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We have been getting rid of clothes throughout our lives without even stopping to think about how much work, how much water, how much energy, how much oxygen, has been invested to create that piece. Every time we get rid of a piece of clothing, Jean, For example, we throw 10,000 litres of water into the rubbish bin. When we throw away that cotton T-shirt because it is too small, too old or because we no longer like it, we render the greenhouse gases, 300 times more powerful than carbon dioxide, produced by the cotton crops that became that T-shirt useless.
The Venezuelan designer Alejandro Crockerwho has made Colombia his new home, decided that the chain that always ended in the same place, the garbage dumps, had to be reversed. He was convinced that the cycles of clothing and fabrics were longer and more enduring than people could even suspect. Why buy rolls of fabric to create fashion collections, if fabrics and materials were the only thing in the world? What happens when what society sees as useless or garbage is, in fact, the input for something new and great? How many stories can fit into a garment, the fabric of a jacket, a wedding dress?
With these questions in mind, 20 years ago, Alejandro Crocker began collecting pieces, saving scraps, unstitching old coats, playing with joining the pockets of hundreds of jeans that were donated to him and created, more than a atelier fashion, an experimental workshop to give new life to what he collected. His work was early for his time. In 2004, little or nothing was said about the need to stop the relentless production of clothing in the world and then it was the art world, more than boutiques and buyers, that first understood his work. After all, what he had studied was art history.
However, the designer was obsessed with the power of clothing, with what that second skin confers on people, and so he insisted on taking his creations out of galleries in Miami and New York. He decided to challenge a system that, every time he offered a garment of his own, asked him where the fabrics of the dresses he made came from, if the owner had divorced or was still alive. This strange tendency to confer the humanity of the owners to the clothes that had belonged to them, played against him for a long time, until he decided to champion the path of remanufacturing and to educate and revolutionize each of his creations.
“If I revealed my story to the fashion world, they would close the door on me. Even though I explained to them that the pieces went through a deep washing and sanitizing process, collectors even asked me not to let it be known that what they were buying was made with shower curtain fabrics or threads from old Indian saris. But when my mother passed away, and I inherited an impressive closet – she had been a collector of iconic fashion garments – I realized that there was nothing to hide in the face of the path I had chosen. That in every material, in every press there was a mystique, a capacity to endure and resist that had to be honored and recognized. Then I knew that I had to raise my voice and overcome my fear,” explains Alejandro Crocker, who with his collection Land of nomads, made from collected materials and defective fabrics, opened the catwalks of Colombiamoda 2024 on Tuesday.
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The designer’s creative drive, far from obeying the short periods of trends that fashion generates, seemed to be based on a pillar that has been growing in urgency and relevance, to the point of being today one of the great demands that the planet makes to fashion: that it stops generating so much and becomes responsible for its waste. That seems to be the only true trend that his designs can respond to: that of trying to have as little impact as possible. “I don’t know what it’s like to work with rolls of fabric. When potential large buyers come to me and tell me that they love my work but that they want everything in ecru, I tell them that they haven’t understood anything about my work. I can’t know what materials are going to arrive at the workshop. It is from that diversity, from that color, from those laces that an underwear factory donates to me, that I begin to create,” explains the designer, who recognizes that the great challenge of remanufacturing is creativity, making something beautiful, desirable, usable with materials that already exist, “because if we make something useless, what we are doing is accentuating the problem.”
Since he formally created his eponymous brand in Colombia six years ago, the designer has managed to connect his passion with different social sectors. Of course, his workshop created close ties with recyclers in the city of Bogotá, who know that they can always sell the clothes or fabrics they have found there. He has also worked closely with trans women who work in high-tolerance areas, training their eyes to see in the pieces that are discarded, or thrown away, inputs so that they can create new things and tell their stories.
“This workshop has zero waste. The material that arrives is denatured and classified: zippers to one side, cuffs to another, collars, sleeves, buttons, they go to different spaces in the workshop and everything is given life. We use lycra and cotton, which are materials that tend to not age well, to make the bags for our garments and what is left and not used in the designs is the material I use in my workshops with different communities to teach them creative thinking using society’s waste,” she explains.
Alejandro Crocker has managed to make his brand sustainable, and when some of his investors are concerned, he always makes them see that youth culture is increasingly closer to these practices and that the waste is and will be so much that we will increasingly be forced to see his model as the only possible one. And if you want to take the brand to other places, you can always work with the collection of textile waste from those places. However, that dream has a previous step: “We have to change the regulations,” the designer says forcefully. “If we want this circularity, which everyone talks about and few understand, to become a reality, we will have to eliminate some legal requirements, which, for example, require us to have a designation of origin for the materials we work with. If we want to reuse and remanufacture more, we will have to change many laws that fashion has been measured against,” concludes the designer, who by being on the catwalks of Colombiamoda gives a boost of hope to all those who are creating beauty with what already exists.
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