PSA: next time you give your shoes to charity or drop them in one of those clothes bins, tie them together. It seems obvious when you think about it, but pairs often get separated during transportation and, well, there are few things more useless than a single shoe. There are vast footwear graveyards in recycling centres for the loners, which are doomed to an eternity (or at least 30-40 years, which is about the time that it takes for a trainer to decompose) in landfill. 

That is unless fashion designer Helen Kirkum has anything to do with it. She was doing a Masters at the Royal College of Art when she visited the London HQ of charity retailer Traid and saw the piles of castoffs. Kirkum decided to embark on an upcycling project, which caught the attention of streetwear blog Highsnobiety. After a stint working at Adidas Women’s Originals post-graduation, in 2019, Kirkum went back to her roots, starting an eponymous business that takes old shoes, deconstructs them, and puts them back together again, giving them a second life.

How did Kirkum find herself in Traid’s Wembley warehouse? It was initially about drawing attention to the artisanal processes involved in creating trainers: during her studies, she wanted to branch out from making brogues and dress shoes, and instead explore street- and sportswear. “Trainers just appear so white and shiny on the shelf,” says Kirkum, who has a friendly demeanour and a head of curls, which are slightly windswept from having just Lime-biked into her Greenwich studio. “They’re so devoid of the process of making whereas, with traditional footwear, people understand that people made those with their hands.” 

“Whenever I don’t know how to do something, I just cut something up,” Kirkum continues. “So I wanted to collect some old trainers to find out how they were made.” She asked for donations, but found people reluctant to part with their old kicks. So, she visited Traid, hoping it would be able to spare a couple of pairs. When she saw the mountain of useless halves, she decided to do something about it, driven by two observations: 1) people feel connected to their old trainers (Kirkum herself is still holding onto her first pair of Converse, which are covered in the writing and doodles of her friends from school: “I guess it was my first customisation project, in a way, and it’s a connection to people that I loved”), and 2) the footwear industry has a massive problem with waste.

Kirkum, who has just been nominated for a British Fashion Award, quite literally takes trash and turns it into treasure, using deadstock materials, either from Traid or the single samples or faulty returns from fashion and sportswear brands, to craft artisanal pieces: “We clean [the shoes], deconstruct them into their component pieces, and then assemble a material which we call our ‘collaged leather’, and essentially collage back together all the pieces to create a raw material that we can use to make our shoes.”

Customers can buy these as part of the ‘voyage’ service, which refers to the trainers saved from landfill, or they can opt for the ‘bespoke’ service. Here, people send Kirkum their old shoes, which often have sentimental value – perhaps the owner ran their first marathon in them, or competed in a big match, or travelled the world. These are then de- and reconstructed, creating something new and wearable which retains the emotional connection. It takes Kirkum about two weeks to make one pair of made-to-order trainers, and she doesn’t make much profit given the labour-intensity of the process, but, she says, this is the lifeblood of the business. It’s what she’s all about.

Looking at Kirkum’s designs, some fashion fans may be reminded of a certain Balenciaga item – that is, the ultra-distressed trainer that made waves when it was released in 2022. That this is the standard-bearer for the ‘used’ aesthetic is a shame because, well, Balenciaga’s trainer wasn’t used. Kirkum’s designs, however, are: “When my first collection came out, it was, let’s say, on a lot of mood boards for a lot of brands,” she says carefully. “It's really hard to see brands take on the aesthetic but not the values. When we create a product, we’re not making something for the sake of it. Equally, though, the distressed look being ‘in’ makes us seem on trend, even if we're not trying to be!”

Kirkum does collaborate with brands (she has brought out lines with Reebok and Adidas) – if they were going to take inspiration from her designs, she thought, she may as well have a hand in the process. That said, greenwashing – when brands make exaggerated or misrepresented claims about sustainability – is rife, so the designer has to be selective about who she partners with and do her due diligence. Her bottom line, always, is that she won’t customise a new shoe.

“I think we're at a point now where any brand that's not addressing sustainability is not one that I would want to support,” says Kirkum. She’s not saying that to do so is easy, which is why it’s all the more imperative that big brands with big resources step up to the plate: “Working with post-consumer waste is labour intensive and expensive so, in the short term, it doesn't seem like a good solution to major brands. But that’s a bit short sighted because, in the long term, there is a business case for investing in sustainable materials. When you're set in your ways it's really hard to change the process which is why, as a small brand, I feel the weight on my shoulders.”

Kirkum doesn’t claim to be making a dent in the vast and endemic problem of waste in the fashion industry, which produces about 92 million tons of textile waste every year. What she is doing is pushing a dialogue. Moving the needle. Holding larger brands to account and showing that there are, in fact, different ways to think about “what the fashion industry is and what it could be”. As long as Kirkum can make people think twice about throwing away a pair of shoes, instead opting to get them repaired, tailored, cleaned, repurposed or customised, then she is helping rewrite the narrative.

“With fast fashion, we've sort of forgotten how things are made, and we don't place value on them in that way,” she says. “The more that you can feel connected to your products, the more conscious you will be.”

Visit helenkirkum.com

Read more: The truth behind the fashion industry's sustainability claims