There was a time when upcycling meant sitting on your bedroom floor surrounded by scissors, unpicking seams from an old jacket you found in your grandad’s loft. Or piecing together a fit from charity shop curtains and your mate’s ripped tee. It was personal, punk, and beautifully chaotic. It wasn’t polished. It wasn’t scalable. And that was kind of the point. One of one unique pieces for the wearer.
Fast forward to now, and upcycling is having a glow-up. Brands are running “upcycled collections,” factories are offering “zero-waste production runs,” and even fast fashion labels are low-key trying to sanitise it into something profitable. On paper, that sounds like a win; less waste, more circularity, right? But here’s the question: if an upcycled garment is made on a factory line, with batch numbers and scalability targets, is it still upcycling? Or is it just repackaged production?
Because the thing that made upcycling powerful wasn’t just the fabric, it was the mindset. It was slow, intentional, emotional even. It asked you to notice waste, to rethink what was valuable, to remix what already existed. It was anti-mass. Anti-speed. Anti the whole idea of industrialised fashion. And now we’re watching it become just another service you can plug into your supply chain like a returns portal. I myself am conflicted. Running Gbadebo, I want nothing more than to scale but I constantly am battling with it's ethics and unless the whole chain is as sustainable as possible then there's no way forward.
Look, I’m not here to gatekeep. I know scaling upcycling is definitely necessary if we want to build a circular fashion system that goes beyond niche capsule collections. And I’ve seen some incredible examples, upcycling hubs that use post-consumer waste in production runs, small factories partnering with designers to create 1-of-1s from deadstock, localised systems where waste is reintroduced as raw material. That’s cool. That’s necessary.
But there’s a difference between scaling a philosophy and watering it down.
When brands start using upcycling as a buzzword to greenwash surplus stock or when they mass-produce “reworked” designs using brand new surplus fabric that was never truly waste in the first place, it stops being radical and starts being marketing. And that’s where it gets sticky.
Because let’s be real, there’s a lot of pretending going on. Some of these “upcycled” collections are being designed like any other line, just using leftover fabric from the warehouse. The aesthetic is the same. The price point is the same. The storytelling just got a little more ethical. But no one’s asking what was actually saved. Was it truly post-consumer waste? Or just off-cuts that never left the supplier? Using old scraps or waste is always a good thing but depending on the design also, if that product doesn't sell... Can it be remade again? Or if your surplus stock is made of fabric that usually wouldn't last 2 wears, what's the use in remaking it into something else that also won't last?
And then there’s the craft element. When upcycling becomes automated, we lose the imperfections that made it beautiful. The hand-sewn patch, the off-kilter pocket, the visible repair. Factory-line upcycling might help with scale, but does it still hold the emotional value of something reworked by hand? This however, is just pedantic. I feel like a lot of people may not care about the imperfections and instead want something perfectly made.
Maybe the answer is both. Maybe upcycling can exist in different forms, intimate and industrial, craft-based and scalable. But we need to be honest about what we’re calling it. Not everything made from leftover fabric is upcycled. And not every system that reduces waste is radical.
As more creatives, brands, and factories start engaging with upcycling, the responsibility is on us to keep its spirit alive. To make sure it doesn’t become another empty label slapped on to sell to conscious consumers. Upcycling started as resistance. If we’re going to scale it, let’s not forget what it was resisting.