Inside Margaret Burton: Shifting mindsets and the importance of educating people on how clothes are made
Continuing on my circular fashion series, I’m taking a look at how an independent designer can drive change in the industry. In addition to building a system for remanufacturing of garments at larger companies like Eileen Fisher, education and grassroots efforts are an essential part of shifting the consumer mindset on clothing and creating a circular economy. There is only so much an apparel brand can do if consumers are unaware of the social cost of the fast fashion they are demanding. How do we educate people on the value of handmade goods?
I caught up with Margaret Burton, a Pratt graduate who created a collection of deconstructed clothing made into new garments. Her main goal of the collection was to show the human labor that goes into making the clothing we wear. Her passion for shifting the industry has led her to Charlotte, North Carolina, where she teaches inner city and underprivileged kids how to sew.
Read about her journey – which has taken her from wasteful high-end fashion brands in NYC to the textile recycling industry in India – and how she hopes to change the industry in the interview below.
How did you get involved in sustainable fashion?
It wasn’t until the end of my sophomore year at Pratt when I did an internship over the summer that I became interested in sustainability. It was a big company with a lot of money, but the people at the head of the company didn’t have any design experience or knowledge of the field. They wasted a lot of money on samples and back and forth between factories in China. My job was to go in the back and cut all of the samples.
In addition to the samples, they had a lot of clothes that were made and had never been sold. I had to go in the back and cut everything in half. It was a high-end company so they had a lot of nice details. I was just imagining a woman overseas that was making all this stuff, and I’m just cutting all her beautiful work, it horrified me. After that experience, I started looking into what was going on. I watched documentaries and read Overdressed and To Die For. I also had a good teacher that talked to us about sustainable fashion.
There was also a video I watched that was on the shoddy industry in India, where unwanted western clothes are sent to. They cut off tags and they turn garments into reusable thread. I had an opportunity to go and visit a shoddy factory in India like the one from the video. I saw the waste produced first hand in NYC and then see it come full circle in India where the garments were being recycled.
How do you incorporate sustainability into your own work?
My senior year is when I really approached how I could solve this problem with my own work. How can I communicate and make people understand what’s going on? My approach is that I take clothes that have already been made and then I seam rip it and get it into a flat form. My thought process behind that is to have people see how many pieces are inside their garments. Have them think about, how is this put together? How does this get sewn together? Looking at it in a different way than how they looked at it before. A lot of people think that machines are making clothes, that there are no humans behind it.
Do you think it’s truly possible to have a circular production model in the fashion industry?
I feel like that is the goal of what I’m trying to do. My ideal dream is to do that. Right now I’m just kind of creating whatever I want because I don’t have enough clientele. I’ve been doing some custom orders here and there. Ideally, one thing I’m working on now is a jacket from a woman who’s father passed away and she wants me to turn his jacket into a fashionable denim jacket for her to wear. I’ve done it for a couple people on a small scale, but, ideally, that is what I would love to do. Take things from your closet that you’re not using and make it into something that you might need.
How have you been active in educating consumers about the labor it takes to make clothing?
I moved to Charlotte, North Carolina to teach high school students how to sew. When I took on this opportunity, I thought it was great to be able to build a little army of people who can make their own clothes and are educated. Our parent’s generation all had home ec class, they understand what it takes to make a garment and how long it takes to make it. Unlike me growing up, I never thought about who made my clothes and how my clothes came together.
The children that I’m teaching are in poor communities. I talk to them about how these brands are feeding off of the mindset that “I need this to be popular” or “I need this to be cool”. It’s really crazy how fashion has an effect on these kids and how kids will literally start selling drugs so they can afford the next pair of Jordans.
How did you get started working with the at-risk youth?
I was in Los Angeles working for Jeremy Scott, and somebody from my high school messaged me. He was working for a non-profit in Charlotte that reaches out to the refugee and inner-city communities. They give free English classes, sewing classes, cooking classes, to adults. He was hired to reach out to the youth. As he was reaching out to them he was starting to see how much of an affect fashion had on the community.
They already had the sewing machines from when they teach women how to sew during the week. He thought, why not use those sewing machines to teach the youth to sew in the afternoons. He knew the basics of sewing but not how to pattern and construct a garment, so he asked me to come. I did that for a month, and it went really well. Eventually, they got a grant and then it became a program, and they asked me to come back.
How has it been to work with the kids? Has anything been surprising or challenging to explain this mind shift to them?
It has definitely been challenging to get them to believe me, or even get them to take action. I’ll have them watch The True Cost, and they’ll be so angry, but they still buy fast fashion. The stuff they buy their clothes off of nowadays is crazy. They have these apps on their phone where they can find t-shirts for five dollars and other really cheap stuff. They’re always looking at it.
I think it’s affecting their choices somewhat, they definitely think about it now, but I don’t think it’s changing their choice completely. I had a girl my class who kept buying fake Gucci and Givenchy bags and she finally stopped doing that. I kept telling her, you need to save this money and buy a car so that you can drive yourself to a job. The programs were twelve weeks at a time but now it’s changing, so I’ll be with students for a longer period of time. I think that will have a more lasting effect.
What do you think is necessary to have a more circular economy?
I feel like it’s both education and better technology for textile recycling. It really blows my mind, I don’t know how companies like H&M do it if they’re really recycling the clothing, then that’s more work, so the prices should go up. That’s the hardest part with my work, is educating people on what goes into making the garment. People see something of mine and ask, why is it so expensive? It’s hard to convince people that they should be paying more for their clothes.
Before the seventies, people wouldn’t have more than twelve pieces of clothing in their closet. They would have to save up money to buy a new pair of pants, it’s not like they could just go out and buy a new pair of pants. In my ideal world, I wish we could go back to that. But now that this fast-paced life has been introduced, I don’t know how to get people out of that cycle. I definitely think that education is a big part of it. Even with me sharing my work, the friends who have followed me along my journey are started to change the way that they shop.
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Visit Margaret’s website to view her work, https://www.margaret-burton.com/
Inside Eileen Fisher: Their innovative Tiny Factory as a model for the circular fashion industry
Over the next few weeks, I’m taking a look at circular fashion and how people are starting to shift their design thinking, and the consumer mindset to adapt to this new model. The next step in sustainable fashion is hacking circularity, taking the traditional “take, make, waste” model and closing the loop. How do we reverse the damage we’ve done and create garments out of discarded garments?
I talked with Carmen Gama, Designer of Eileen Fisher Renew, to hear about how they are stepping up as leaders in the industry to create a circular production model at their Tiny Factory. Carmen established RESEWN, a remanufacturing model so solve the company’s challenge of repurposing damaged inventory that they had been collecting since 2009.
The Tiny Factory, located on the Hudson in Irvington, New York, is pioneering the way for the industry to redefine its product lifecycle and production models. They’ve faced challenges along the way and are still developing ways to grow and scale their model to tackle all the inventory they have in stock but are finding innovative ways to overcome setbacks. Read more about Carmen’s work with the RESEWN program and the Tiny Factory in the interview below.
How did you first start the Eileen Fisher RESEWN program?
I started working with Eileen Fisher three years ago when I was a recently graduated student from Parsons. The CFDA partnered up with Eileen Fisher, along with two other students from Parsons, to figure out what to do with their damaged inventory they had been collecting from their take back program since 2009. We were trying to figure out how to make something profitable, beautiful and scalable. By repurposing just one garment at a time, changing a sleeve or fixing a button, we would not have been able to tackle the challenge the company was facing. We really focused in on developing systems and processes that were able to produce these garments.
At the end of the year we had a collection made of 500 units, and after Eileen saw our collection and our process she was really excited about our proposal to resolve this challenge. She asked us to continue, and I decided to stay and work on the project.
How did the Tiny Factory come into being?
While I was working on creating the systems for the RESEWN program, the manager who was guiding the project, Cynthia Power from Eileen Fisher, also had an idea of Eileen Fisher having their own factory here in Irvington. The factory didn’t start with the idea of making garments out of garments, but out of the idea of owning some of our Eileen Fisher production. So they opened the factory and at the same time, we were trying to scale our process. When it opened it was supposed to be 75% Eileen Fisher main collection and 25% Eileen Fisher RESEWN collections, and it started that way. Very quickly, Eileen decided to do only RESEWN because it was too expensive to do the main production in the facility.
What does the production process look like at the Tiny Factory?
Making garments out of garments requires different steps from regular production. First, you have to source the inventory that you need. Second, you have to deconstruct that garment. Third, you have to prep the materials on a table. You have to lay it all out to be ready for cutting. This is what we call our pre-production steps. It’s kind of like when designers place their fabric orders, or the colors of their yarn, you forget what happens on the other side of the world, people spinning and creating textiles. That is what those three steps are for us, we are prepping the garment to become raw material.
After those steps then it’s just regular production. We cut them and then we sew them, we have three factory sewers. They were hired initially with a very simple skill set, which was sewing basic pants, one of our viscose pants. But when they started doing our production, the skill set for making garments out of garments was a lot higher. We ended up having to train them because sometimes we had garments made from silk and other details. In the beginning, I was very much involved in every step from the sorting to the deconstructing, so it was not very economically sustainable. To solve this we cross-trained all of the sewers to not only to sit down at the sewing machine constructing the garments but also doing the other pre-production steps.
Has there ever been inventory that you’ve been stumped on what to do with? And how did you work around it?
Yeah, there’s a lot of them, but we have one, in particular, it’s a silk jersey. It’s a bread and butter fabric that we use every season. That fabric tends to stain in the same way, it’s this oily stain that is pretty consistent, but they’re everywhere in the garment. Sometimes you don’t even see it, but when you’re pressing them more stains come up. We actually did a production of them, it’s a beautiful shell. But as we were finishing production and we were steaming them to be ready to be packed to the store, stains were surfacing.
Now we’re working with one of our vendors that is doing fiber recycling with textiles to solve this problem. We told them to take the silk and experiment with it, that we would like to use it if they can shred it and turn it into a new textile. They were so excited, within a month they came back with a sample. Now those garments will be part of a new textile that we will be using for Spring 2019.
Do you work with the design team from the Eileen Fisher main line to talk about what fabrics are used designs are done in the main line?
I’m part of the circular by design team at Eileen Fisher, which is a team of people trying to make sense of circularity, how it works and what does it look like for Eileen Fisher. We have been thinking a lot about design for takeback. Eileen has essentially been doing this since day one since her designs have been so simple, so they actually provide a lot of material to work with.
Are you working with other brands to share what you’ve learned?
We opened our doors and share the story with anyone who is interested. It’s not only up to us to change this industry it’s up to everybody else. We were talking about sustainability, and now we’re talking about circularity and I think transparency is the next big thing that people are going to jump on board for. If these companies really want to see change in this industry, companies will have to be transparent in order to see change and we have to share how we’re doing it. We’re working on some collaborations with designers and companies like H&M have come to tour the facility. We open our doors to anybody. It doesn’t have to be the same model for everybody, but it’s about taking what we’re doing and applying it to your own needs.
How do you see this programming growing? What do you see for the future of the Tiny Factory?
Right now because of manpower there is a limit. I feel like our processes are there. We have processes that can replicate what we’re doing by the hundreds. The number of people who are working here is just not enough to do that. So far, every store would love to have our product. And I’d love to have more online, our product actually sells well online, our story is told better there.
My ideal shoot for the moon goal for the factory is that we can produce as fast as we are getting garments in. We will need a lot more people. I think our designs are there. Right now we’re at a bottleneck, we’re really drowning in garments. I would like to produce as fast as clothing is coming in.
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Click here to shop Eileen Fisher RESEWN products