How surplus designer fabrics became the height of fashion

Every year, catwalks around the world come alive with new styles, their models adorned in the latest prints and textures.
When the season moves on, the remnants of Burberry wool, Hermès silks and floral Liberty prints are left behind. By one estimate, uncut fabric worth more than $280 billion languishes in storage and most of it, if it is not used, will be burnt or sent to landfill.
Now a new wave of fabric retailers and clothing brands are breathing life back into forgotten and surplus fabrics, and giving home sewers the chance to create their own designer wardrobes.
“Deadstock” — surplus fabric — is a fact of life for designers, according to Patrick Grant, a tailor and a judge on The Great British Sewing Bee. He founded the Community Clothing brand to sell ethically-produced clothing while minimising fabric waste. The business uses deadstock fabrics, as well as working to eliminate deadstock in its own production lines.
“You have to make fabric in multiples, usually of about 60 metres,” he explained. “But it is almost never the case that what you need to make fits perfectly as a multiple into 60.
“So there’s always quantities of fabrics that are left over — often really beautiful fabrics — because it’s impossible to make the number of garments that you’re selling equal the amount of fabric that you have to buy.”
The result is rolls of small quantities of fabric, languishing in storage or being sent to landfill. Overproduction by mills and imperfections in finished cloth can result in even more deadstock, Grant said.
But thanks to enterprising shops that are scooping up designer remnants and passing them on to their customers, home sewers can stitch themselves garments from designer fabrics.
Hannah Silvani, one of the founders of the New Craft House in Hackney, east London, sell deadstock bought from some of London’s most luxurious brands in an effort to reduce waste.
“When we decided to start selling fabric, we knew we didn’t want to buy new product,” she said. “A designer friend told us that they had loads of fabric and they didn’t know what to do with it. And so we said great, we’ll buy it all. That was our first stock.”
Today, New Craft House partners with more than 60 top designers, rescuing leftover fabrics from fashion lines that sell for hundreds or thousands of pounds per item. When the team polled their designers about what would happen to the fabric otherwise, they found that the fabrics would be incinerated, pulped, sent to landfill or simply left languishing indefinitely in warehouses.
“We’re reducing usable textile waste,” Silvani said. “What we are buying is from the studios in London that they have used for samples, or from the factories at the end of the season. We are really transparent about where it comes from.”
The team is also creating a tool to help buyers see how much water and carbon they save by buying deadstock, compared with buying new fabric. A single wool coat made from leftover wool saves 50kg of CO₂ and 9,000 litres of water.
New Craft House does not advertise which designer originally used any specific fabric, but among the brands whose leftovers they rescue are Emilia Wickstead, Palmer Harding and Three Graces, as well as fabric used by the London department store Liberty in its bespoke clothing ranges.
A new dress from Emilia Wickstead can cost up to £1,900. New Craft House fabrics range from £2 to £160 per metre for luxuriously embroidered and jewelled dress fabrics.
Other deadstock retailers advertise their fabrics’ origins. Beglarian, a big retailer in France, sends its buyers to Italian and French mills and designers and its website offers Moschino, Burberry and Roberto Cavalli fabrics. Sewers dreaming of a Burberry coat can buy thick wool and silk linings for as little as £15 per metre, meaning that a whole coat can be made for under £70. A new Burberry coat sells for thousands of pounds.
Businesses such as Community Clothing are also helping to reduce waste, using deadstock wherever they can. Grant frequently models items made from rescued cloth, and its suppliers offer surplus or imperfect cloth.
Recently, the company received a large quantity of wool that had been made for the Royal Navy but the dye had come out the wrong shade of blue. “If two of our customers turn up on the same day and that peacoat is not the exact matching navy, the world will not stop turning,” Grant said.
Fashion students can also benefit from deadstock, he said. “Groups like the British Fashion Council periodically go round and there’s a call out: let’s have all your deadstock. There’s an amnesty. Colleges are big beneficiaries of that.”
For Tilly Walnes, a sewing pattern designer and former Sewing Bee contestant, homemade clothes will always be superior to designer and deadstock fabrics add to the sustainable and luxury options.
“Sewing clothes from scratch isn’t cheap,” she said. “But it can still cost less than buying designer ready-to-wear, depending on the designer. And I think the real value is in the process of making something by hand. You’re a lot more likely to treasure that clothing afterwards, because you’ve seen how much work goes into it.”
Through her company, Tilly and the Buttons, Walnes teaches sewing and introduces people to the pleasure of making clothes. “What we see is that once people have made something themselves, they generally tend to engage a lot less in fast fashion,” she said. “They can’t believe how cheap it is and it doesn’t feel right, paying so little for something when you’ve seen the time going into it.”