How Ouno Salvages Old Things To Make New
We primarily use beautiful, collectible vintage materials to make our soft furnishings. This can be a labour intensive process.
Why do we prefer vintage textiles?
Quality. We started our design business partly because we loved older fabrics and had already amassed a valuable collection. The quality of textile production has changed over the years, and with notable exceptions, it's not for the better. Industry's need to make fabrics faster, cheaper and in larger quantities has inevitably changed the way fabrics look and feel. To get the kind of textile quality and longevity and character that was affordable to many in the 1930s, or 1960s, you often now have to pay about $300 a yard. Fabrics once made either by hand or in small mills have a beautiful weight and texture. The more efficient the machinery, it seems the less character a textile often has. The quality of the fibres, the dyes... vintage textiles often have the kind of depth and beauty that make them perpetually interesting to live with, rather than disposable.
Sourcing Materials
The first step is to source materials. Most of what we buy comes from "rag houses." Rag houses are hard-to-access warehouses where old textiles go to die - clothes, bedding, curtains, homewares, any soft furnishings - and from where they are reincarnated as raw materials. The textiles arrive at the warehouse in mixed bales, and there they are sorted and re-baled and sent out to be re-distributed or recycled. The best of the clothing is bought by "pickers" who work for the vintage clothing stores. Like us, pickers buy in bulk, paying by the pound. But most items that end up at rag houses are there because they can't be re-sold locally, not even at Value Village or the Salvation Army, and in fact much of what ends up at the rag house has already proved unsellable at charity or second-hand shops, and we see plenty of items with their Value Village tags still attached. These rejects are sorted at the rag house and sent on. Cotton mills will re-pulp old cottons to make new fabric; mills in India and Africa will buy and pulp old jeans to make new ones; and charities will buy bales of old t-shirts and send them overseas to clothe people in need. The uses of old textiles are very mixed, but they are all a great example of recycling. In our case, we're welcome at the rag house because we don't compete with the other pickers - we will buy vintage textiles that are in excellent condition but are undesirable for some reason: they're an unfashionable cut, or are a size 18 muumuu, or they are stunning mid-century modern curtains with a rip, or an authentic Moroccan berber carpet with a single rust stain that we will happily cut around. So that's our niche. We will buy curtains, weavings, silk scarves, coats (for our trench coat bags, for example), cashmere sweaters, vintage bedspreads, etc. Some of our best creations have been made out of once-expensive evening dresses. Apart from the rag house, we will also occasionally buy from thrift stores, if they're affordable, or online. Recyclers such as ourselves tend to have many sources. Lastly, we don't always consciously set out to find a particular item. We buy anything of high quality and intrinsic beauty. We bring it back to the studio and figure out what to do with it later.
Washing Materials, and Testing for Durability
The next step is wash everything and determine the stability of the dyes, etc. Where possible we wash and dry everything on hot heat to make sure things are going to continue to look good no matter how our customers wash them, and to make sure dyes are not going to transfer to other items - like your sofa, for instance. We wash everything with environment-friendly soaps.
Construction
Once fabrics are washed, we then have to determine whether there are flaws or damage to be cut away. Once we've assessed how much useable fabric we are actually dealing with, then we try to figure out its best use. Sometimes it takes months to decide what to do with a particular material. We collected vintage silk scarves for a year before we discovered how to use them, and it was the same with trench coats - it's a process of playing around in the studio.
