While clothes giants H&M and Zara are dominating global street wear trends, a group of Berlin designers is resisting “fast fashion” to create their own style of recycled chic.
The floor of Daniel Kroh’s workshop near Berlin Central Station is littered with piles of orange overalls and the fluorescent reflector jackets worn by German railway workers.
They are the raw materials for this designer, who cuts and dyes the scraps to make men’s fashion. “I seek traces of authenticity,” Kroh explains about his unique creations, his answer to cheap and mass-produced garments made for the world in faraway textile workshops.
Photo: AFP
He and a growing band of Berlin designers specialize in giving new life to textile waste to produce trendy and high-quality products. Kroh also uses the blue work pants of carpenters, which would otherwise likely be burned in a garbage incinerator, to make new tailored clothes for the city’s hippest fashion pioneers.
The trend, a stance against waste and over-consumption, is not a new idea, the designers say.
“My mother and my grandmother ... made new skirts with pieces from dresses or offcuts from coats, just to be economical,” says Italian designer Carla Cixi, who has lived in Berlin for five years.
Cecilia Palmer, another fashion designer in the German capital, lamented that in today’s world “we throw away clothes because of a missing button or a broken zipper.”
The designer, who is in her 30s, organizes parties where everyone brings clothes they no longer want to trade for other pieces. Participants can also make new clothes with the sewing machines provided
‘LIKE GOING TO A FAST FOOD JOINT
The big idea of the project? “Consume differently,” says Palmer, who decries the fact that tons of clothing end up in the garbage each year.
These designers are rebelling against what they dub “disposable fashion.”
“It’s a scandal that some brands sell clothes that will be worn just two or three times” before they are considered outdated, said Cixi, whose crocheted creations require hours of work.
Shopping at global fashion retail chains “is like going to a fast-food joint to eat hamburgers. You feel bad afterwards,” said Kroh, who scoffed at mass market clothes as having “no soul.”
The designers complain that from Athens to Oslo, European youth wear the same slim-fit jeans produced in Bangladesh or Cambodia, with millions sold at unbeatable prices. It’s a fashion that pleases everyone but “ends up being all the same,” Cixi said.
Each jacket or suit made by Kroh includes explanations about its origin. Eugenie Schmidt and Mariko Takahashi, who also created a recycled clothing label, have also opted to “tell the story” of each dress or pair of pants from their workshop in the former East Berlin.
“The more a garment is worn, the more it contains of the history of the person who wore it,” said Schmidt, showing off a part-transparent pink creation with stains on the sleeves. “These are traces of paint,” said Schmidt, explaining that the sweatshirt’s last owner was a painter.
The catch with recycled clothing, often produced in labor-intensive ways, is that it remains unaffordable for many. A jacket can easily cost more than 400 euros (US$540).
The designers recognize that their style still serves a niche market. But they proudly defend it, denouncing the fact that the big chains sell T-shirts for as little as five euros.
A newcomer among the mega-retailers, Irish chain Primark, has used very low prices — without advertising — to lure tens of thousands to each store opening in Europe.
In Berlin, as elsewhere, shoppers pile out of the stores loaded with full bags. The rock-bottom prices are in turn fueling controversy over labor conditions among garment makers.
With an eye for irony, Schmidt and Takahashi make most of their clothes from old H&M and Zara garments.
Taiwan’s English education system is being pulled apart by three opposing forces. Bilingual Nation 2030 pulls students toward English and global communication. Artificial Intelligence (AI) readiness pulls them toward digital judgment, verification and AI-mediated work. But Taiwan’s old exam culture pulls them back toward memorization, grammar drills, timed reading and correct answers. If the education system keeps using old exams to define success, it risks producing graduates who are neither genuinely bilingual nor genuinely AI-ready, but trained for tasks machines can already perform. The first force is Bilingual Nation 2030. Launched in 2018, the policy aimed to “help Taiwan’s workforce connect
“Taiwan’s Opposition Leader Comes to US With a Message Straight Out of Beijing” read a May 31 headline in the Wall Street Journal. Top US administration officials and members of Congress almost certainly read the WSJ, and if there was a bullet point takeaway that people in Washington should absorb ahead of Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) Chair Cheng Li-wun’s (鄭麗文) arrival in DC on June 9, that headline is it. The last few columns have discussed this very topic, and the timing is not coincidental. While those top officials likely do not read the Taipei Times, judging by the number
With weighty, anxiety-inducing geopolitical topics dominating the headlines, checking in on the wild and weird state of local politics can take some of the edge off. This November’s elections will determine who will be in charge of fixing potholes in your neighborhood, not the potholes in Taiwan’s complicated geopolitical space. Recently, after an online interview with a Taipei-based journalist, I commented that Taipei journalists never go further than the MRT can take them. He laughed and agreed. Naturally, the Taipei mayoral race is eating up much of the press attention. TAIPEI CITY Democratic Progressive Party (DPP) candidate Puma Shen (沈伯洋) has
As someone who normally steers clear of books with “transcendence” or “metaphysics” in their subtitles, this reviewer — a casual observer of local belief systems since the 1990s — found Fabian Graham’s Money God Temples in Taiwan a challenging read. Those who’ve only dipped their toes into temple culture will likely need to parse several sections with special care if they’re to keep up with the author, a British ethnographic researcher whose previous books have investigated religious practices among ethnic Chinese in Southeast Asia. This scholarly volume examines a facet of Taiwan’s religious landscape that didn’t exist a century ago, and
RSS