I have been making clothes since my teens in the early 80’s; visiting charity shops and altering or customising vintage as well as getting fabric from the rag market in Birmingham to experiment with. Back then, my inspiration was pop fashion, wanting to replicate the look of music icons, creating designs that couldn’t be found on the high street.
Largely self taught apart from school needlework, I took tailoring classes in my twenties and was fortunate to have a couturier teach me. Making clothes for friends and family grew into a part time business focusing largely on costume as my designs were still led by music and pop culture. For a couple of years I ran a costume hire business until demand for my own designs meant that Missfit Creations was born in 2002.
Within ten years I had my own range of tribute costume, Tribute2 dressing boy and girl bands, tribute acts, dancers, drag queens and entertainers. Running alongside this I had my ReCreate range which incorporated vintage stock and upcycled clothing. The latter was a throwback to my teenage years of DIY fashion, growing up in an era when wearing and mending second-hand clothing was still prevalent.
In 2013 my business was brought to an abrupt halt when a kidney cancer diagnosis drew me away from my sewing machine. When I did return, twelve months later it was with a hospital gown design – I’d found out for myself the impracticality of the standard gowns!
Time away meant I was able to reflect on the superficiality of the fashion industry and I decided that my return to full time work would be as a fully sustainable business. In 2014 Missfit became zero waste and I ceased buying new fabric, working only with used clothing and textiles. As my stock was predominantly vintage this was not a huge leap, most of my fabric stock had come from deadstock and I’d bought no new clothes myself for eight years by then.
It did however mean keeping a closer eye on waste; now even the smallest offcuts and threads are saved for reuse in some way. With the help of the Energy & Bio Products Research Institute at Aston University I was able to show how much textile waste I saved and how that equated to CO2 equivalent. The Case Study can be viewed here and the full report is available on request.
Missfit is now entering its third decade, over ten years of which has been zero waste, a proud forerunner of the sustainable fashion movement. Through my creations I hope not only to bring back to life garments from previous decades but also to share the skills and knowhow passed on over the years.