Sourcing at Magic: FabScrap, Drexel University Speak to the Importance of Circular Design
Educators and industry innovators are working to make circularity a part of the fashion school curriculum, moving beyond the tenets of design and forcing students to think about the end of a garment’s lifecycle.
At the Sourcing at Magic trade show on Monday, FabScrap co-founder and creative director Camille Tagle and Drexel University fashion design associate professor and sustainable design educator Lisa Hayes spoke to their strategic partnership and the importance of providing the next generation of fashion creatives with a foundation for circular thinking.
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In a discussion facilitated by Hey Social Good founder Dr. Cindy J. Lin, Tagle revealed her reasoning for launching the Brooklyn-based textile recycling service. After starting her career as a women’s evening wear designer in New York, Tagle said she was disturbed by the high volume of waste generated by the industry—sometimes even before a gown hit store shelves, or made its appearance on a red carpet.
“Co-founding FabScrap was very much an accident—I had not gone to school to study environmental science,” she said. “But seeing the waste firsthand, and most notably, how much of it was perfectly usable yardage, large pieces of fabric that sometimes wasn’t even used… brought up questions, like, ‘Why is this waste? How did we allow it to become waste, and what can we do to prevent this from happening again?’”
Launched seven years ago, FabScrap gives brands a channel to dispose of their production scraps, cutting-room waste, unwanted samples and other unsalable merchandise. To use the service, they schedule a pickup with FabScrap, which transports their waste to its sortation centers in Brooklyn and Philadelphia where the items are processed and their trims removed. Proprietary materials and small scraps are shredded and downcycled for industrial applications like insulation and carpet padding, while usable pieces of fabrics can be used by students and designers. Some larger pieces of fabric are sold at a reduced cost on the company’s website.
“I was working with sequins, beading, chiffon and satin all day, and now I’m at loading docks,” Tagle said. “I think all my experience at FabScrap has really come down to this idea that the role of a designer must change; what we know a designer to be now is destined to be different if we’re truly going to become circular.”
Hayes, who has taught fashion design at Drexel since 2005, previously spent nearly two decades as a designer in New York, working for the likes of Albert Nipon and spearheading design at Liz Claiborne. Her tenure in the industry also opened her eyes to the importance of designing with circularity in mind, and several years ago she approached FabScrap with the idea to provide students with upcycled fabric scraps as the feedstock for their designs.
Designing within set parameters—using a certain textile, color or pattern—can prove frustrating to students who simply want to create. But Hayes said she believes exercises like this engage students’ creative focus, while also forcing them to think about environmental impact as a result of design. “I think it’s about making it exciting and challenging to turn things that are difficult into things that are possible,” she said. Ultimately, she hopes that knowledge will help them become advocates for circularity when they enter the industry. “It really arms them with the tools they need to go into any company and start asking questions and making changes” to the status quo.
“When people were actually forced to design with some constraints and use what already exists, they were able to take a creativity so much farther than if they had been able to do exactly what they had wanted to do,” Tagle said.
Hayes also spoke to Drexel’s new partnership with Urban Outfitters and its rental service Nuuly, which makes use of the company’s de-commissioned rental garments. “We’re taking the garments at the end of their useful life, when they can no longer be rented, and the students have to sit there and disassemble them,” the design program director said. The exercise teaches students how time consuming and labor-intensive that process can be, and also asks them to consider the challenges of designing with upcycled materials at scale.
These experiences “help people in our industry who are going to drive the next generation of change,” Hayes added. “Each subsequent group of young product and fashion designers are more on the page of sourcing sustainably and doing things better.”
