London-based designer and engineer Alexander Taylor has been a passionate advocate of environmental sustainability throughout his life. But over the last two years, he’s decided to harness that passion and create a platform that aims to do something about the enormous amount of waste created by the global fashion industry each year.
Recently, Talyor announced the launch of ATID, an online platform that will sell technical apparel made from biomaterials and leftover inventory from the fashion industry. It will be a space for the brand to showcase its sustainability-led concepts and products.
“The idea of seasons within fashion generates huge amounts of waste, due to deadlines and ‘consumer’ demands, unsold inventory and the endless creation of new textiles. Fashion as it is now and sustainability does not work together – the idea of sustainability has to be questioned because there are such huge volumes of waste generated every day,” shares Taylor. Ultimately, the designer had grown tired of the “endless production to feed the consumer world,” and that is where the idea for ATID came about.
ATID is set to launch on August 4, 2020, and its first collection will include a series of introductory garments made out of biomaterials and unused fabrics (or deadstock as the fashion industry calls it) sourced from manufacturer, KTC Group.
Through Taylor’s partnership with KTC factory, his team will produce small batches of products in the time slots that are made available to them by KTC Group. All items that ATID produces will be limited and controlled in number due to the small size of the studio and the lack of infinite resources available to them.
As much as possible, pieces will comprise unsold garments from KTC Group’s many fashion brands. However, when this isn’t possible, they will exclusively be using biomaterials. An example of a biomaterial used in the collection is AlgiKnit, a material made out of yarns and fibres that came from microalgae.
In terms of the production process, each and every item in the collection is designed in Taylor’s studio in London. From there, it is produced at the KTC partner factory in China. Once the pieces have been created, they are shipped via boat back to Taylor’s London studio, and from there they are shipped out directly to consumers.
If ATID grows as Taylor hopes, the future of the initiative involves setting up a network of deadstock material partners and shipping products directly from factory to consumer to cut down on transportation and energy usage. In this vein, Taylor also plans to adopt a made to order business model, whereby consumers can unofficially pre-order items by registering their interest on the website. This useful data would provide Taylor’s team with a general idea of which pieces are most in-demand before they have to commit to batches. Overall, this would allow manufacturing to be done on a more on-demand basis, cutting down on waste.
Products that consumers can look forward to include a three-layer waterproof, seam-taped mac, parka jackets, and bags, all of which have been designed using heat-bonded frames fused to lightweight ripstop textiles. Another exciting piece is what Taylor has dubbed “perhaps the most lightweight shorts in the world.”
All images in this article are courtesy of ATID.
