Tinker, tailor: inside Eden Tan’s DIY den

Eden Tan is more than just a fashion designer. While his Central Saint Martins graduate collection earned him this year’s L’Oréal Professionnel Young Talent Award, marking him as one to watch, Tan would more comfortably describe himself as a “tinkerer,” fixing and finding solutions to whatever challenge is at hand. Spend any amount of time in his presence, and this impulse to “tinker” reveals itself. Before we even start rolling, he jumps up, hammer in hand, ready to MacGyver a makeshift solution to the window rattling in the wind threatening to derail filming.

Reaching for power tools as readily as fabric shears, it becomes clear how fashion is just the latest facet of Tan’s ongoing experiments in zero-waste. A natural instinct honed over years of DIY projects with his dad (“I think I made a crossbow [once],” he recalls), Tan was taught from an early age to see infinite potential beyond something’s prescribed limitations, scavenging materials to breathe new life into them. Lined with saws, screws, drill bits and shelves of seemingly miscellaneous odds and ends from balloons to bonsai tree food, Tan’s studio space – whose central work surface also doubles as Murphy bed when his brother comes to stay – is a shrine to this. “A lot of the things I keep maybe aren’t worth anything,” he admits, his search for “hidden fabrics” leading him to airbags saved from the scrapheap, “but their value in a landfill is much more expensive than their monetary value.”

Like the deconstructed “sketchbooks” of research for his final project, this flat lay of tools and materials on the walls form a roadmap of Tan’s lateral way of thinking, pulling ideas from each corner to form hybrids like his leather jacket backpacks and car hood ornament caps. “There’s lots of stuff in here, not necessarily fashion-related, which helps me fill in the gap between my different processes,” he explains, gesturing around the room. The throughline that connects it all? “It’s just like a fabrication language, and that’s what I’m interested in,” he says of how he began to apply this to making clothes.

“On Borrowed Fabric” – focusing on six different fabrics from latex, denim, and even mattress covers through a desire to minimally interfere with each roll while still communicating the idea of a garment so that they may be used again – is the fruit of this curiosity. “It’s about making zero-waste,” which Tan recognises as an “important”, but “pretty bland topic, a bit more palatable.” “You shouldn’t have to engage with it as zero-waste to appreciate the work,” he tells us, which is exactly what made the collection resonate in an industry still finding ways to grapple with its significant impact on the environment.

Full of contradictions, hypocrisies, and ham-fisted attempts at greenwashing, sustainability in fashion is still handled clumsily through a mainstream overproduction of tote bags and slogan tees purporting to benefit either the rainforest or the oceans. While we’re leaps and bounds from where we once were, with major companies undertaking their own zero-waste initiatives, it is often the work of small designers like Tan who have this ethos baked into their DNA that are really able to interrogate and present interesting alternatives to the fashion cycle as we understand it.

Sending out models wrapped in rolls that doubled as garments and bags, alongside an airbrushed substitute for the environmentally taxing denim-washing process, Tan’s “On Borrowed Fabric” was a powerful statement on our perception of a garment’s lifespan, and what we could do to change it. “I’ve only done one collection, and I’m not sure I intend to do more,” he says honestly, citing how the traditional fashion cycle “forces creatives to make waste and often make seasons which aren’t as high calibre as previous seasons because the ball has to keep rolling.” Instead, like things he picks up at the charity shop and cuts up to reengineer, he prefers to focus on the continuity of the life these rolls may live after him. “I feel like I’ve added to the story of that material, that object – but the story doesn’t really end with me, it keeps going.” In the meantime, he’ll keep on tinkering.

Watch our In The Studio With Eden Tan above.