Sustainability

The Sustainable approach I The Way We Make Things

There’s a moment I still think about. Standing in Paris at Première Vision — one of the world’s biggest textile shows — surrounded by over a thousand fabrics. Beautiful ones. Fabrics they would weave for me in any color, any weight..... It was, genuinely, overwhelming in the best way.    But something then shifted.

Because standing there, in the middle of all that possibility, I realized: this isn’t what I want to be part of. There are already so much beautiful fabrics and garments in the world, why add more?

I left Paris without ordering a single thing. And came home more certain than ever.

Outcome: 

I work exclusively with preloved materials — with a couple of honest exceptions. Haberdasheries like buttons and yarn are new. Linings have been old bedsheets or tablecloths, but good ones are getting harder to find, so I now use deadstock fabrics instead. Older pieces in the collection may have a polyester lining — but from 2025 onwards, every Studio Wunderbar piece is lined in cotton. No exceptions.

Very limited new lining. No factory orders. Just a studio in the Netherlands, a lot of beautiful rescued materials, and the deep satisfaction of turning something overlooked into something someone will wear for years.

Clean!

Everything I work with gets washed before it becomes anything. If a material doesn’t survive a wash, I don’t work with it — simple as that. Whatever arrives at your door is clean, tested, and ready for its next chapter.

 It’s not always the easy path....sometimes it’s a lot of work.

Take the vintage towel coats. First, the towels had to be washed, dried and sewn together. Then a layer of cotton was added to give them body — and to make sure that actually held, every single pattern in the fabric was stitched over. Then came the lining. A coat like that takes three to four days to make. That’s why some pieces are priced the way they are — not because of a label, but because of the hours that quietly went into them.

Or the vintage Mail bag Coats. Before a single pattern could be cut, every metal piece had to be removed. Then washing, then tumble drying to soften them up, then unpicking every seam, then ironing — strongly — to get them flat enough to work with. And after all that, the real puzzle begins: figuring out how to get the most out of every irregular, characterful piece of material.

Some will call this way of working a limitation. I call it the most interesting creative challenge there is — because the material always comes first. A design has to work with what’s there, not the other way around. And somehow, that tension is exactly where the best pieces are born and sometimes during the process the whole design changes because the material inspired something else than what I had planned.

If I just bought fabric off a roll, none of that would be necessary. But then it wouldn’t be this fun and unique, either. And I only sew things I genuinely love myself.

 

                                     🧡 Which makes me happy to sew  🧡