Xenia Sidorenko: The Side Effect Is the Raw Material

Xenia Sidorenko spent years inside mass fashion production in China, where waste was simply a side effect of making the thing you actually sold. Cutting room scraps, surplus fabric, damaged garments, unsold stock. When she founded USEDEM in 2015 she reversed the relationship. The Buddy Backpack began as discarded jeans. A product line for Levi’s, adidas, ASICS and W Hotels began as their own deadstock. The question is not what material do we need to make this, but what can this material become. Not all of it worked. Some ideas were visually exciting and then died on contact with the factory, too much labour, too many operations, or a waste stream that could not be sourced twice. On why industrial upcycling cannot run on creativity alone, and what changes when you design for the waste stream and the production line at the same time.