LONDON - Driven by a passion to protect the planet, Phoebe English hasn't bought a centimetre of fabric or a single plastic button for her collection at London Fashion Week.
The fashion industry is one of the most polluting, accounting for up to 10 percent of greenhouse gas emissions, according to World Bank estimates.
"Fast fashion", where clothes are bought for a few dollars and then discarded after a few wears, leads to a high volume of waste, which often ends up in illegal landfills in the Global South.
It's an issue that preoccupies English, a 37-year-old designer who graduated from London's prestigious Central Saint Martins arts college in 2010.
"We are producing too much too quickly, in quite an unnecessary way, and we need to really think about it," she told AFP.
"Is that something that can actually continue with the planetary boundaries that we have?"
"We spend the year collecting textile waste, so that might be in the form of off-cuts from other businesses," she explained.
Several wedding dress manufacturers send her scraps of fabric "that usually just go in the rubbish".
The non-uniform and often small nature of the off-cuts makes the work transforming them into garments to wear "quite technical and complicated", she added.
Given the self-imposed constraints focusing on slow and sustainable clothes, she only presents one collection per year at fashion week, which starts on Friday, while most designers present at least two.
"We can't do it at the same speed that potentially other companies can," she added.
"What we're aiming for is to work in less damaging ways," she said.