We are all familiar with the notion that recycling and upcycling are not only a sustainable way forward but also celebrate the previous life of materials – transforming them into new objects and giving them a new life. And just as repurposing determines the new iterations of materials and products, it also influences their colour – sparking a different way of thinking about colour and incorporating it into design.

This encourages designers to take a leap of faith away from the conventional way of doing things: choosing a colour and seeing all items produced in an identical shade of cerise or teal or marigold. Standardisation has to take a back seat. It’s also less easy to follow trends. ‘This season it’s all about purple’ has to give way to a more relaxed acceptance of what the materials available may offer; a supply of chartreuse deadstock, say, could present a challenge. This requires a curatorial approach to assembling existing colours into an effective palette.

Another approach involves colour mash-ups. When a toddler plunges into new pots of Play-Doh, by the end of the day clear blue, bright pink and zingy green are likely to have been squidged into a whole new shade that doesn’t resemble any of the originals. Such bold mixology is unpredictable and requires the confidence to embrace a result that may turn out to be 100 shades of khaki.

This unplanned approach leads to a new aesthetic freedom that celebrates imperfection rather than fighting for homogenisation. This is also reflected in the techniques frequently used in repurposing. We are seeing a return to traditional hand skills: felting, weaving, patchwork, knitting and embroidery, all of which are particularly suited to working with discarded materials and giving them a fresh lease of life. The results reflect the designer’s intentions: a rejection of mass manufacturing and the opportunity to create unique items. While the production process can be replicated, drawing on materials, techniques and colours that will always vary slightly ensures that output remains individual.

All the designers featured here are sending a strong message about sustainability and the importance of reuse, embedding these even more firmly in the mainstream agenda and underlining the importance of making repurposed items not only conscientious purchases but also desirable for the consumer. They are also setting an example in their use of colour, showing that standardisation doesn’t have to be standard and homogenisation can be shaken up.

Helen Kirkum

For sneaker re-designer Helen Kirkum, whose upcycled materials are sourced from recycling centres such as Traid in Dalston, east London, ‘upcycled material brings with it an entire story, a history and an authenticity. I love to discover the marks and memories of other journeys when I take apart sneakers and to stitch them back together to create something new. The creases, scratches, and worn marks bring with them a mystery.’ As Kirkum says, ‘we have a deep resource of incredible pieces that may have reached their limits in their current state, but picked apart, cleaned and cherished, they can become not only useful again but beautiful again.’ Using a cut-and-paste assemblage technique, outsoles are spliced and reconfigured with upper patterns of assorted foams, interlinings, dirtied suedes, and perforated leather components.

The colour curation is spontaneous; Kirkum says it comes naturally. ‘I mostly use neutral bases – black, white. I especially love white because it picks up so many marks and brings with it so many shades and tones.’ She uses accent colours to call out detailing such as TPU logos and embroidered patches. The designer’s intention is to ‘encourage people to hold onto things a little longer, to personalise or adapt things when they are worn out, and to love and look after products.’ As Kirkum says, designers need to acknowledge their responsibilities. ‘I don’t think we can be blasé about the issues any more, or have a “we will do it next season” attitude. This has to happen now and we all have to assume responsibility for the state of things.’

William Yates Johnson

‘From the beginning, I wanted this project to stem from a zero-waste process. In cutting the forms out of a large whole block, excess material is left over; it is this ‘waste’ that I crush up to become the seeds for the creation of a new edition. I love that the excess material, often discarded, becomes essential to the formation of a new generation, and that, instead of the physical or visual quality degrading, the process creates more beauty and complexity as the series progresses.’

William Yates-Johnson is a multidisciplinary designer who is ‘obsessed by the effortless chaos’ that comes about within the manufacturing process. In his practice, the arbitrary reactions that emerge between the material and process becomes the aesthetic. His Polyspoila project, initiated in 2015, is ‘a proposal for a new manufacturing model.’ It describes a circular, carefully considered process, where the object can be continually broken up and remade into a fresh composition. No waste is created during renewal –production energy is countered by using a chemical reaction rather than a heat production method. Yates-Johnson uses a notably vivid colour palette and loose terrazzo patina to mark the material’s history from piece to piece. The Smasher collection expanded on the Polyspoila technique, using resin-reinforced plaster instead of thermosetting plastic.

‘For the Smasher and earlier Polyspoila projects, colour is absolutely fundamental to communicating the core concept of successive generations. I add a new colour at each progression of the break-and-remake process, which becomes a genetic marker of that stage, clearly visible in the surface of the object. The colours are mapped out in advance, creating a sequence of contrasting but complimentary hues, so that even in the 12th edition, each fragment from the previous 11 series is crisply delineated, enabling the lineage to be easily read.’

Eileen Fisher

Eileen Fisher opened her first store in 1987 in New York’s East Village. Over the past 31 years, she has grown a successful, women-led and environmentally sustainable company. She advocates a transparent supply chain and the use of less toxic materials in the manufacturing process, and continues to progress towards a circular fashion business.

Fisher started her first take-back recycling scheme, Renew, in 2009 – it invites customers to return their old clothes, in any condition, to be resold or renewed by the company. By 2017, the brand had taken back over 900,000 garments. In 2015, Fisher launched DesignWork, an artistic solution to the clothes received that were damaged beyond repair. DesignWork sees Fisher collaborate with artist Sigi Ahl and designer Carolina Bedoya to transform waste textiles, using a traditional craft felting process, to produce unique artworks and designs. When waste becomes wealth and culture, the circle has come around twice, empowering new ventures, and gifting the world with amazing beauty.’

James Shaw

‘The tool dictates the outcome; therefore, by making a new tool, you create new outcomes.’ Working to this rationale, designer James Shaw developed three different types of tool for his final design products course project at the Royal College of Art in 2013. One piece was a gun that shot out molten pewter, another created papier-mâché and the most successful is a plastic extruder. Over recent years he has developed his production process, iterating on the tool and experimenting with different plastics. He settled on recycled high-density polyethylene (HDPE), having found a plastic recycling company that provided him with its waste plastic for free.

From the outset, Shaw found plastic a ‘quick and expressive’ material to work with and the process of creating, he says, is ‘almost like painting in 3D.’ His Plastic Baroque furniture aims to frame plastic in a new light, elevating this much maligned material by demonstrating its aesthetic potential and historical relevance. Shaw incorporates colour using natural powdered artists’ pigments, accommodating the original base colour of the plastic. His making process is gestural and intuitive, so colour becomes more imaginative – an experimental alchemy, where the unexpected often brings the best results.

‘Plastic Baroque is all about colour because it’s such a gestural and expressive way of working, and the material takes colour fantastically. I have a mixture of colours that comes from the base colour of the plastics and then add my own pigments in. I often experiment with different gradients and this can often throw up something unexpected – sometimes it’s fantastic and sometimes it can be awful, but I find you always get the best results from unexpected things.’

Garcia Bello

Argentine designer Juliana Garcia Bello founded her eponymous Garcia Bello brand in 2013 with a very contemporary approach to fashion. ‘The brand is looking for the national identity and sustainable processes of production. The patterns are zero waste. The garments are a universal size and have no gender,’ Garcia Bello explains. ‘I like to think of a timeless collection, with reduced stock, made by hand, thinking about the producers and the working time behind each garment.’ Garcia Bello wants to spread the understanding of a more conscientious approach to consumption.

Her vision for the future, she explains, is to ‘democratise knowledge, generating tools for conscientious consumption’, adding that observing the effect of discarded material on the natural world is necessary to understand the extent of its environmental impact. Campo, her spring/summer 2020 collection, is made out of discarded material donated by local fishermen, hunters and adventurers. The colour palette is a consequence of these donations, consisting of gradients of off-white with warm, utilitarian greys.

DRxRomanelli

Growing up in Los Angeles in the 80s has always been a huge source of inspiration for Darren Romanelli, the designer behind the street-inspired custom creations of DRxRomanelli. Romanelli was initially enamoured by remaking. ‘The idea of re-appropriating vintage didn’t even seem DIY,’ he says. ‘It just seemed like something brand new.’ He continues to reinvent in his collections, collaborating with international artists and brands on projects that span fashion, homewares and installations. For every one-off piece, second-life materials are sourced from archive collections, flea markets and even eBay, depending on the brief. His working process is meticulous, as he explains. ‘Usually, I’ll sit with the vintage materials for months or even years, developing relationships with them before cutting them up.’

His bespoke approach to colour is mostly influenced by the reclaimed vintage materials, with graphic logos and iconography sometimes driving aesthetic decisions. Romanelli’s upcycled short sleeve tracksuits made from 100% vintage Nike apparel, layer blocks of track blue with faded lilacs, grey marl and washed out black.

Studio Mend by Sunniva Rademacher Flesland

A recent graduate of Design Academy Eindhoven, Sunniva Rademacher Flesland proposes that the visual repair of garments will be a future signifier of their value. With more than half of discarded clothing ending up in landfill, extending the life of an item not only reduces the impact of producing new pieces, but also encourages emotional investment in its material value.

At Dutch Design Week, Studio Mend showcased an entirely new aesthetic for traditional darning methods that uses contrast-colour stitching and elements of pattern to repair and improve damaged textiles. The service encourages users to playfully adorn their clothing by selecting custom combinations of up to four darning techniques as well as threads in bold hues such as cobalt. Studio Mend will be hosting further workshops in 2020.