In fashion’s quest to become a less-harmful industry, it’s ironic that it always comes down to making more clothes. Brands have to start somewhere, though; you can’t just flip a switch and “be sustainable” overnight. Maybe you add organic cotton one season, expand to 50% recycled materials the next, and gradually bump up those numbers and credentials with each collection. Still, as long as you’re producing anything, you’re having an impact, and it gives naysayers an easy opening: If you really want to be green, then why make anything at all?
It’s a lazy oversimplification, because we’re always going to need clothes, and—more importantly—fashion is an entry point for consumers to embrace sustainability in every aspect of their lives. It’s a way to educate them about plastic pollution, toxic chemicals, even regenerative agriculture. But the constant churn of new collections and deliveries still felt incongruous to Maggie Marilyn, who is committed to traceability and to using natural or recycled fibers in her collections. Even with the best materials, she felt designing six new pants a season was excessive, and when retailers asked her to tweak a skirt’s color or length to make it exclusive—only to put it on sale or send it back—it just felt like a waste. Maybe that skirt didn’t need to exist in that color, or at all.
In an era of 100-look runway shows, doing less is typically perceived as a concession. But Marilyn was proud to say her resort collection includes just one pant, a lean black flare. Most of her lookbook was styled with ivory jeans from Somewhere, the capsule of organic, seasonless, traceable basics she launched back in November. Marilyn designed the jeans to be a foundation piece you can wear again and again, so by reshooting them in this lookbook, she’s practicing what she preaches. Design-wise, she also created Somewhere’s jeans, T-shirts, and leggings to ground the more fanciful stuff in her seasonal collections, like the ivory ruffled blouse and knotted crimson tee seen here.
Those items speak to Marilyn’s broader mission for resort, which was to design pieces, not “looks.” She’s thinking about how her customer actually shops—for a couple new things a season, not full looks—and she’s no longer interested in creating extra stuff to fill up a linesheet or accommodate every retailer’s request. She wants to create pieces she truly believes in, and that she believes will actually be worn. Her customers are a helpful gauge for that; in the #BeforeTimes, Marilyn traveled every month, but she’s been home in New Zealand since March and has had time to reconnect with them and ask what they want from her. Some fell in love with past-season items, like a diagonal-striped silk dress, which Marilyn reinterpreted here in graphic black and white. Other past hits got a second life, too, including a ruffled-edge blazer and an emerald silk midi dress.
As for her sustainability credentials, Marilyn cut several pieces in post-consumer recycled cotton, and a handful of easy black dresses came in soft jersey. She’s thinking beyond the “organic” or “recycled” tags: Earlier this summer, she visited a Merino station that uses regenerative practices and saw firsthand how the farmers care for their sheep. Marilyn reported the sheep even have cushions to sit on while they wait to be (safely, painlessly) sheared. She hopes to collaborate with the farm on materials in the future, and said she’s recently shifted her shipping to a greener option. It’s those kinds of efforts—the ones a customer may never even see—that actually move the needle and demonstrate a designer’s true commitment.
