TOAST Renewed by | Meta Struycken

Dutch textile artist Meta Struycken spent decades immersed in the world of fashion, working as a designer, creative director of the Dutch Fashion Institute and editor-in-chief of a trade magazine. Over time, disillusioned with its relentless pace, she began looking elsewhere for meaning. “My interest in needlework only really began a few years ago,” she recalls, describing how she turned towards the slower rhythms of domestic textile crafts, once part of everyday life. To explore how these crafts might take on new form, she worked on a series of small jacket studies, using them as a canvas for embroidery, appliqué and quilting. 90 of these pieces - just 35cm tall -were exhibited last summer at EENWERK gallery in Amsterdam, received as art objects and signalling a new chapter in her work.

That spirit of repair and reinvention mirrors that of TOAST Renewed by, our new limited-edition series, which sees one-of-a-kind garments transformed by guest artists through traditional textile handcrafts, honouring both their past and their potential future.

The first in the series, TOAST Renewed by Meta Struycken, is a capsule of eight garments that will be on display at TOAST Brooklyn in September and October, and available to buy online. Each piece is created from returned and damaged TOAST items and fabric remnants in Meta’s studio, sitting west of Amsterdam in Haarlem. Across the collection, handcraft techniques are used for both preservation and transformation: an organic cord jumpsuit is embroidered and appliquéd with abstract motifs; a quilted cotton jacket carries sculptural white stitch work across its surface; a wool cardigan is revived with painterly darning in vivid shades.

For Meta, these acts of mending are part of a longer tradition. Until the latter half of the twentieth-century, repair was a necessity. Clothes were expensive and households kept them in use for as long as possible. Tears were patched, worn fabric was cut down for other purposes and textile waste was rare. Many of the techniques she uses today - patchwork, quilting, appliqué, embroidery - originated as inventive ways to extend the life of garments. By returning to them, she believes we can rediscover a more sustainable relationship with clothing and “keep our planet going.”

The pieces Meta has created for TOAST Renewed by also draw deeply from her background in art and design. “For me, the universal visual elements of art are a driving force to renew the aesthetics of traditional handicrafts,” she explains. “The modernist abstract principles needed to create a work of art - like form, texture, composition, colour and value - offer endless ideas for repurposing clothes. Instead of paint, pencils and brushes, fabric, yarn and needles are my tools. For TOAST I chose an expressive, painterly approach.”

“I love how wearable and joyful these pieces are,” says Laura Shippey, TOAST Creative Director. “These are one off pieces with an incredible amount of handwork and the selection of colours, stitch techniques and mix of materials is uniquely playful and expressive.”

Meta is keen to show that repair can be an act of creation as well as preservation. “Once you get started, it’s so much more fun to go beyond patching a hole or mending a tear. Think of it as giving the whole garment a second life - that’s when something truly fresh, personal and unique can be created,” she says It’s about treating a damaged garment as “a blank canvas.” She is working on a book - STITCH! - which continues this theme, following on from her exhibition of the same name. Conceived as a sourcebook to spark the imagination, it gathers ideas to encourage readers to pick up a needle and thread and intuitively repair, reuse, or personalise clothing. With embroidery, patchwork, appliqué and darning at its centre, it explores traditional textile crafts in new and inventive ways.

At the heart of Meta’s practice is a call for responsibility, which sits with the wearer as much as the maker. She believes meaningful change in fashion will come not only from designers but from individual decisions. “Each of us influences the future of our planet through our buying choices, so change is up to us,” she says. “And why should fashion change every season? This more and more seems to be an obsolete idea at the present time. As newness and trends will not be so relevant anymore, we can revise the meaning of fashion and find new ways of valuing clothes that place planetary wellbeing at the center.”

The collaboration is an exciting new chapter for TOAST’s circular initiatives. “Historically, Renewed has been delivered through our in-house Repair Specialists,” says Rosie McKissock, TOAST Brand Director, “but with 'Renewed by’ we will work with people who share our values and also have their own unique design handwriting, allowing us extend that idea of imaginative transformation even further. Like anything ‘simple’ there is a huge amount of skill in being able to repair clothing or textiles. Truly, it’s an art form.”

TOAST Renewed by Meta Struycken will be presented at TOAST Brooklyn, New York from Saturday 20 September to Sunday 19 October, and available to buy online from Thursday 23 September.

Words by Alice Simkins Vyce.

Photography by Inga Powilleit and Simon Moss.