No Instagram or not TikTok, if you’ve ever seen a bra made from a Dove tissue dispenser, shoes made from tennis balls, or a toasted bread hat with the Carhartt logo, you’ve probably seen the works of Nicole McLaughlin. Making unique clothes with everyday objects and reused streetwear, the Brooklyn stylist gives a new function to each of her playful pieces.
Over the past two years, McLaughlin has amassed hundreds of thousands of followers with designs ranging from the unexpected to the impractical, like a “shoeshi” sandal with a take-out sushi tray on the handle.
While straps with McLaughlin’s tool kit and an inflatable vest made from cereal wrappers encourage laughter, they also challenge us to rethink the items we own.
“We all have a lot of things,” McLaughlin said in a telephone interview, adding that people often have a limited view of how their objects can be used. “A jacket is a jacket and it cannot be a pair of shoes or anything else. And so I thought maybe I should try to break them, because the more opportunity you give the material, you’ll see how much can come out of it.”
Fashion has a big problem in the generation of waste, with 80% of all clothes ending up in landfills or incinerated. While brands bear much of the responsibility, consumers can help by buying less and wearing their clothes longer.
THE Upcycling – the act of turning old clothes into new – inspired thriving online communities with inspiring and instructive content on YouTube, Pinterest and TikTok – on TikTok alone, the hashtag has nearly 6 billion views. Wearers restyle old sweaters, teach spectators how to hand-embroider torn garments and transform modest garments, embracing the unique results of the makeovers as well as their eco-friendly benefits.
As for her practice, McLaughlin began her transformation projects in her spare time as a former graphic designer at Reebok, where she saw firsthand how many samples were being discarded. So he started taking some of the pieces home to disassemble and reassemble the designs, then posted the results to his social media accounts.
“When you take something apart and almost dissect it from the inside out, you can see how far it goes in these pieces,” she said. “And many times, if something is made in a factory, we don’t value it, especially when it comes to fast fashion, because it’s so cheap.”
His first viral post was of a comfortable but surreal sneaker made of open tennis balls that resembles the bulky shape of a Yeezy foam running shoe.
“He ‘ticked’ several boxes. It was comfortable, the colors were cool, it was wearable and durable,” she recalled. “And I thought, ‘I think I have something to do with this.'”
Intuitive Designs
From the first experiments, McLaughlin gained technical sewing skills from friends and family and was committed to her studio full-time. She doesn’t sell her designs (most of them she takes apart again to reuse the materials), but she has worked with Crocs and her former employer, Reebok, to produce recycled collections.
Some of her clothes were worn by celebrities, with model Kristen McMenamy wearing a coat made of Puma gloves on the cover of British Vogue in December, while Puerto Rican rapper Jhay Cortez wore his shoe vest in a music video last fall.
McLaughlin is paid by brands to recycle products for their social media. Her partners include Arc’teryx, Puma and Camelbak, and when they send their samples or excess inventory to work, she says creating new designs is an intuitive process.
“I put it on my body and try to sculpt something out of it,” she explained. “If it’s sports equipment, I put it on my foot and see if it creates some kind of shape, or I put it on my head to see if I can make a hat out of it.”
For independent projects, she looks for materials to transform, looking for items that have unique characteristics, mainly in terms of wear and tear.
“Actually, I prefer to find things that are badly damaged or well beaten because it’s a good starting point for me,” she said. “If there is a hole or a stain, I can […] incorporate in the piece”.
But she also likes to maximize the use of each item in one or more projects, so the more details – like hoods, pockets and zippers – the better. The big pockets feature prominently in her designs, which she says is likely a “d-you unconscious” for brands that remove them from women’s clothing to save money.
“I get really mad when I buy something and it doesn’t have pockets, or there are those fake pockets,” she commented. “Every woman needs a pocket to carry her things […] I’m putting pockets on everything now, including the bras.”
McLaughlin has become a person brands can turn to with overstocked products, and while she often directs them to fashion design programs that need materials, she says this year she will build a nonprofit organization for a more formal way to help the brands she works with.
“It’s been a really interesting experience to be able to work with brands that don’t usually recycle things,” she said. “It’s not really viable for them to take secondhand material and try to find a way to use it again.”
In her own workshops, which she organized with Cooper Hewitt at the Smithsonian Design Museum in New York, McLaughlin tasked students with building shoes with only one sole as a starting point, reusing something from their own closet, or digging through the trash – like the challenges of unconventional “Project Runway” materials, but with sustainability in mind.
She loves teaching others how to do this reuse because everyone will approach the same message differently, she said.
“There is space for everyone to participate (in the transformation) because we need people to do this. There are so many things that we need to try to figure out how to use them in a different way,” she said. “And each one’s submissions will be so different.”
For starters, she said, “you don’t have to be a sewing expert to be able to change things.” It can be as simple as cutting out an old T-shirt, she added.
“Start in the closet, go to the things you’ve kept for a long time and don’t fall apart for a reason,” she advised. “Try to find out what would make you want to use them again. What do you like about them? It’s the texture – like a wool, but it doesn’t fit anymore? Could you take her sleeves off and join them together to make a bag? And then you have a vest made of her too.”
While your early designs might not be as engrossing as McLaughlin’s moisturizing jacket made of Camelback shells, or as bizarre as a croissant bra, rethinking any old garment is a good start.
Reference: CNN Brasil
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