The fashion and luxury industry has failed, Kresse Wesling, co-founder and director of sustainable luxury brand Elvis & Kresse, says. “It is supposed to be creative, but its pace, processes and materials lead us down this path of destruction,” she says – noting that the sector had developed into the second most polluting industry in the world.
Her answer? Prove that creativity can be wonderful, solve waste problems and still create beautiful things that people want to buy. “I set out to solve the landfill problem of London’s damaged, decommissioned fire hoses,” she says, outlining her company’s story and its commitment to finding sustainable solutions.
Using the principle of “rescue, transform, donate”, she created luxury gifts from the hoses – such as the belt in the picture above – and donated 50 per cent of profits to The Fire Fighters Charity. Next, she turned to the 800,000 tonnes of virgin tanned leather thrown away each year. The company designed modular cuts that could be reused as rugs, chairs or luggage, while creating a bare minimum of material wastage.
A partnership with Burberry to transform its leather waste into goods delivered profits that now fund three scholarships to train women as solar engineers at India’s Barefoot College – an initiative that creates economic empowerment for the rural poor.
“If we want to have a circular economy which is the moonshot for the material world, we have to get away from this take, make and waste system,” she says. “We have to get involved in perpetual recycling – everything has to be in use at all times.”
Since 2018, Wesling explained, the company has been building on its “rescue, transform, donate” platform to attain a more ambitious target – to make all the company’s business decisions based on whether or not they are going to make the world better for other people’s grandchildren.
Local, distributed and renewably powered manufacturing are the key, she insisted. “It’s like alchemy – a tonne of leather waste will either cost you £410 if you are content to have it put in the ground, or will create £100,000 worth of value and lots of jobs.” Elvis & Kresse’s current challenge is an open-source solar-powered forge costing less than $500 that can recycle some of the 56 million aluminium cans thrown away in the UK every year.
This article was originally published by WIRED UK
