What is deadstock fabric?

Earth.org estimates that every year the apparel industry produces around 92 million tons of textile waste. For context, that’s like if we built 1,759 Titanics and then just tossed them into a landfill. It’s pretty difficult to even imagine that much fabric could go unwanted, let alone that much every single year.

A significant portion of this waste is what’s referred to in the sewing world as ”deadstock.” Deadstock fabrics are bolts of leftover textiles that were either purchased or manufactured for the garment industry and then not used, or mass-produced textiles that have been discontinued, and the remaining quantities aren’t sufficient for clothing production runs. This ultimately means that this fabric was designed, produced, transported and warehoused, only to be discarded before use. Isn’t that heartbreaking?

Where Do We Come In?

Making use of deadstock fabrics — keeping them out of either incinerators or landfills — is one of the key tenets of slow fashion, and one we incorporate into our process here at Made X Hudson. (We also recycle any and all scraps that are able to be recycled.) We use three types of fabrics in our house line:

- Vintage textiles from a private trove, which we’ll tell you more about soon!
- New fabrics, in which case we only work with sustainable, biodegradable fibers.
- And deadstock, which we buy from a ‘‘jobber” — the industry term for an entity that collects the unused fabrics from the fashion houses and resells them to indie designers and small businesses like us.

While using deadstock is a great way to reduce fabric waste and our carbon footprint, we also recognize that it is not a perfect solution. Many existing unused textiles contain synthetic fibers (like polyester or nylon), and when buying vintage or deadstock fabrics, they are often not labeled — so we can’t always know the exact fiber content. But as noted (whatever their content may be) we do our part to keep these materials from being destroyed or discarded by turning them into beautiful, well-made clothes you can wear for many years to come.

Left: Deadstock zero-waste wool-blend cape and deadstock waxed cotton jogger pants; Right: deadstock faux leather jogger pants; all three from our house line

See also:
What is slow fashion?

 

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