Before creating anything, we looked at what already existed.
For this first capsule, we made a choice: 100% deadstock.
Before it becomes a garment, a fabric already has a history.
Raw materials were extracted to produce fibres. Water and energy were used. The fabric was spun, woven or knitted, dyed, finished and transported. And sometimes it simply stays there: in a warehouse, at a manufacturer's, or in the stockroom of a fashion house.
A perfectly usable material that, in the end, never found a purpose. It may be fabric produced in greater quantities than ordered, cancelled orders, the ends of collections, or stock that no longer matches a brand's needs.
This is what we call DEADSTOCK, or DORMANT STOCK.
Why do so many materials go unused?
Because the textile industry largely runs on anticipation.
Manufacturers produce before the garments exist. Brands have to forecast their needs, their volumes and their collections, sometimes several seasons ahead. But forecasts are never perfect, all the more so when they are tied to trends.
An order can be cancelled, or a collection can change because a colour is dropped, for example.
The fabric, though, remains.
New fabric or fabric already produced?
We think it's essential to be clear about one thing: using deadstock does not erase the environmental impact of its original production. The fabric has already consumed resources in order to exist. But when an available fabric is used to create a new garment, it can avoid producing new fabric for that garment.
That is where its value lies.
At copain.e, we like to start from what already exists.
Deadstock can sometimes become the starting point of a piece: a fabric discovered for its material, its rare composition, its drape, its colour or its construction… Then the way the garment will be imagined begins to take shape.
It changes the creative process: the fabric no longer simply answers a drawing; it can also be its origin. It exists before the drawing has even taken shape. It can suggest a silhouette, a construction, or a particular way of wearing a garment.
That said, deadstock is, by definition, available in limited quantities. So it isn't always possible to make hundreds of pieces from the same fabric, or to guarantee that a material will still be available in a few months' time. This is also why some copain.e pieces are made in limited series, and are unique.
Rather than treating this constraint as a problem, we choose to build it into the way we create: the limited series is not a way of making a piece more exclusive; it is the direct consequence of a fabric available in limited quantity, and of a wish to produce as closely as possible to what really exists.
A way of creating that accepts constraints, because working with deadstock also means accepting that you can't control everything: a fabric may no longer be available, a colour may never be reproduced. A series may deliberately stay small.
These constraints also open up a different creative space: that of a fashion that doesn't systematically seek to reproduce things endlessly!
At copain.e, a garment is built where three things meet: an existing fabric, an idea, and the quantity actually available. And sometimes it is precisely that limit that gives a piece its singularity.
The impact of our capsule's fabrics, in figures:
For this collection, La Belle Empreinte compared the impact of our deadstock fabrics with that of newly produced fabric.
The results speak for themselves:
The life cycle is analysed for each type of material.
This first analysis covers the environmental footprint of the new fabric, from the extraction of raw materials to the finished cloth; in other words, from field to fabric.
It takes into account the origin of the materials, the energy mix of the countries involved, and transport between each stage of production: extraction, spinning, weaving or knitting, dyeing and finishing.
At copain.e, for this first capsule, we made a choice: 100% deadstock.
The fabric was there. All that remained was to imagine what it could become.