In the endless stream of garments that are sold, bought, delivered and desired in our society of excessively fast consumption, a large part belongs to major sportswear brands. Nike swoosh and Adidas stripes are embedded in the day-to-day landscape of our cities, pop up online and comfortably rest on our bodies. Sportswear seems to be the compromise even the devotees of conscious consumption are sometimes willing to make — a status quo of globalisation. But not everyone working in fashion is complicit. In fact, there’s a new wave of designers who are keen to use existing sportswear garments as a raw material for creativity, to revive traditional crafts and promote sustainability.
For everyone following the ongoing merge of high fashion and sportswear, Virgil Abloh’s 2019 Off-White collection gave a lot to talk about. Abloh described his creation as “Nike Couture” in bold inverted commas — a term which sounds like an oxymoron, a paradoxical combination of couture gowns as a symbol of elitist old-era fashion and Nike as something fast and mass-produced. One of the key items of the collection was a top littered with multiple Nike ticks. Tight and armour-like, the top was assembled from common Nike sports socks and immediately drew comparisons with the sock sweater designed by Martin Margiela in 1991. Abloh’s hommage manifested the mainstream shift in approach to streetwear: from workout clothes and athleisure to a creative resource for bootleg fashion hacking.
Virgil Abloh surely has a superior intuition for cultural shifts, but he is certainly not the first one to deconstruct and rework sportswear. Off-White garments evoke not only Martin Margiela, but also the work of Alexandra Hackett aka Miniswoosh. The London-based designer is a go-to when it comes to artful Nike manipulations: she has created custom pieces for Kendrick Lamar, Stormzy, Young Thug and Frank Ocean, and has recently expanded her work into producing full-scale menswear collections as Studio ALCH.
Hackett has been interested in sportswear design since her late teens, and focused on it throughout her studies in Australia, combined with 6-years of experience working in a trainer store. “I’ve always believed functionality should be an inherent factor in all stages of apparel design, hence my affinity towards products that are designed purely for sport. I’m similarly fascinated by branding and the ability of a logo to transcend socio-economic barriers and, in the case of sportswear, evoke a sense of movement,” she says.
Hackett’s witty swoosh manipulations make for eye-catching statement pieces, but her practice also raises crucial questions about sustainability. Most of the pieces are crafted from Nike garments by hand in her studio, and some are outsourced to local or EU factories. “In my practice, we’re specifically focused on exploring methods that can extend the life-span of pre-existing products. We often work with found or second-hand items, as well as products that may not necessarily be selling too well. We achieve this through the process of deconstruction and reconstruction — a lengthy, but rewarding process,” she explains.
Initially, Hackett worked exclusively with 1 of 1, not for sale pieces, and she still enjoys creating garments by hand in her studio. New York-based Japanese designer Shin Murayama has a similar dedication to working by hand (in a recent interview for i-D he admitted that sewing is the only thing he’s been doing since he was 18). Murayama has worked with a wide variety of existing materials to craft his masks, hats and jackets — including cowboy boots and vintage denim. He previously collaborated with New York brand Alyx and recently launched a full-scale collaboration with Stüssy.
Footwear artist Helen Kirkum has a similar approach in using handwork and craftsmanship skills for reconstructing existing products — but her domain is trainers. Kirkum trained as a footwear designer and creates unique hybrid shoes put together from elements of different pairs — they could be treated as art pieces but are also comfy to wear. “The way I build the trainers is like a collage, so my process really crosses so many pre-existing boundaries. It’s a kind of luxury hacking,” she explains. “Trainers that we experience as consumers can become so far removed from the making process that they seem impossible to fix when they are broken, unlike how you can with traditional footwear. With my work I am addressing our ideas of newness — how do we take something that’s discarded because it’s deemed useless and create something incredibly valuable with it? I hope that within my work I am challenging consumers to think again about the obsolete nature of their products,” muses Kirkum.
New York-label based Jahnkoy founded by Maria Kazakova also addresses the obsolete nature of sportswear and consequent environmental issues. Her LVMH Prize shortlisted collection from 2017, Displaced, drew on the way the donations of Western clothes to the African continent bring destruction to artisanal crafts. Supported by Puma, Kazakova meticulously covers tracksuits and trainers with beading and embroidery in her Brooklyn studio — turning them into what looks like cosmopolitan shaman attire. The designer also runs workshops in Brooklyn educating people about the history and political potential of crafts — although spending hours on beading could perhaps teach people about the labour going into clothes even more than words.
Nowadays, there’s a lot of talk about the shift in our mentality — how our communication is instant and attention span short — but we rarely think about how it impacts the material culture we’re surrounded in. “Everything we experience now is instant, we are used to interacting with technologies and products, but we have little idea how trainers and clothes are made, but the aesthetic and modernity of them is appealing,” Helen Kirkum sums up. The trainers and sportswear garments that these designers choose to deconstruct and recreate is endlessly relatable — we’ve all bought and worn them. Seeing them suddenly transformed and given another mode of existence is powerful — it could give us a different perspective on not only what we buy and why, but who we are in this endless circle of consumption.