Sage Hill students host ‘upcycled’ fashion show, a look at styles through the decades
When it comes to sustainable fashion, the students in Sage Hill School’s Reimagined Fashion Upcycling Club have a real passion for it.
So much so that the club held its second annual fashion show — “Deja Vu Through the Decades” — to a warm crowd of community members and fans at the school’s Black Box theater on Friday. About 60 models were gathered from the school’s campus to wear the 80 pieces of “upcycled” clothing fabricated by club members throughout the school year.
All pieces were made to be sold at the Melrose Trading Post in Los Angeles with proceeds to go to nonprofit Remake, an advocacy group for fair pay and climate justice in the fashion industry.
Club co-presidents Anna Yang and Sofia Jellen said the show’s theme takes from the concept of “deja vu” in that the featured clothing items clothes were attire many community members may have already seen, but given new life and flair pulled through core aesthetics of every decade from the 1960s until the early 2000s.
Yang said she started the club in 2022 after finishing a summer course at the Parsons School of Design in New York. She said she learned about the concept of “upcycling” there — which, in her case, involved taking old clothes and embellishing it to create a new piece to avoid buying into fast fashion.
“We had just had the club fair and I was thinking, ‘Well, why don’t I try to upcycle something?’ I took one of my old shirts that I didn’t wear and added gemstones and lace at the bottom and went, ‘Oh my God, this works,’” she said. “You can be a beginner like me and have access to all of these and create all of these new things from old clothing. [We] ran with that concept and started ‘Reimagined.’”
Jellen joined on as a vice president in its first year but is now a co-president alongside Yang, who will be graduating this spring.
The club, Jellen said, is about focusing on sustainability and creating a circular economy between thrifting and upcycling to decrease the amount of textile waste produced by the fashion industry. She said the group hosts about three workshops a week and that all the pieces for the fashion show Friday were made from clothes that were donated in a community clothes drive that they ran last year. Jellen estimates about 650 gallons of clothes were put in their hands.
“It looked like a landfill,” she joked.
The pieces shown Friday were made by students with varying degrees of skill. Some were decorated through fabric paint or spray paint while others might have taken up needle and thread to sew on new additions. Yang said the focus of the club was not just about designing and giving old clothes new life but “about imagination, and we’re reimagining ... what is the future of the fashion industry and future for all of us.”
“It’s about trying to save our planet and show people that there’s a way you can reuse your clothes without creating more waste,” said Jellen. “We want to show how accessible it is to thrift and upcycle and show how good it can look too. There’s a stigma around thrifting because it’s ‘used’ clothes, but it’s always pieces you can wear. It’s not that it’s unwearable. It might just be out of style.”
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