aesthetic consideration to justify a finished product.
• 00:24:44 — Upcyclers in Ghana, India, and Pakistan have practiced this for generations out of economic necessity but operate outside Western fashion systems, and elevation of upcycling as a trend should also recognize and uplift these existing practitioners.

In depth

From hobbyist fringe to LVMH runway: what changed

Upcycling has always existed at fashion’s margins, practiced by independent labels and DIY-minded designers who reworked old jackets into skirts or jeans into new silhouettes, mostly with a needle and thread 00:01:33. What Shiaza Waleed’s reporting captures is a shift in who is doing it and why. Sheena Butler-Young frames this against a longer arc: a decade ago sustainability conversations centered on building entirely new “sustainable” product lines, then roughly five years ago pivoted toward reuse and re-commerce of what already existed in the supply chain 00:02:30. Upcycling, in this telling, is the next iteration of that same trajectory, but now practiced by the biggest names in the industry rather than niche players.

The emblematic moment is Kevin Germanier’s Paris Couture Week collection, stitched entirely from unsold inventory across seven LVMH-owned brands 00:00:39. Waleed didn’t even see it in Paris—she caught it as a surprise showcase at the Global Fashion Summit in Copenhagen—but what stuck with her wasn’t the spectacle, it was Germanier’s insistence, before the show even started, that none of the 25 looks were made from dead stock fabric; every piece came from goods that already existed but simply hadn’t sold 00:05:41. That distinction, small as it sounds, is doing real work: it’s a signal that a major conglomerate is willing to publicly stake its couture credibility on genuinely diverting waste, not just recycling production scraps.

The throughline Waleed points to across the year is collaboration: smaller upcycling-focused labels like ELV Denim, Alu Walia, and Marine Serre increasingly partnering with giants like Nike, Patagonia, and Miu Miu, which has quietly run upcycled collections since 2020 and this summer expanded from vintage dresses into denim and leather, fronted by Suki Waterhouse 00:04:18. The term “upcycling” itself, Waleed argues, has become ubiquitous in marketing in a way that would have been unthinkable when it was seen as belonging to a specific type of sustainability-minded consumer 00:03:38.

Dead stock versus true upcycling: a fault line among practitioners

One of the sharper distinctions Waleed draws out is between two things now both marketed under the same word. True upcycling, in the stricter sense favored by long-time practitioners, means taking textile waste—used clothing pulled from donation bins, secondhand markets, or unsold garments that already exist as finished products—and cutting them up into something new 00:06:59. Dead stock, by contrast, is unused rolls of fabric or production scraps that were never turned into garments at all; using it is closer to using any other new material, just scarcer and harder to source 00:07:24.

This matters because critics argue the two practices have very different implications for fashion’s core problem: overproduction. Using dead stock still involves manufacturing new garments from existing fabric stock, which doesn’t necessarily reduce how much new material enters the system—it just assigns value to what would otherwise be wasted 00:07:48. Waleed is careful not to flatten this disagreement; she notes that advocates like the CEO of the Indian brand I Was A Sari take a more pragmatic, big-tent view, arguing that any method keeping existing material in circulation is a net win, whether that’s dead stock or literal textile waste 00:08:32. But she also flags that sustainability advocates and brands that have upcycled from actual discarded clothing for years—ELV Denim, Bobby Kolade, secondhand markets like Kantamanto in Ghana—see something qualitatively different in dead stock use, since it doesn’t force brands to reckon with how much they’re producing in the first place 00:08:49.

This tension isn’t resolved in the conversation; it’s presented as a live fault line inside the industry’s own definition of the word. Even Germanier’s insistence on distancing his LVMH collection from dead stock reads, in this light, less like semantics and more like a deliberate attempt to claim the more rigorous end of that spectrum for reputational reasons.

Why regulation, not virtue, is driving adoption

Waleed is explicit and somewhat blunt about her own theory of causation: she doesn’t believe large companies are doing this primarily out of moral conviction, and she says sustainability broadly has slipped down the corporate priority list in recent years 00:26:14. What’s changed the calculus is regulatory pressure, specifically the EU’s ban on destroying unsold goods, which took effect in July and forces brands to find approved, legal outlets for excess inventory 00:06:03. Incineration—long the industry’s quiet default, with Burberry as the most infamous public example—is no longer an option, at least within the EU, and upcycling offers a documented, marketable alternative that also happens to generate positive press.

This reframes Germanier’s LVMH collection not just as a creative statement but as a compliance signal: a way of showing regulators and the public that a major luxury group is actively finding sanctioned uses for stock it can no longer legally destroy 00:06:33. Waleed extends this logic forward, predicting that within five years more companies will lean toward upcycling dead stock and unsold goods specifically because they’ll be required to report waste figures to regulators, and no company wants to publish embarrassing numbers about how much it couldn’t sell 00:26:42. That’s a distinctly unsentimental prediction: the growth she expects is concentrated in the dead-stock and unsold-goods category, precisely because that’s the category regulation currently targets—while actual textile waste, which continues to flood global south markets, remains comparatively under-addressed 00:27:09.

This is also where infrastructure investment comes in. Waleed describes improved sorting and collection systems, some using AI to identify which damaged or unsellable garments qualify as “feedstock” for upcycling rather than resale, alongside intermediaries like LVMH-backed Nona Source and London-based The Materialist that connect brands to dead stock more efficiently than before [605, 659]. None of this is framed as altruistic infrastructure-building; it’s presented as the practical scaffolding that regulatory compliance and economic incentive have made worth building.

Selling waste as desirable: the consumer psychology shift

Butler-Young draws an explicit parallel between sustainability marketing and diversity marketing, arguing both eventually needed a “sidekick”—something beyond the moral case—to actually move product, since consumers have historically been skeptical or confused about whether buying sustainably branded goods really delivers proportional environmental benefit 00:11:59. Waleed agrees, and points to Coach as the clearest case study: rather than leading with an environmental pitch, Coach has marketed upcycled bags—made from cut-up denim or leather scraps in its recognizable silhouettes—on the basis that each piece is unique, has a story, and offers a kind of provenance no mass-produced item can replicate 00:13:50. The pitch isn’t “buy this to save the planet,” it’s “buy this because no one else has the exact same bag.” his extends beyond Coachtopia, Coach’s original sustainability-focused sub-brand, into the mainline Coach and Kate Spade product; Waleed notes the company Gen Phoenix works with Coach’s parent Tapestry (which is also an investor in Gen Phoenix) specifically on leather upcycling, suggesting the approach is spreading across categories and isn’t confined to apparel 00:14:32.

Underneath this marketing shift, Waleed argues, is a genuine change in consumer appetite, particularly among younger shoppers who want variety and narrative in their wardrobes rather than a single defining aesthetic identity 00:15:52. An upcycled Miu Miu piece doesn’t mark its owner as someone who only cares about sustainability; it can coexist with a Zara haul or a Dior bag as simply one more interesting object with a story attached. Waleed’s own reporting on the Indian brand I Was A Sari reinforces this: despite being an Indian company selling saris transformed into bomber jackets, the overwhelming majority of its sales happen outside India, which she reads as evidence that cultural storytelling and provenance—rather than sustainability credentials alone—are what’s actually pulling in customers 00:17:16.

What remains unresolved is how durable this consumer enthusiasm is once upcycled goods move from novelty to routine stock. Waleed doesn’t claim the moral case has disappeared, only that it’s no longer sufficient on its own—creativity and uniqueness now have to do the selling that sustainability messaging alone couldn’t.

The scaling problem, and who gets left out of the upside

Despite the momentum, Waleed is emphatic that upcycling remains structurally marginal, and she resists the temptation to overstate where the industry actually is. The fashion system—wholesale, retail buying, sizing conventions—isn’t built for products that are inherently non-identical, and retailers dislike the inconsistency: a customer might want a specific colorway that isn’t available in their size precisely because no two upcycled pieces are alike 00:18:59. Brands like Bonnetie in Denmark and ELV Denim have developed workarounds, disciplining their design process to make silhouettes and colorways repeatable enough to feel coherently “on brand” while still preserving uniqueness 00:19:39, but Waleed frames this as a craft solution to a structural problem, not a fix for it. Bobby Kolade, a designer she interviewed, goes further, arguing that unless production volumes and the underlying fashion system change, upcycling will remain confined to a limited set of brands riding a trend rather than becoming genuinely embedded practice 00:18:30.

Logistics compound this: used-textile trade is governed by an uneven, sometimes contradictory patchwork of national policy. Bangladesh bans imported used textiles outright, restricting its secondhand market to domestic factory discards, while countries like India, Ghana, and Chile have become the default destinations for exported Western textile waste, without corresponding investment or inclusion in how the value chain benefits are shared 00:21:05. Waleed is pointed about this asymmetry: regulation designed to solve the

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