We approach industry much like a ‘boro’ artist approaches textiles. With care for value that could be lost, adding only what’s needed, nothing more. It saves money, communities and our environment, and it lets us make progress faster.
Before industrialisation, textiles were cherished possessions that no one could afford to waste. In rural Japan, the necessity of mending developed into an art unto itself. ’Boro’ are textiles patched together from torn clothes and discarded scraps using ’sashiko’ stitching techniques that result in unique pieces of functional textile art.
Boro has a lot in common with how we approach scaling up our innovative textile recycling technology.
We take care of value that could be lost in order to make progress faster, with less impact.
Our recycling process is designed for existing machines and existing know-how to deliver a product into existing value chains. We establish ourselves at ’brownfield’ sites where we can reuse buildings, infrastructure, equipment, utilities and, most importantly, knowledge.
At Renewcell 1, our first industrial scale plant, we’ve employed about a hundred people that used to run a massive paper production line at the same exact site. Many of them had lost their jobs when that paper plant was shuttered recently.
Putting these highly skilled operators and engineers back to work at a site that they know better than anyone lets us move faster and more efficiently towards our goal of making fashion circular.
Takao Momiyama was born in Sano, Tochigi in Japan in 1951. He is an artist and budo trainer that has been living and working in Sweden since 1979. We take inspiration from his art and try to apply key aspects of its philosophy to our effort to make fashion circular at scale.
“I see power in the slow process of sashiko technique. It is impossible to plan from the beginning how something will take shape, instead there is value in allowing thoughts and ideas influence what happens to both the material and the compositions throughout the process. With surfaces of dense stitches in patterns, the worn fabric surface is preserved and something new is built up, an artistic process where “function” also brings with it an aesthetic expression. The old cloth surfaces bear traces of time and life, they tell stories that could not be expressed in words.
It is as if I no longer think about whether what I am embroidering on is an everyday object or a picture, if it is “function” or if it is “art”. When I mend my old Japanese training pants with sashiko, I choose the color of the thread, the choice of fabrics that can strengthen, I add varying formations of dense and sparse stitches. Suddenly, my mended trousers become an artistic expression.”