Spring Collection: Surplus Fabric

What do these styles all have in common? They are all part of our spring collection, you say? Correct, but there’s more to the story. Read on!

Style Snapshot: Leftovers, but make it fashion. 

The pandemic pivot is something we’ve become all-too familiar with over the past couple years, and our Spring/Summer 2022 collection was no exception to the new way of living moment to moment. Back in 2020, we had quite a few textiles in the works that were planned to be used for both Spring and Fall 2021 collections. For various Covid-related reasons they were not completed, or were not cut for styles in time for production. This happens frequently in the garment industry, and in many areas of production in general; ideas are scrapped, or don’t pan out, but unfortunately this contributes to a problematic amount of waste - both in materials and time. 

Mata regularly utilizes past-season unused fabrics for sampling meters for future collections, but 2020’s challenges left us with simply just too much fabric to use in that way. As a company committed to honoring fair trade production standards, discarding these fabrics would not be environmentally responsible, nor would it honor our production groups that had already put their time and labor toward sourcing materials and manufacturing. So, with the wise words of Tim Gunn’s favorite Project Runway pep talk in our heads, we figured out how to “make it work.” How? By incorporating these existing textiles into our plans for the Spring 2022 Collection! 

Without intense scrutiny, these styles should blend right in, but now you know their secret. Fabrics from this group of leftovers actually helped inspire other designs and color-ways, and ultimately they’ve all made a really nice home for themselves in this collection. 

This was just one of many pandemic pivots we have made on the road to producing the collection you see on our site and at your favorite Mata retailers. Would you have even known if we hadn’t told you?