Stuart Vevers, the Coach’s creative director, stood next to mustard-colored leather scraps scattered on a table at Coach’s New York headquarters. They were the derivative of the production line for the company’s luxury bags.
“Waste scraps like these would normally end up on a factory floor before being incinerated or in a landfill,” Vevers said, in a video interview.
Yet as the fashion industry comes under scrutiny for its wasteful practices, a Coach team has spent two years trying to come up with ways to embrace more circular business models, a concept that emphasizes minimizing the use of resources and make products easier to recycle and reuse.
Last month, the company introduced Coachtopia, a line offering nearly 100 products including handbags, accessories, ready-to-wear, and footwear made primarily from scrap leather brought in from India and Vietnam or with partially recycled materials, such as cotton, resin or polyester.
Prices range from $75 for a T-shirt to $495 for the most expensive bag.
With designs like fluffy clouds and flowers, Coachtopia’s ’70s fashion-infused aesthetic is designed to fill people with hope, rather than anxiety for the future.
The cornerstones are Ergo and Wavy Dinky, shoulder bags available in a variety of colors and handcrafted designs, like a checkerboard pattern, with each square made from dozens of woven leather scraps just like the ones scattered in the workshop.
“The idea behind Coachtopia is not just to create beautiful new items from waste, but also to close the loop by minimizing waste in the first place,” Vevers said. The challenge is finding a circular system that actually works, he added.
Initially, this will mean using scrap or recycled materials from Coach factories.. Over time, the materials will also come out of older Coachtopia products, which customers can return to Coach for credit and which are being designed to be more easily reused.
Coachtopia’s foundations come from (Re)Loved, a program started by the company in 2021 that offers remanufactured bags and allows customers to trade in older designs.
Condensed collections or “sustainable” lines are common in fashion, and many critics see them as marketing opportunities with minimal impact.
Coach himself has come under scrutiny for his sustainability strategies after a viral TikTok video in 2021 alleged that he was destroying unsold bags, a widespread practice in the industry.
Jules Lennon, fashion initiative leader at the Ellen MacArthur Foundation, a charity focused on the circular economy, said Coachtopia was a good start.
“We need to completely transform the traditional organizational silos in the fashion industry so that companies can generate revenue without making new clothes,” he declared.
Elizabeth Paton
THE NEW YORK TIMES
BBC-NEWS-SRC: http://www.nytsyn.com/subscribed/stories/6693977, IMPORTING DATE: 2023-05-02 22:50:09
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