British designer Christopher Raeburn just celebrated 15 years of running his brand RÆBURN with a retrospective in London. According to him, several very tangible, healthy, and positive things have happened during these years.
— When I first started, he says, I wanted to buy recycled fabric, but it was going to be 30 or 50% more expensive. Within 15 years, all of a sudden you could get parity in pricing. So, wow! What are the next 15 years going to look like? During these years, we’ve made things even more messy. But we’ve also got a lot of new thinkers, people thinking differently. Now, it’s how we get them together in the next 15 years.
A year after Raeburn graduated from Royal College of Art, in 2007, Timberland launched its Earthkeeper boots.
— I found it so inspiring because, at the time, it was one of the most responsibly manufactured pieces of footwear globally, he says. Back then, no one was thinking or acting on those things. And, importantly, it was done at scale.
About a decade later, after a successful apparel project for Timberland’s London Fashion Week catwalk debut, Raeburn was appointed as Global Creative Director for the global shoe and apparel brand.
— A real honour, of course, and with it, of course, also comes a real responsibility. It’s a heritage brand.
Raeburn left Timberland last year to take on as the Creative Director of Napapijri. With RÆBURN, Christopher and his colleagues have also teamed up with some of the world’s biggest lifestyle companies for partnerships, collaborations, and executive positions.
— There’s a little analogy that I’ve always liked. When you see nature programmes and the big whales and sharks swimming, you see the little fish that come along. They clean them, they even go inside and clean their teeth. I’ve always thought it’s quite a good analogy for what we do: swimming alongside some pretty big fish in the work that we do with RÆBURN, taking all of the stuff that already exists, remaking and recycling it and making it useful, contemporary, and wearable again. But the important thing is that while you’re swimming alongside and cleaning that fish, you’ve got an opportunity to talk to it — and maybe you can steer it. That’s what we try to do, through good practice and innovation and through, at points, being pretty disruptive and radical, we’ve been able to move some pretty big fishes, and, maybe, has been a catalyst for change.
And it’s fair to say that Timberland has turned into a much more progressive brand under your helm.
— Yeah, I hope so. The nature of the work that I do is that it’s about pushing, and it is about innovating, and it is about modernity. Even though I’m taking things that are more ’archaeology’ — finding stuff in the past — what comes out the other side is always about modernity. Importantly, with Timberland, is that it’s also about teamwork. You’re there as global creative director but there are so many people there on the product side, and also on the marketing side, that are able to amplify that and to come up with their own ideas. Now, to see them collaborating with Louis Vuitton and doing all of these things, I’m really proud of the chapter that I was in, almost being that creative catalyst. Now, it’s about handing the baton on to the next teams.
What have been the hardest challenges working with circularity for you, both with RÆBURN and the bigger brands?
— Circularity is about galvanising both brands and communities into genuine action. A lot of people say they want to act responsibly and sustainably, but there’s a hell of a lot of research about how people say one thing and they do the opposite. We haven’t had that moment that galvanises people to go, ’OK, here is a new way of doing something — we’re going to wake up and change the way that we’re acting.’ To use another example, there was a TV documentary series already in 2017, Blue Planet II, which was the first time that David Attenborough looked down the lens and said, ’it’s up to you to make a difference.’ And so many people kind of woke up and it was, really, hairs on the back of your neck moment. We haven’t had that in fashion with people saying, ’OK, we can do something about this.’ Instead, unfortunately, we’ve had some terrible things happening: Rana Plaza, human rights, and all of the issues of microplastics. But still, the machine rolls.
Despite the challenges, Raeburn explains that he sees his role within all of this as to try and lead by example, both through the lens of RÆBURN and with other brands to amplify that.
— I almost look at RÆBURN as being the incubator. I’ve made a hell of a lot of mistakes as well as done a lot of projects that I’m very proud of, and the question is how you can take all these learnings to bigger companies.
— Thrown into the middle of all of this, and the biggest challenge we all have had, was Covid. The timing was pretty significant because going into that period, a lot of companies were publicly announcing their ambitions around sustainability, such as carbon emission reductions and very tangible things, towards 2030, 2035, and 2040. And a lot of them have now moved away from them. On the one hand, I understand because no one expected Covid and the knock-on effects business-wise but, again, how do we re-shift the balance? That’s what is important.
If we look at the fashion industry, it’s been linear and is now slowly moving towards being circular. Where are we on that road?
— The truth is, it’s a mess. Unfortunately, it’s not one system. It’s hundreds, thousands, millions of things that are not coordinated. The acceleration of particularly man-made fibres through the 70s and 80s, and particularly the use of blended materials by so many companies, is one of the biggest issues. You’ve got all of the micro experiments with Bethany Williams Helen Kirkum, and Greater Goods doing incredible things, but they’re all small-scale experiments and incubators. And then you’ve got big brands that have the opportunity to really make a difference…
— I think what’s not happening enough is considering both upstream on a fibre level, what are the best materials that we can use? And importantly, keep those as a mono construction and mono fibre in a garment, bag, or shoe. Rather than taking cotton and polyester, or nylon, and putting them together, just keep it as a nylon garment with nylon zips and nylon tape, so that you can recycle it at end of life, you can then recycle that thing.
— Within RÆBURN, we’re very clear. If you look at the pillars of what we do, we either remake things from stuff that already exists, so it’s already its own little circle, and we make those things infinitely repairable. But it’s a terrible business model! You can’t make money. And therefore, it’s not sustainable on a financial level. But alongside it, we have two tiers — Reduced and Recycled — which were implemented properly a decade ago, and incubated 15 years ago. It’s all about natural materials — organic cotton or merino wool in mono composition — that, in theory, can go back to the Earth.
— We’re not perfect, but it’s not bad. And it’s not blended. Same with the shoes I’m wearing today, created for Timberland, made of natural rubber, leather, and a synthetic upper. It’s designed for disassembly so that at end of life, you can undo the stitching, take the parts into their component waste streams, and recycle and reuse them.
— Unfortunately, as mentioned, the big fashion system and the industry as a whole is a fantastic mess of overproduction, and of things that are not working with poor quality products. At points also bad design. It doesn’t matter what level you’re at; whether it’s luxury or fast fashion — if it’s a poor design, it’s poorly conceived, or poor methods of make, then that’s almost a crime.
What’s required to scale circularity?
— It has to be a combination of many things. First, you need to think about what’s going into the product to begin with. We need to look really big at the materials that are, for one of the better word, good, or better for the environment. And then we need to be thinking cross-industry. Are they good in fashion? Could they also be good in furniture? Could they be good in automobiles?
— Some of the things that I’ve learned through my career are the examples where footwear brands and big sportswear brands, of course, use a load of rubber. But compared to the automobile industry and the tyres, it’s a tiny amount. And if we talk cotton, for sportswear brands versus IKEA, it has to be less than 1%.
— So, could we not be working more cross-industry to work through the right certified manufacturing, the right ways of building products, and thinking about what happens at end of life. Can that sofa, or that T-shirt, or that umbrella all go into the same thing at the end and be reused and recycled and spun again? Well, that’s going to take a lot of people working together.
— And we do have the UN goals, we do have EU legislation coming through, and we do have companies. I’ve been to the Textile University here in Borås to see firsthand how now the guys there, for the first time, have brands coming to them. They tell them they know they need to do something about circularity, and they’re allocating budgets and people for it. That wasn’t happening 10 years ago.
As part of the mentioned London retrospective for RÆBURN, Christopher has taken the opportunity to look back at the brand’s first 15 years. He breaks it into three chunks, which also reflects how the industry has developed.
— In the first five years, we were like an alien to a degree where people weren’t talking about sustainability and we didn’t have the same vocabulary. In the middle chunk, all of a sudden, people did start to wake up a bit, and they started to know the difference between upcycling, recycling, and sustainability. Things that had not been talked about. All of a sudden, I was getting really big brands coming to RÆBURN, not to say they loved our design, but to say that they’ve heard that they needed to do something about the sustainability trend. To which my answer was, ’well, this is not a trend — this is about us that need to fundamentally change what we’re doing.’ In this last chapter, the ambition and stepping stones were there already pre-Covid. But then, there’s been a reality check of the financial status globally, the cost of living crisis, and political upheaval that has happened again globally. This general instability means that it’s not the priority. But it needs to be.
You mentioned Borås and The Swedish School of Textiles, and you’re in Sweden as this year’s recipient of Fabric of Life Award Life Achievement Prize.
— Yes! Of course, it’s a real honour, also when I think back on some of the previous winners, that include Patagonia. That’s an amazing thing, to have little old RÆBURN within that same conversation. The only caveat is that it’s a Lifetime Achievement Award. I struggle a bit with this! I hope that the 15 years of Raeburn so far have been the test bed and the learning and everything else. But, I think the best of what I personally achieve and, therefore, by default, the legacy of RÆBURN, needs to be ahead. We’ve grown up in this thing, and I’ve grown up personally, but now it’s about how we take those learnings and really push forward. So, I hope that maybe in the future, there’ll be a Lifetime Achievement Award 2.0!
