The young designer making high fashion from Paris houses’ waste fabric

Hills of clothing in a jumble of colours and fabrics stretched high and far under the stark sun of Chile’s Atacama desert. Some had price tags still attached bearing the names of common high street brands, apparently unworn.

This was the surreal scene captured in footage by news agency Agence France-Presse that went viral last year. It highlighted that about 59,000 tonnes of unwanted second-hand clothing from around the world is shipped to the northern Chilean port of Iquique each year, the bulk of it ending up dumped in the desert.

The clothing industry is estimated, in a report by the environmental sustainability consultancy Quantis, to produce eight per cent of the world’s carbon emissions, and the environmental damage it causes has increased with the rise of fast fashion: the rapid mass production of ephemeral trends at low prices, much of which ends up as landfill.

Mounzer realised that fashion houses were ordering much more fabric than they were ultimately using

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Charlotte Mounzer (31) liked science at school and remembers her parents being somewhat cautious about her desire as a teenager to go into fashion.

“They just asked me to choose a school that had a good reputation and had an entrance exam. So if I had no talent at all, I would stop right away,” she recalls. “Because there’s a lot of people who want to do fashion, but there’s only a few that actually found a job.”

She ended up attending La Cambre visual arts college in Brussels, in a programme known for instilling strong practical sewing skills in students as well as design training, and which integrates internships into its courses.

After learning the ropes at stints in small local brands in Brussels, in her third year, Mounzer landed a placement at Balenciaga fashion house in Paris.

Fashion houses typically divide work between the studio — in which designers come up with concepts for the clothes — and the atelier, a workshop where tailors make their ideas into real items. Mounzer’s strong sewing skills allowed her to put together the clothes herself in the studio, and show the artistic director what she was thinking.

The Paris fashion world is small — artistic directors typically change brands every few years, and they know each other. Mounzer was recommended for other positions and ended up at Nina Ricci, where she was hired.

[ Ghana’s next generation of clothes designers blow the whistle on fast fashion ]

During her time in Paris, Mounzer realised that fashion houses were ordering much more fabric than they were ultimately using. Bolts of cloth are ordered years in advance, with long delivery times, while collections were put together extremely quickly. Much more was ordered than ultimately made the cut.

“If the artistic director says, ‘I want a coat in red for the next season’, then we order a lot of different reds in case he changes his mind. In the end, we just use one red, or don’t use it at all,” Mounzer said.

Reams of top-quality fabric goes unused in to storage. “We just send the fabrics away really far from Paris, and we just forget about them. So I realised how much fabric there is in that stock, that we can actually use.”

When Mounzer founded her own brand, Sé-em, in 2019, she called her contacts in the Paris houses and asked if she could take some of the fabric off their hands for a small price.

Providing this kind of one-on-one service means that Mounzer’s business is limited in how much it can grow, she acknowledges. It will remain small — and she’s happy with that

Trusting that they did not risk giving away the secrets of forthcoming collections to a rival — usually a worry when it comes to the stored fabric — they agreed.

The pieces of fabric she buys make for tiny collections: only between one and ten copies of any given clothing item are made. Mounzer sells them in pop-up shops, her appointment-only showroom, and online.

For each customer who buys one, she tailors the piece to fit their size.

“It’s pieces that a customer will keep, because it was adjusted for them, and they bought it with the fashion designer there in person. They know it’s done with respect for people and the environment,” she says.

She will even readjust pieces if a customer changes in size, and she advises them on how to preserve the pieces of clothing so they become permanent items in their wardrobe.

Providing this kind of one-on-one service means that Mounzer’s business is limited in how much it can grow, she acknowledges. It will remain small — and she’s happy with that.

“It’s the service I want to give, and the fashion I want to sell also,” she says. “That’s the difference [between this and] all the fast fashion — it’s slow fashion.”