Pictures: Rikesh Chauhan
Bespoke tailoring houses, accessories and cloth merchants from Savile Row and surrounding streets collaborated with Eco-Luxe to create an innovative luxury cloth made from textile waste. The new grey herringbone luxury cloth and the garments made from it were revealed at Holland & Sherry (31 Savile Row) and at Campaign for Wool pop up on yesterday in celebration of Wool Month in October.
The tailoring houses on Savile Row have always strived towards sustainable methods in their craft, with recycling, repurposing and amending as some of their core values. Eco-Luxe takes these efforts a step further by collaborating with Savile Row companies on producing bespoke garments, accessories and textiles from recycled wool cloth made entirely of wool off-cuts. Bespoke tailoring houses, accessories and cloth merchants from Savile Row and surrounding streets that have taken part in this ambitious and important project include Anderson & Sheppard, Gieves & Hawkes, Henry Poole & Co, Richard Anderson, Dege & Skinner, Kathryn Sargent, Holland & Sherry, Arthur Sleep and Pickett London.
Spending months collecting the tailors excess fabric cuttings, Eco-Luxe founder Su Thomas collated over 200 kg of textile waste to ‘kick start’ the bedding-in of the first ‘fibre opening’ machine in the UK at iinouiio. It was then sent to iinouiio Ltd to convert the waste pieces of cloth into a yarn, before being woven into cloth at Woven in The Bone, a micro mill in Scotland. The project has so far resulted in 36 metres of grey herringbone luxury cloth, the first of its kind used in Savile Row tailoring. It’s truly a step forward to a future with zero-waste tailoring and highlights the tailor’s recognition and importance of reducing textile waste that goes to landfill.