A Jumpsuit, Reimagined

Current fashion cycles embrace the new over sustainability. This leads to exploitation, overconsumption, and mountains of clothes in landfill.

This, of course, is not news to you. In theory, it’s easy to renounce it all. Who needs more clothes?!? In practice, opting out of this cycle creates creative challenges even for intentional clothes horses.

How do you keep things fresh, while questioning your consumption? How do move through the world as a person who likes style and beautiful things? 

From Old to New: Re-imaging Your Fave Pieces

One answer to this is to reimagine and redo pieces. I do this a lot with my tailor. We breathe new life into vintage pieces with great fabrics. And we’ve successfully remodeled a couple of my closet favorites that I just grew out of.

When I was younger, I thought that this process of recycling was embarrassing. Now that I’ve wizened in my ways (see my past lessons on consumption for that), I appreciate the ability to keep fabulous, pre-loved pieces in circulation.

Before I show you what we did to a past favorite piece, here’s what I look for, when I consider reimagining clothes:

1. The quality of the fabric. Is this piece durable enough to sustain a second life? Is it worth the work and care of my tailor?

2. Use cases. How do we need to tweak or recut the piece to get additional use out of it? Sometimes, that also means “downgrading” a piece. What was once for nice occasions might now be better suited for everyday life due to wear and tear or style changes.

New Life for a Jumpsuit

This is a white cotton poplin jumpsuit I got a Zara when I lived in Mexico seven years ago. The quality of the fabric was great for a fast fashion piece and I enjoyed wearing it in the tropical heat. It was comfortable, yet stylish.

When I came back to Europe, the design didn’t hold up. I noticed I had grown out of my experimental years in fashion. It just didn’t look right anymore. Also: the legs were cropped. I look crap in cropped [just had to write that to play with the words!].

But, as the jumpsuit kept sitting in my closet, I felt bad, because I liked its fabric and zipper detail. After all, it wasn’t the clothing’s fault I had changed my mind about what I liked.

I took it to my tailor to ask her about what we could do with it. We both agreed that it had a good baseline structure to be cut into a dress.

That’s what we did. She left the top intact and recut the legs. Now it’s a lovely dress!

It has a fun 90s futuristic vibe to it, when zipped up. It would fit right into the GATTACA movie set, peak 90s sci-fi.

I also like that you can make it a little more or less sexy moving the zipper up and down. It’s always nice to have that optionality.

Ideally, I’d wear this dress with white, pointy, mid-heel pumps. These trendy, all-over-social-media-and-fashion-substack kitten heels by Prada could also do the trick!

Alas, I haven’t found a good pair, yet, so slides it was. It’s summer, after all!

I’ll write more of these pieces about reimagining clothes over time. I love the creativity of it and intend to inspire others to give new life to old friends.

Have you done something like this before - breathed new life into an old favorite?

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