As Givenchy’s fabric buyer, Romain Brabo often visited the French couture house’s fabric warehouses, seeing bolts of leftover silk, lace, tulle, cashmere, wool and more piled up, all forgotten. The most exquisite were from past couture collections by Christian Dior or Givenchy, when a studio would use material for a runway look and possibly a few made-to-measure orders, then ship the remainder off to storage.
“I thought, ‘Why not offer this to everyone?’” Mr. Brabo said as he stood in the center of a small room of La Caserne, a former firehouse in northern Paris that has been converted into a fashion incubator. The room was lined with racks of fabric swatches.
“That’s how I came up with this,” he said, sweeping his arm around the space.
Mr. Brabo was referring to Nona Source, a showroom named for the Roman goddess of textiles. He helped found the showroom to offer unused fabric — or “deadstock” — from LVMH brands like Christian Dior, Givenchy, Celine and Fendi to in-house design teams for capsule collections, special orders or marketing projects, as well as emerging independent designers, at a steeply discounted price. Nona Source’s deadstock is up to 70 percent off wholesale prices, Mr. Brabo said. In May, Nona Source opened a second showroom, at the Mills Fabrica, a tech-style co-working space and incubator in Kings Cross in London. And there is talk about expanding to Southeast Asia — most likely Hong Kong or Singapore — and the United States.
“We wanted to incentivize creative reuse and do so at a super-competitive price,” Mr. Brabo said. “We revalue all of our materials, so nothing goes in the trash.”
As some fashion companies transition to a more sustainable business model, there has been much talk of circularity — the shift from a linear way of producing and selling products, known as “make-use-waste,” to one that makes recycling and zero waste priorities. For global brands, that has meant rethinking and reshaping wasteful policies; for independent, and often young, companies, eco-conscious practices like circularity are often a founding principle.
