London fashion designer turns abandoned festival tents into couture collection

Chloe Baines and her friends were one of the last to leave Boomtown festival in 2018. But you wouldn’t have known it with the field still littered with upright tents, air beds and camping chairs – all abandoned after a weekend of partying.

Baines is a London-based fashion designer. She had been thinking about what her next collection would be while at the festival and was struck by the messages of sustainability being highlighted.

During the finale there was a big presentation about how many tents got left behind every year, and how attendees are unaware of the amount of waste that is left. She says it was a "really harsh, hard hitting reminder of just how awful it is.”

She realised that a lot that could be done with the tent remains, and so her friends helped her to collect them.

Once she got home she started experimenting with the abandoned materials.

The first item of the collection she made was an off the shoulder orange dress which uses the tent’s mesh door for a skirt.

“This was the first revolution of the collection and I thought, okay, this is how it works," she said.

New statistics released from the charity Oxfam show that 11 million items of clothing are sent to the UK landfill every week.

“The impact on people is that the people who make our clothes are often working in poor countries where they paid below the living wage” says Fee Gilfeather, Oxfam’s sustainable fashion expert.

“The impact on our planet is the big carbon emissions, which are made by the textile industry.”

With London Fashion Week kicking off this month Oxfam is encouraging consumers to stop buying new clothes for a month as part of their ‘Second Hand September’ campaign.

Initiatives like these can create momentum for the cause, and Gilfeather sees that consumer power has already been shown to work incredibly well with plastics. She hopes that “fast fashion can be the next revolution we have”.

Baines tried to use every part of the tents she found, including the pegs, hardware and fabric. She even collaborated with weave artist Alexandra Lucas to made bodices from leftover scraps. “Anything leftover Alex can then weave into something that is equally as beautiful.”

She also incorporated jewellery in the collection by teaming up with jewellery designer Belle Smith, who used aluminium and steel from the old tents. For her, the contrast of rubbish to designer jewellery was particularly special, “going from a dirty tent peg to a beautiful shining pair of earrings, that is such a beautiful transition”.

Baines will continue going to festivals but only if they have a more sustainable ethos. “I’m only going where there is a rule where you can’t leave anything behind, what you bring you take back with you. And I think that’s something that can translate into the way we live our lives.”

To find out more about Oxfam’s Second Hand September campaign and pledge to buy second hand fashion for 30 days go to po.st/SecondHandSeptember

You can follow Chloe’s work here