On a warm July afternoon, we met in our office Eugenio Fasulo, Creative Consultant & Art Director, and Giuditta Tanzi, Founder & Creative Director of Garbage Core. Together, they talked about upcycling, sustainability and the creative process behind the brand.
EF: Garbage Core is a Milan-based brand that works on the concept of upcycled fashion, producing fashion collections from second-hand garments and dead stock materials. I have known Giuditta for several years, but only recently we had the chance to work together on Garbage Core’s first show, which took place on the 19th of June in Milan. But let’s proceed with an order. How did the Garbage Core project come about?
GT: Garbage Core has two different births. It was born first in late 2017-early 2018 as my final project at the university, with the same principles that I’m carrying on now. Obviously, everything is much more developed today, but that project was called Garbage Core too and the idea was basically the same. This was the first birth because, after I graduated, I didn’t actually found the brand. I started doing internships and that kind of thing that everyone does. But after a year and a half, almost by chance, I decided that I wanted to develop my ideas and I re-picked up the idea of Garbage Core. I’d consider that as the second birth, a bit more official. From then on, Garbage Core started as a real project.
EF: And where does this beautiful name come from?
GT: The story of its name is really weird. When I was doing my thesis research, I did this giant search by looking at Instagram profiles with an aesthetic based on trash and garbage—in the true sense of the word. I wanted to investigate why a person could feel attracted by abandoned stuff and street rubbish. During this research, I randomly found a hashtag and I immediately fell in love with it. It was: #garbagecore.
EF: How did your story with upcycling start?
GT: As a child, I used to collaborate with my grandmother, who was a seamstress. She had a sewing machine, which is the one I now have in the studio—upcycled too. I used to buy clothes at flea markets and then together we would modify and alter them. […] Upcycling is both a creative process and an ethical principle, which actually coexist in Garbage Core. There’s a raw-cut aesthetic, that feeling of something a bit broken and worn, but at the same time, there’s something erotic in each piece. […] The studio is a laboratory and we work a lot in an artisanal way. We always try to modify the fabrics, almost inventing new techniques to do that.
Listen to the podcast and find out more in the full conversation.
