By Cristina Rivas - Translated by Ángela Suárez
Uruguayan designer Lucía López didn’t arrive in the world of upcycling because it was trendy — but because it had long been part of her everyday life. Her connection to fabric scraps began in her grandmother’s sewing room, where Lucía learnt that fabrics, even smaller ones, could have a second chance. “I was always interested in working with textile waste, in finding ways to use discarded materials that no longer belonged to the formal industry”, Lucía explains.
(Vía Instagram: @lucia_lopez_rod)
Materials in flea markets and experimented with waste from other industries. The wish to transform the waste naturally led her go to the upcyclingworld, and she not only adopted the concept but also investigated and re-signified it from a critical perspective.
What is upcycling for Lucía López?
Lucía makes a clear difference between upcycling and traditional recycling. “Unlike recycling, where original materials are often degraded — as happens with recycled cotton or plastic — upcycling seeks to transform discarded materials by adding value without losing quality,” she explains.
(Via Instagram: @lucia_lopez_rod in @casaurbanauniformes)
The term, originally borrowed from other industries, emerged as a critic of traditional recycling that often resulted in lower-quality products. The prefix “up” symbolizes the upgrade or revaluation. In Spanish, the term has been translated to supraciclajealthough this is not a widely used term.
(Vía Instagram: @lucia_lopez_rod)
In fashion, upcycling involves transforming discarded clothing or materials into new creations, while preserving — and sometimes even highlighting — original details, such as seams, textures, fastenings, and trims. For Lucía, this process has a strong creative, technical, and above all, ethical component.
Beyond the objective: other forms of actions
For Lucía, upcycling isn’t just a design technique but a critical strategy embedded within a broader reflection on the fashion system itself. In mid-2018, alongside designer Agustina Comas, Lucía held a conference called “Post Fashion. Other forms of actions”at Proyecto CasaMario in Montevideo. There, they challenged the traditional structures of fashion design, advocating for a necessary slowdown in the cycles of production, distribution, and consumption, with sustainability at the core.
Within this framework, they explored the possibility of infiltrating the fashion system critically and gradually, adopting strategies that subtly subvert its established logic. They emphasized the value of cooperative work dynamics, knowledge exchange, collective reflection, respecting the time needed for learning processes, and preserving handicraft traditions. One of the most provocative examples was shopdroppingwithin this framework, they explored the possibility of infiltrating the fashion system critically and gradually, adopting strategies that subtly subvert its established logic. They emphasized the value of cooperative work dynamics, knowledge exchange, collective reflection, respecting the time needed for learning processes, and preserving handcraft traditions.
(López Rodríguez, 2022, about clothing and manufacturing practices)
The transformative potential of upcycling
Currently, Lucía López leads upcycling projects with upcycling with an industrial focus- a relatively unexplored field in Latin America. In collaboration with the Uruguayan company Casa Urbana Uniformes, she’s developing a circular management system for textile waste that goes beyond creative redesign to tackle sustainability from a strategic and structural perspective.
Casa Urbana embraces the initiative of the United Nations Global Compact, since they received the First Prize for Sustainable Fashionin 2021. This distinction boosted their public commitment to the Compact’s ten principles, which focus on human rights, labor standards, environmental responsibility, and anti-corruption efforts. In Uruguay, more than 60 companies participate in this Network of Good Practices, promoting a more ethical and sustainable business model.
(Vía Instagram: @lucia_lopez_rod)
For Lucía, this ethical framework reinforces the relevance of the translation of sustainability into real decisions in the companies. “The work we do with Casa Urbana allow us to think about upcycling at scale with measurable processes, while preserving the artisanal spirit and critical stance towards the system,” she explains.
Although she acknowledges that the quantitative impact of upcycling is still relatively small, Lucía highlights its enormous potential as a tool for raising awareness. “It is small today, but it plays a pivotal role in exposing the issue of textile waste, and in offering accessible and creative ways to face it.”, she states.
Social media: visibility with caution
Lucía is cautious regarding the role of social media. Even though she admits platforms like Instagram have been key to spreading new sustainable practices, she also warns of the risk of upcycling becoming just another aesthetic trend stripped of its critical content. “It’s important that people understand why we are doing it. It’s not just about sewing two shirts together — it’s about taking a stance on; it is taking a stand on consumption, on the value of natural resources and human labor”, she affirms.
From both an academic and professional perspective, Lucía insists that true sustainability lies in the processes: in how garments are designed, produced, and reused, not just in the final product. “Sometimes, the right thing isn’t the most popular, but with time, those new ways can become the standard,” she reflects.
A scalable and collective future
Lucía López believes in an upcycling approach that doesn’t compete with other sustainability strategies, but complements them. From artisanal craftsmanship to industrial implementation, she advocates for working on multiple fronts simultaneously. “It is not about homemade clothing being less valuable than industrial clothing “. It’s about how every action contributes. We need to work along multiple paths at the same time,” she states ng“. It’s about how every action contributes. We need to work along multiple paths at the same time,” she states.
In a world where fast fashion dominates the market and growing mountains of textile waste, voices like Lucia Lopez’s offer real, creative, and committed alternatives. Her work is an invitation to think beyond trends and to see discarded materials as resources with potential, and to remember that change, often, begins with something as simple as a stitch.
Sources:
Informe Casa Urbana 2023: https://drive.google.com/file/d/1vHFiWj22x8iGkt3GM7-82y1ThMXH63jT/view?fbclid=PAZXh0bgNhZW0CMTEAAac1bd0VHJ2jlkywh4D3pnESxwpQuBi31itHZ3ZxYVjvdlPAzBssvPCT-P0ACg_aem_DGYGEp1h17HZ0hZrRyMYcA
López Rodríguez, L. (2022). Atinando al ojo del cíclope: la remanufactura y otros modos de accionar nuestras prácticas del vestir (S. Alonso & F. Miranda, Eds.). CasaMario Edition.
