Siri Johansen & Sebastien Maes: Waste Yarn Project

Feature Image Credit: Waste Yarn Project Lookbook

What happens to the yarn left behind after knitwear production? It’s too little for the next big order, too mismatched to neatly fit into a collection, so they sit around factory floors or get discarded.

Siri Johansen and Sebastien Maes quest to utilise leftovers became Waste Yarn Project, the Paris-based independent label they founded to turn surplus yarn from the fashion industry into one-of-one knitwear.

Johansen had spent more than a decade designing knitwear, with roles at Burberry and Kenzo. She had met Maes through the industry. And years later, while visiting his production business in Shanghai, they saw boxes of yarn.

Johansen began asking why it couldn't be used anyway. That eventually pushed the pair to design a production system around the leftovers instead of expecting the leftovers to fit a normal production system.

Johansen brought her knitwear design experience and what Waste Yarn Project describes as a love for the strange colour combinations that leftover yarn can accidentally create.

Maes brought manufacturing and production expertise through his work with Maestro Knitting. They had been colleagues before becoming friends and eventually co-founders.

Developed after years of experimenting, their system helps determine which yarn combinations are used. The garment shape is designed, but the exact mix of yarn is partly left to this controlled system of chance. That means the waste isn't forced to behave like conventional raw material. The design adapts to what already exists.

Waste Yarn Project has an ongoing WYP PYM collaboration with mending artist Celia Pym that explores visible mending and slow craft, with workshops held in Bulgaria, France and Norway. Another project, Puzzle Pieces, uses leftover knitting tests and production scraps alongside other discarded materials as the starting point for design.

Visible mending also fits naturally into the project through their collaborations. They've experimented with darning and patching on their knitwear, treating holes and repairs as part of the garment, and not as something to hide.

They work with the odd colours, limited quantities and unpredictability as they are. In a fashion system built around making more and keeping everything uniform, using what already exists actually feels surprisingly simple and smart.