By Lea Stewart / Source: Ecouterre

Garment is a Los Angeles–based brand that wants to create clothes in new, unexpected ways. Founded by four creatives who plied their craft at companies such as American Apparel, Everlane, and Halston, Garment seeks to “break the cycle of compulsive overproduction” by reclaiming clothing castoffs and bringing them back to life using bespoke tailoring methods, natural dyes, and found embellishments. Its goal, it told Ecouterre, is to bring an “anti-fashion point of view to the emerging world of progressive retail” while “breaking through the boundaries of copy-and-paste culture.”

REDUCE, REUSE, RECYCLE

By cutting out the middleman and offering direct-to-consumer pricing through its e-commerce shop, Garment said it hopes to “democratize avant-garde style.”

Its founding quartet—consisting of a strategist, a clothing designer, a retailer and an art director—said Garment was created to “incite new processes of making clothes” while countering the fashion industry’s fondness for excess and pollution.

The last thing Garment wants to do, the firm said, is create more of the same.

Rather than “incessantly taking without giving back,” Garment hunts thrift-store racks and factory reject piles for previously worn or unwanted pieces.

Then it’s makeover time. Its designers imbue their haul with the company’s signature style, whether by mixing and matching elements (collars, pockets, sleeves) from disparate items, adding asymmetric seams, or overdyeing whole garments to obtain unique, purposefully uneven effects.

Cookie-cutter mass production this isn’t. Unlike typical brands that only have singular ways of realizing a vision, Garment’s process is one of discovery and experimentation.

It even has its own version of the three Rs: reclaim, rework, reissue.

Read more @ Ecouterre