This Thai couple makes fashionable clothes from repurposed materials

“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.

In fact, waste in the fashion industry has become a big problem worldwide. Every year, the US alone throws away more than 15 million tons of textiles, which makes the clothing and textile industry the second largest polluter in the world, runner-up only to oil – it can take 19,000 liters of water just to produce a T-shirt and a pair of jeans. However, the two entrepreneurs saw a solution: repurposing clothes rather than adding to the global waste pile of textiles.

Every Madmatter product goes through a lengthy process before it’s ready for sale. Jazz and Tap hand-select textiles from markets in Bangkok, like Talad Rot Fai (the “Train Market”) and the Chatuchak Weekend Market. They then wash them thoroughly, deconstruct them, and prepare them for production.

“At first, we sold at kind of a high price, because our designs took so much time and effort,” Jazz says. “But I felt like it was my responsibility to manage the process better so that we could sell them at a more reasonable price. We’re already using waste from the fashion industry; we don’t want to create even more waste by not being able to sell our products.”

To lessen some of that burden, Madmatter has incorporated deadstock into their bags. By using deadstock – the fabric that goes unused by the mills or brands that produce it – the couple has salvaged material that would otherwise go into landfills. This has also sped up the production process, as the deadstock is by and large ready for production from the moment they procure it.

“To me, sustainability involves the whole ecosystem: the factory, the brand, the customer,” Jazz says. As it affects customers, that means Madmatter’s products have to last and be timeless, too – “fashion that can be worn for many years”. Jazz and Tap achieve that by developing a modest yet enduring aesthetic. Their panel and patch caps feature simple silhouettes and classic shapes while their tote bags are durable and cleanly designed.

A surprising side effect of using found, one-off items is the limited-edition appeal of Madmatter products. “We might have only one or two of a certain color in stock,” says Jazz. “A lot of customers will rush to buy them right away, because they feel they will regret it if they miss out.”