10 MARCH 6-12, 2025 westword.com WESTWORD | MUSIC | CAFE | CULTURE | NIGHT+DAY | NEWS | LETTERS | CONTENTS | Dressing Up CLOTHING UPCYCLERS ARE MAKING DENVER’S FASHION MORE SUSTAINABLE — ONE STITCH AT A TIME. BY KRISTEN FIORE Aliyah Wallace has things to say, and chances are she’s going to say those things on a shirt. The Littleton-based fashion designer cuts the letters out of old T-shirts and uses them to spell out phrases like “Trans Rights,” “Dyke Power” and even “Bella, Where the Hell Have You Been, Loca?” (A Twilight reference, for those who are uncultured.) Wallace’s AW Exclusives is one of many small businesses, events and communities popping up in the growing realm of cloth- ing upcycling and sustainable fashion. And sustainable fashion is in style in environmen- tally-conscious Denver, where people are becoming more aware of the waste created by fast fashion — cheap clothing made in sweatshops with new designs being released every day, encouraging people to discard their clothes and buy new garments online (think brands like Shein, Zara and Brandy Melville). Every year, people in the United States throw out billions of pounds of used textiles. Even clothes that are donated to thrift stores mostly end up in landfi lls around the world, contributing to mountains of textile waste in third-world countries, according to sources like ABC News and Boston University. In Denver, artists and fashion en- thusiasts are fi nding local solutions to this problem by keeping clothes cir- culating in the commu- nity through clothing swaps and by upcycling their own clothes (and teaching others how), so that old garments can become something new and unique to the wearer instead of being thrown away. When Wallace was sixteen, she got a job and her parents stopped buying her clothes. She started thrifting and up- cycling her clothes to keep up with the trends; eventually, it turned into an exploration of her own personal style. “You can fi nd individual pieces so you’re not wearing the same thing everyone else is wearing, which really stuck out to me — just trying to be a little bit different in the fashion scene and not necessarily go with the trends, even though that’s why I started. It helped me become an individual in my style but also while not creating more waste,” she says. After reading about the textile waste cri- sis, Capitol Hill resident Katessia Robertson was inspired to make a change. In a report by the Eileen Fisher Foundation, she’d learned about a direct local intervention: clothing swaps, in which people bring old pieces they don’t wear anymore but are still in good condition to a community space, and then everyone swaps their clothes, picking out garments that they would wear and trading them for the clothes they no longer use. In response, Robertson started the Clothing Cycle, which she describes as a “closed loop fashion system that centers community and climate.” The Clothing Cycle organizes clothing swaps and works with upcycle de- signers to keep clothes circulating in the com- munity instead of being sent to landfi lls. Similarly, Brea Ken- nedy was looking for a local solution to the fashion industry’s waste problem when she started hosting cloth- ing swaps in her living room. That turned into her own secondhand clothing shop and com- munity space — Solstice: Style & Stretch in Denver — as well as participat- ing in massive clothing swaps. “The most recent one was at Stanley Mar- ketplace and we had like 200 people,” Kennedy says. “In those swaps, we go through 5,000 pieces of clothing in three hours.” On the upcycling side, artist Bucky Grant started hosting monthly visible mending meet-ups called Stitch ‘n’ Bitch at Seventh Circle Music Collective. The events, which are put on through Wallace’s art club, Art- ists In Sync, teach people how to mend and upcycle their clothes so that they can keep them for longer. “I set up with scrap cloth, thread, buttons and other notions — needles, scissors, embroidery supplies — and invite people to bring clothes they want to mend to the workshop,” Grant says. At the events, Grant takes a look at common mends like worn-down pockets or clothes that need to be hemmed or tailored and suggests fi xes. “This is a skill that I love that I have and I love to be able to improve on, and pairing that with being in the punk music scene here in Denver and being part of a scene that was built upon working class and poor people maintaining their clothing and embellish- ing it in unique ways with very low budgets: making spikes out of cut up soda cans or dying a ball gown you found at the thrift store black,” Grant says. “That kind of ‘DIY or die’ attitude combined with the fact that I can sew, combined with the fact that I’d like to spend less money on clothes, coalesced into this desire to mend my own clothing.” As a transgender person, adds Grant, get- ting to make alternative men’s fashion is one of their favorite parts about being a clothing upcycler. Grant uses recycled handmade lacework as the fringe on a cowboy shirt, strings beads beneath collars, sews on their own hand-printed patches and cuts clothes into more fl attering shapes for transmascu- line and transfeminine people. “Everyone deserves fashion and clothes that fl atter them, and getting to take a step back from printed patterns and CULTURE continued on page 12 KEEP UP ON DENVER ARTS AND CULTURE AT WESTWORD.COM/ARTS Aliyah Wallace in her workspace. HEATHER M. SMITH Brea Kennedy stands in her secondhand clothing shop and community space, Solstice: Style & Stretch in Denver. KRISTEN FIORE
