“We’ve always enjoyed digging around for used clothing at secondhand markets,” says Tanisara “Jazz” Poenateetai, who launched Madmatter Studio with her boyfriend, Patanin “Tap” Ngamkitcharoenlap, in 2016.
Both Tap, in trendy black-framed glasses, and Jazz, in solid white shoes with long, middle-parted black hair, have the fashion sense expected of the design school graduates they are. “But after a while, we thought about all the waste. Thailand is a developing country; every year, we receive tons of secondhand clothes from places like the US and Japan.”

The problem with receiving so much clothing from abroad, she adds, is they are mostly thick and bulky, making a lot of it impractical for Thailand’s tropical climate and inevitably destined for the landfill. Worse, they also discovered that movements like fast fashion, which sees brands churning out collections up to a dozen times a year, are compounding the issue.