Upcycling, also known as creative reuse, is the process of transforming by-products, waste materials, useless, or unwanted products into new materials or products of better quality or for better environmental value.
The biggest issue with garment upcycling is that when you make a garment from other garments, the new pieces have to be smaller than the original pieces. As kids are small, so an adult dress can make at least 1 1/2 children’s dresses.
While major players like H&M and C&A create foundations through which to fund new innovations in the field of textile recycling, most of these innovations are still a long way off from being commercially viable at scale.
Upcycling creates more employment because upcycled clothing is a lot more labor-intensive than clothing cut from yardage. This is also the reason it’s not widely adapted. Clothing has become cheaper as brands find people willing to work for less money.
When making clothes from old clothes, each pattern piece is cut out one by one.When making clothes from running yardage, the cutter can stack dozens of layers of fabric and run a saw (or laser, oftentimes) through the fabric, cutting dozens of pieces at once.
This is fine when you just want to reduce the total amount of textiles winding up in landfill.