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Saturday 29th of September 2007 03:18:34 AM

Not one to waste fabrics and materials, Canadian fashion designer, Adrienne Butikofer, finds vintage T-Shirts, dress shirts, and other items at charity clothing stores and creates new designs that are one of a kind. Using old buttons, fabric from other clothing, and simply reshaping the shirts, she is able to create a new piece of clothing for her line, 'Adrienne Butikofer'.

After winning the Up & Coming Designer award at the Toronto Fashion and Design Festival, Butikofer is happy that her designs, inspired by 'The Girls Own Annual', available in two volumes, which were printed in 1913 and 1919 as a way to help women conserve resources while Canada was involved in World War I, are being noticed. "The whole making and mending philosophy is huge in these books because it was during wartime. There are articles about how to transform your old clothes into new clothes and how to make things last as long as possible and how to do little tweaks here and there," said Butikofer.

Before creating her own label, Butikofer, held an internship in a design firm located in Berlin, Germany. It was there that she developed her appreciation for reworking old clothing. "They were doing a lot of stuff where they would take big Sweatshirts and take them in and make them small and tight and hot. When I came back to Canada, I started doing that. My first collection was reworking European boy-band shirts I found in thrift shops in Berlin," she said.

"My whole philosophy is that there is enough garbage already in the world and I don't need to support any factories to make more. I would rather use up what already exists, which is what I am trying to do with the shirts I am making now," Butikofer added.

(c)Diane Groves, www.sxc.hu