I Vestiti che ami vivono a lungo

Today, the author of this book " I vestiti che ami vivono a lungo" is considered the queen of upcycling, the process that gives new life to discarded clothing, and is one of the icons of the movement calling for the fashion industry to become more ethical and sustainable. Orsola de Castro was born in Rome, grew up in Venice and landed in the cosmopolitan London of the 1980s at only 15 years old.

"And to think that it all started from a holey jumper". That's right: she was still very young when a shopkeeper saw a cashmere jumper that she had repaired with crocheted appliqués and ordered six identical ones. Like in a fairy tale, in just a few months, her creations arrived everywhere and in 1997 she created From Somewhere (everything comes from somewhere, everything has an origin), a fashion label that offers clothes made with tailoring techniques using discards from big brands.

Orsola de Castro and her partner have been fighting against waste in fashion since 1997 by using leftover fabrics found in warehouses around the world for their collections. These are leftover fabrics and often include precious fabrics such as silk and cashmere.

In 2013 Orsola launched Fashion Revolution, which over the years has become the largest fashion activism movement in the world.

In the Clothes you love last a long time, she talks to us about fashion, aesthetics, cut-and-sew, the pleasure of dressing ourselves by building our own identity. But hers is also a book written by a woman who has worked in the fashion system for decades, who from the inside got to know its volatility, contradictions, waste, even crimes, and who decided to work to radically transform it. And her strength lies in making us understand that true politics begins with individual choices, with everyday gestures that belong to our collective experience, like picking up a needle and thread to repair something that we are otherwise forced to throw away.