Words by Perrin Drumm. Photography by Shana Jade Trajanoska.

On the face of it, Nicole McLaughlin’s rise from design intern to Instagram sensation might seem like the stuff social media dreams are made of: an around-the-clock hustler working long hours at a day job while spending her nights and weekends crafting the fantastical yet functional gear she’s become known for (a shirt of stitched-together Calvin Klein underwear, shoes made from badminton shuttlecocks) until her growing fan base caught the attention of big brands and she was able to quit her job and strike out on her own. But as with any story, there’s more to it and a lot going on behind the posts on her feed.

What started as a genuine curiosity about the potential of discarded and unwanted materials—in other words, trash — has not only turned into a treasure trove of possibilities for fashionable wear and functional gear, but a deeper interrogation into the endless stream of waste that powers a consumer market we all, even the most conscientious among us, participate in with reckless abandon. 

Who can resist the latest T-shirt drop even though we’ve read the articles about water-intensive cotton production and watched the reports on the toxic conditions in dye factories? Many of us don’t bat an eye when we’re handed a free tote or add yet another reusable water bottle to our collection. Who stops to trace the threads of a new purchase back to their source in the heat of a buying decision? We click, it ships, and we move on. Not Nicole.

But this is not a guilt-inducing story about our consumer habits. Yes, it’d be great if we all bought less and were more thoughtful when we bought something new, to begin with. We know this. This is a story about following the fibres of our material possessions back to their source and finding problems, yes, but also possibilities.

It started with an IKEA bag and a bunch of tennis balls. If you’re one of the over 700k people who already follow Nicole on Instagram, you know the story. But to recap: woman wants to make a cool pair of sandals, woman lacks materials, woman looks around her apartment, sees IKEA bag, IKEA bag strap sandals are born. Ditto for the tennis ball sandals. And the beanie shorts. And the zipper pouch skirt.

Then there’s the itsy bitsy teeny weeny Carhartt bikini, a bra top and thong made from old workwear pants, complete with all the pockets and tool straps you’d need to complete any construction project. “When I was working in women’s wear, they would remove the pockets to save money. Or they’d use fake pockets, and I was like, ‘What the fuck?’ We’ve all experienced fashion that hasn’t functioned for us. So the bikini was kind of a ‘fuck you.’ I ended up putting pockets on everything, sometimes too many pockets. I like the irony of that. I’m not trying to look slutty in a Carhartt bikini. I’m here to work. It’s funny,” she continues, “there’s a very serious approach to the sustainability aspect of what I’m trying to achieve, but the conversation can’t really start if it’s not approachable.”

These explorations quickly turned Nicole’s hobby into a viral sensation, but the last thing she was interested in was becoming an upcycling influencer. She was much more intrigued by the unseen potential of unwanted goods. Still, people couldn’t help but notice, and brands were quick to follow, hungry for an upcycled social media stunt that would inject their brand with a dose of art school cool and limited-edition caché, with a few eco points tossed in as a bonus. But even though Nicole was early in her career and her funds were limited enough to send her digging through her trash instead of buying new fabrics, it has always been easy, even instinctive, for her to say no. Her biggest heroes aren’t buzzy artists or fashion designers. They’re activists fighting against outmoded ways of thinking. They are people like intersectional environmentalist Leah Thomas, who highlights issues of race and sustainability; queer environmentalist Pattie Gonia, who leads hikes in full drag; and Céline Semaan, the founder of Slow Factory Foundation, which advocates for climate justice and social equity by reimagining environmentally harmful systems. “I saw her talk on a panel about sustainability and her personal experience, which she’s very raw about. I was so captivated that I was like, ‘I don’t know if I have anything else to offer in this conversation.’” 

Nicole had an unlikely start. After learning sign language in order to date a deaf boyfriend in high school, she decided to pursue a degree in speech pathology at East Stroudsburg University in Pennsylvania, a course of study that was less about exploring the joys of new languages than it was about a strict academic understanding of human biology and audiology. Nicole promptly switched to media studies and was mostly left to her own devices in the school’s markedly less popular art department. There, she learned graphic design and parlayed a design internship at Reebok into a full-time job, where she worked on footwear and clothing. But as she developed her skills in design and fabrication, she noticed something else: an awful lot of waste. Rooms of unusable samples and unwanted castoffs, not to mention the untouched treasures in the brand’s archive, all slowly collecting dust. 

After work, she would go home and experiment with designs of her own, sewing together whatever scraps she had on hand. The disparity between the glut of materials at the office and the absence at her apartment was not lost on her. Soon, she was taking unneeded samples home—a one-off left shoe here, a cut of test-print fabric there—deconstructing them and putting them back together into bra tops and vests, shorts and sandals. Just to see what might happen. What she discovered was an entire second life for stuff previously destined for the trash heap. “It was while I was working at Reebok that I started to realize the amount of waste that was happening in the industry. And I was like, ‘I’m a part of the problem by designing this stuff.’”

As an entry-level designer, Nicole didn’t have much, if any, capacity to make changes at a higher level, so she started small, at home. “I was living with three roommates, and I was taking literal trash from my apartment and the samples I would find at work.” But it was hardly enough to fuel her growing sewing habit. “I had always been into the idea of thrifting and buying my clothes second-hand, so I wondered, ‘What if I bought material second-hand, too?’ And that’s when I discovered the possibilities of not just garments, but second-hand sporting goods: volleyballs and tennis balls that are flat.”  

A flat tennis ball is useless to most people, but it made Nicole think, “What if I use the felted material for something else?” Cue the montage of late-night bedroom sessions, with Nicole furiously ripping apart deflated basketballs and old shoes and turning them into something new and useful. “That’s when I started to discover the possibilities of what materials could do.”  

She was sewing by hand, working intuitively, but she didn’t let her lack of technical training get in the way. “I realized that because I didn’t know how to actually construct things—because I didn’t have a boundary of what was possible to sew and what wasn’t—I was like, ‘Oh, I can do anything.’ If I had gone to a traditional fashion or art school, I probably would have put way more constraints on myself.”  

But sewing by hand is painfully slow, and once Nicole has an idea for something, she’s eager to get it made. “I’m impatient. If something is going to take me too long to see the idea, I will do it as quickly as I possibly can without ruining the quality. It’s a weird thing because, in my head, I’m always thinking, ‘If I don’t make this Carhartt bikini or this chair made from old Swiffer mops right now, someone else is going to take this idea.’”

She upgraded from hand-sewing to a proper sewing machine and taught herself what type of stitching and thread best suited her grab bag of materials. How many zippers are too many zippers? When the brands came calling, she was ready. Both to say no to those who were just looking to leverage her art kid cred and streetwear savvy into a social media stunt, and yes to those who saw the potential of the impact upcycling could have on their supply chain and product line. 

“When I first talk to a brand, I think they realize pretty fast that I’m not just some influencer trying to push sustainability. If the conversation starts with, ‘Let’s create this fun viral piece for Instagram.’ I respond with, ‘Show me your KPIs. Show me your life-cycle assessments. What are you actually doing right now?’ And sometimes they say, ‘Ah, actually we don’t want to work with you. We don’t have enough information,’ or ‘We don’t have our shit together.’ Which I appreciate because if you don’t want to commit to sustainability, then I don’t want to work with you anyway. And it’s probably better for you to get your ducks in a row before you start talking about stuff.”

Now that she’s gone freelance, she’s able to pick and choose the brands she works with. Like Arc’teryx, where she’s the brand’s first design ambassador. “The other ambassadors are professional athletes, and then there’s me.” It’s the rare example of a brand that’s committed to “taking back all their used product, or repairing it for the owner, or upcycling it into something brand new. I help them with the last part: taking their used gear and helping find solutions for what to do with it. It’s super rare for a brand to care that much about their old product.” 

When a brand that’s caught somewhere in the middle approaches her, it’s not necessarily a hard no. “I always want to work with someone to find a solution. But I’m realistic. You can’t change a business overnight. A lot of brands talk about future technologies, like mushroom leathers and algae-based materials, and that’s great and very cool, but I’m more interested in what a brand is going to do about all the stuff they’ve already made, that’s sitting in warehouses collecting dust or getting burned. Every brand will make stuff and put it out there and be like, ‘This is your responsibility now,’ and they never have to deal with it again.”

Getting more brands to care might start with the designers who come to work for them. When she’s not educating companies from within, Nicole is holding workshops with young designers and students aimed at teaching them how to think radically differently about materials — where they come from, how they’re created, and how their life cycle could be extended. Oftentimes it requires them to break the rules they learned in design school. “It’s not about showing people the possibilities. It’s about teaching them how to look for what the possibilities are.” 

From the macro level—with brands and the next wave of design talent—to the micro, with her personal projects, Nicole is always thinking big. Can this one-off be scaled and sold? Can we make upcycling scalable? “I think that’s really the heart of my work and what I’m trying to do, to show examples of what things could be. People get rid of so many things, they don’t realize the value those objects hold.”

This conversation features in Riposte #13 - The Care Issue. Click through to our shop to order your print copy.