September —24 TAC
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The Art of the Rewear: How Sustainable Fashion is the New Sexy”
By Willa Kramer
As we revel in the afterglow of this fall’s New York Fashion Week, one thing is decidedly, shiningly certain: sustainability makes haute couture HOT. From Collina Strada to Kamal Haasan’s House of Khaddar to Coach, sustainability and secondhand style is the new playground of fashion—and we can’t look away.
With the rise of fast-fashion brands, producing billions of garments—many never worn—and millions of tons of textile waste year after year, what the fashion industry so desperately needs, what the world so desperately needs, is a revolution. We can see hints of it in the Spring-Summer 2025 collections that debuted in NYC last week: a turning point in Christian Siriano’s textile-waste-turned-elegant-garment; a statement in performance-artist Justin Hutchinson’s 8-foot-tall “fashion zombie,” assembled as a representation of the industry’s massive amounts of waste. When the clothing dump in Chile’s Atacama Desert is burned into our brains in all its tens of thousands of tons of horror, watching the fashion industry take steps towards the CFDA-set deadline of net-zero carbon emissions by 2025 feels a lot like hope.
At eBay’s Endless Runway, hosted in collaboration with the CFDA and British Fashion Council and curated and dressed by Wisdom Kaye, the pre-loved is love. Catwalks are streamed live and entirely shoppable, encouraging viewers to buy in (literally) to the movement that is secondhand fashion. The focus here, in the vintage silhouettes and old-made-new-again street style looks, is on authenticity, on the ways we learn to live and love again through the things we wear. Isn’t there something about watching Kaye’s models glide mesmerizingly around eBay’s circular runway, their ensembles genuine embodiments of what it is to give something a second chance, that makes you want to take them back? (By them, of course, I mean low-rise jeans and suede jackets, to be found in thrift stores, on the RealReal, or—if you’re really on a budget—in the back of your mom or grandma’s closet.)
Kamal Haasan’s ‘Sutura’ collection, too, played with dissolving the boundaries between sustainability and the high-end fashion of NYFW, platforming eco-friendly textiles with deep roots in India’s culture and craftsmanship. Haasan’s color schemes, borrowed directly from the world around us, pair with his daring and creative silhouettes in just the right way to make us want more, to crave more of this combination of powerful, captivating art and sustainability. Similarly, Collina Strada’s SS25 collection takes the earth as both inspiration and reason, hosted in New York’s Marble Cemetery and featuring just the right amount of playfulness to make the eco-friendly fun while also grounding it in the stakes of the situation. We are told to “touch grass,” but we come away wanting to run our fingers through the climate-conscious fabric that clings and drapes like a gauzy dream. Hot, right?
It is undeniably sexy to care about the planet and our role in the climate crisis. Coach got that right in their show, with their worn-in pieces and retro curations. Watching it back, Vevers’ stylings feel both timeless and quintessentially of the moment—blazers and skirts are paired with loose t-shirts featuring pen scribbles and beading, silky slips with upcycled leather jackets and bags studded with pins. It’s carefree while also demonstrating concern for the planet, playful while reflecting the all-too-real anxieties held by the younger generations from whom Coach seems to have drawn inspiration. These are clothes that demand use, that show the proof of it on their surface, and that ask the question staring down the whole of the fashion industry: who are these pieces for, how will they be shopped and worn and valued, if the world continues to collapse around us? It’s getting hot in here—it seems a much better approach to face the reality of the situation than to continue to dismiss and offload its consequences.
To be fair, it’s always going to be easier to slip off a pair of jeans that have been lived in, loved, stained on the back pocket and torn at the knee, than it ever will be to struggle out of the plastic-feeling polyester-blend jeans offered (and over-produced) by the likes of Shein. Sustainable fashion offers us a future, and there’s a whole lot of love, lust, and play to be found in that.