From jogging outfits to summer dresses, Lea Baecker has stitched together most of her wardrobe herself from inside her London flat, part of a burgeoning number of young amateur seamstresses.
Like many others in the growing horde of sew-it-yourself enthusiasts, she has grown increasingly disillusioned with the retail clothing industry, viewing it as too destructive.
“My main motivation was not having to buy ready-to-wear clothes anymore, because I didn’t want to support fast fashion,” 29-year-old Baecker said, referring to clothes made and sold cheaply to be thrown away after minimal use.
Photo: AFP
The doctoral student in neuroscience only started sewing in 2018, beginning with small bags before moving on to clothes.
Four years on, she estimates that about 80 percent of the clothes in her wardrobe are homemade, from pajamas to long fleece coats, as well as jeans made with denim scraps scalped from relatives. Baecker now buys new clothes “very rarely,” she said, wearing one of her self-made long, hand-sewn dresses.
The fashion and textile industry is the third most polluting sector globally after food and construction, accounting for up to 5 percent of greenhouse gas emissions, a report released by the World Economic Forum last year showed.
Low-cost fashion retailers are regularly criticized for their waste and pollution, as well as the pay conditions imposed on their workers.
Tara Viggo knows fast fashion only too well, having worked in the industry for 15 years as a pattern maker.
“I realized the scale that the fashion industry was working at and it was a bit terrifying,” she said.
In 2017, Viggo decided to start creating her own patterns — the blueprint drawings on paper before garments are made.
She started out small, selling only about one set of patterns per year, a far cry from the four a day that she would sometimes churn out in the ready-to-wear industry.
Viggo said that while independent operators like her are only tiny competitors to the big brands, they could still have a meaningful impact.
“The more of us that do [it], the better,” she said. “It’s like a trigger... People start to look at where their consumption” is, she said, adding that it also makes one aware of the true costs involved.
“Once you know how to sew your own clothes, you can’t fathom that a shirt should be £3 (US$4.09) anymore.”
Viggo’s “Zadie” jumpsuit is now a top seller on The Fold Line, an online platform that sells independently produced sewing patterns, according to its cofounder Rachel Walker.
Since its launch in 2015, the Web site has grown from about 20 designers to more than 150 today. Rosie Scott and Hannah Silvani, who run a London workshop selling fabrics from fashion designers’ unsold stock, have also seen the resurgence in sewing’s popularity, particularly among young people.
“The clients have changed,” Scott said. “More young people have shown interest in sewing — young people who are really interested in making their own clothes and making them sustainably.”
Women make up more than 90 percent of the clientele, she added.
Customers can choose from about 700 designer fabrics, sold from £8 a meter for cotton voile — a sheer, lightweight cotton fabric — to £110 for the same length of lace.
Orders soared during the COVID-19 pandemic and are still going strong despite the lifting of restrictions, Scott said.
The sector’s explosive growth would not have been possible without Instagram, where the sewing community has made a pastime once seen as unfashionable much more trendy.
The photograph-sharing platform “is really important,” Baecker said, allowing sewers to post images of their designs and engage with each other. This is what prompted her to join the social network, where she now regularly shares her latest works.
“I found each pattern has a specific hashtag that you can look up and then you can see a lot of different people wearing the same pattern and you can imagine how it can look on yourself,” she said.
For example, Viggo’s #Zadiejumpsuit — which comes in velvet or cotton, and with or without sleeves — has been tagged in almost 11,000 posts.
Meanwhile, the hashtag #handmadewardrobe features in more than 900,000 posts.
With Baecker sharing so many of her creations, she has also inspired friends to join the growing sewing revolution.
“That is my proudest achievement ... getting my friends into sewing as well,” she said.
HAVANA: Repeated blackouts have left residents of the Cuban capital concerned about food, water supply and the nation’s future, but so far, there have been few protests Maria Elena Cardenas, 76, lives in a municipal shelter on Amargura Street in Havana’s colonial old town. The building has an elegant past, but for the last few days Maria has been cooking with sticks she had found on the street. “You know, we Cubans manage the best we can,” she said. She lives in the shelter because her home collapsed, a regular occurrence in the poorest, oldest parts of the beautiful city. Cuba’s government has spent the last days attempting to get the island’s national grid functioning after repeated island-wide blackouts. Without power, sleep becomes difficult in the heat, food
U-TURN? Trami was moving northwest toward Vietnam yesterday, but high-pressure winds and other factors could force it to turn back toward the Philippines Tropical Storm Trami blew away from the northwestern Philippines yesterday, leaving at least 65 people dead in landslides and extensive flooding that forced authorities to scramble for more rescue boats to save thousands of terrified people, who were trapped, some on their roofs. However, the onslaught might not be over: State forecasters raised the rare possibility that the storm — the 11th and one of the deadliest to hit the Philippines this year — could make a U-turn next week as it is pushed back by high-pressure winds in the South China Sea. A Philippine provincial police chief yesterday said that 33
The space rock that slammed into Earth 66 million years ago at the end of the Cretaceous Period caused a global calamity that doomed the dinosaurs and many other life forms, but that was far from the largest meteorite to strike our planet. One up to 200 times bigger landed 3.26 billion years ago, triggering worldwide destruction at an even greater scale, but as new research shows, that disaster actually might have been beneficial for the early evolution of life by serving as “a giant fertilizer bomb” for the bacteria and other single-celled organisms called archaea that held dominion at the
PROPAGANDA: The leaflets attacked the South Korean president and first lady with phrases such as: ‘It’s fortunate that President Yoon and his wife have no children’ North Korean propaganda leaflets apparently carried by balloons were found scattered on the streets of the South Korean capital, Seoul, yesterday, including some making personal attacks on the country’s president and first lady. The leaflets attacking South Korean President Yoon Suk-yeol and first lady Kim Keon-hee found in the capital appear to be the first instance of the North Korean government directly sending anti-South propaganda material across the border. They included graphic messages accusing the Yoon government of failures that had left his people living in despair, and describing the first couple as immoral and mentally unstable. The leaflets included photographs of the