Re.Pair Lab is a new fashion retail initiative developed with Landsec, promoting sustainability, creativity, charity, and community. The 12-week pop-up store, located in Trinity Leeds shopping centre, features rotating residencies from Leeds Beckett fashion students and local fashion designers and labels, providing them with the opportunity to showcase and sell their collections. The initiative also enables Leeds-based secondhand online sellers to build upon their online success on websites such as Depop and Vinted with a physical retail presence.
We are proud to have partnered with Leeds Beckett University to present Class of 2024 graduate fashion collections, where students explored themes of sustainability through repurposing and upcycling, and zero-waste design and cutting techniques.
Sam Hudson-Miles, Course Director of Fashion at Leeds Beckett University, said: “Leeds Beckett Fashion is delighted to support the Re.Pair Lab initiative as an educational partner. As the most connected and dynamic fashion course in the city, we bring our creative energy to this project through involvement from our students, emerging and established designers with a sustainable ethos, and businesses such as vintage resellers, launched by our Professor of Fashion, Matty Bovan.
Re.Pair Lab aligns with our commitment to celebrate and retain fashion talent in Leeds and its region. The initiative also furthers our allegiance to sustainable fashion design education. Re.Pair Lab is a pivotal opportunity for our students to test-bed the marketability of their collections and host workshops to demonstrate simple repair and upcycling methods that can be done at home, sharing skills and amplifying the slow fashion message. It’s a joy to bring together this Leeds-centric melting pot of creative fashion talent!”
Resident designer-makers have been paired with Re.Pair Lab’s charity retailer partner, Emmaus Leeds, to repair, upcycle and customise second-hand, surplus and donated items of clothing that would otherwise end up in landfill, into new garments and collections.
Re.Pair Lab aims to inspire a new perspective on upcycling through a program of free creative workshops hosted by the curated sellers and designers themselves. Over the course of the pop-up Re.Pair Lab will host 54 free drop-in workshops, focused on re-using materials that would otherwise end up in landfill. Enabling customers to engage with the designers’ and learn techniques and upcycling skills for repairing and reinventing their own wardrobe items at home.
In addition to the workshops, we partnered with Leeds-based sustainable fashion studio Trad Collective to introduce a new repair and alteration service at Trinity.
The store interior has been created almost entirely of repurposed items, with rails reclaimed from closed-down retail stores and upcycled, workshop tables and chairs built using timber waste and off-cuts by Emmaus North East – a charity supporting people who have experienced homelessness by providing them with a home and meaningful work experience, and an oversized curtain partition constructed from textile waste, creating intimate workspaces for the resident designers.
