RE-PURPOSING | Giving New Life To The Old

Naimah bint Lukman
Sep 9, 2020
3 min read

Updated: Sep 23, 2020

Hi sweet souls!

Thank you for sticking with me during my 2 weeks hiatus. Also, thank you for referring and sharing my posts with your friends. I love you!

In the post on personal style here, I mentioned how my style tilts towards sustainability. I would be dedicating another post to sustainable fashion. This post will be on re-purposing which is a valid tool in sustainability.

What is re-purposing?

Re-purposing simply means using something (for fashion; a fashion piece) for a purpose other than what it was originally intended for.

“Uncommon thinkers reuse what common thinker refuse”

-J.R.D.Tata

Re-purposing is not limited to fashion, anything can be repurposed. Re-purposing genuinely gives me so much joy and makes me excited as I find the process of discovering other use for what I already have very interesting.

“Creation always involves building upon something else. There is no art that doesn’t reuse”

-Lawrence Lessig

Re-purposing sometimes requires entirely tearing something down to get what one needs. Hence, making it irreversible. Other times, the repurposed item is reversible and can be used for an entirely different thing other than what it was initially intended for.

Re-purposing is not limited to fashion as there is re-purposing in architecture. In architecture, re-purposing simply means converting a building or using a building for a use other than what it was originally intended for while retaining significant and historical features of the building.

This building is called the white house in the University of Lagos, department of architecture. It was the first structure built in the university and was originally built as a site house during construction of some faculties on campus. It has since been repurposed and is currently the 100level studio of the department of architecture. @signaturebykam did a documentary about the building here.

Also, every other studio of the department was originally designed to be science laboratories but has since then been converted into 200, 300, 400, MED1, MED2, MLA and MUD studios.

One of the most famous repurposed buildings in history is the Hagia Sofia. The building was originally a cathedral, then a mosque then a museum and now a Mosque. Through all the process of re-purposing the building, the historical components were retained.

We often waste a lot of fabrics and cloth pieces simply because we feel tired of wearing them or we do not know how else to wear what we already have.

Re-purposing gives a new life to clothes we think no longer serves our purpose

Re-purposing can be the solution to that style rut you find yourself. I wrote about style rut here.

Going to my parents’ house in march due to the lock-down was impromptu and I didn’t imagine I would be there for months. I went there with just two clothes and since I haven’t stayed there in years, the only clothes I had there were very old ones. Well, I guess circumstances bring out the best in us as I was able to re-purpose the old clothes into new ones.

This pant, for instance, used to be a dress that was repurposed due to lack of clothes.

I removed the upper part of the dress and converted it to a crop top. Then the lower part to what is in the picture below.

I got the inspiration for the pants from @ryaansari

The skirt here is a big hijab my mom gave me. I didn’t have to do much to the hijab. This was particularly very interesting while doing the re-purposing. All I did was increase the face of the hijab to fit into my waist then held pinned it on the side. If you have a big hijab, you should try this out.