To see that, you have to see differently. To do something with it, you have to design differently.
I have often wondered what makes one person look at a piece of fabric and see waste, while another sees possibility.
A vintage textile whose style no longer fits the market. A garment with a stain. A piece with a rip. The outer skin of a bean bag that has lost its shape and purpose and is already on its way to landfill.
I remember holding that bean bag skin and wondering how something could be considered waste simply because it no longer served the purpose it was originally made for.
The material itself had not changed. There was still fibre, texture, labour, memory and possibility within it.
What had changed was the judgement placed upon it.
That thought stayed with me because the more I looked around, the more I realised how often we do this. We decide things have reached the end of their usefulness and move on. Yet we rarely apply that thinking to ourselves.
Most of us spend our lives redesigning who we are. We change our style, our ambitions, our direction and sometimes our entire identity. We expect transformation. We celebrate reinvention. We call it growth.
A textile changes purpose and we call it waste.
I have never quite understood that.
Particularly in a world still obsessed with growing more, producing more and demanding more from the earth. More cotton. More fabric. More consumption. More waste.
Why are we so determined to cultivate more when the material has already been grown, the fibres already exist, and so much value remains in what we already have?
That understanding did not arrive as a business idea. It evolved through necessity.
During Covid, we began styling donated clothing in the North East of England. Those images travelled further than we ever expected. Pieces that might once have been dismissed locally began appearing in national campaigns and selling to fashion customers in London, New York and Paris.
It left a mark on me because it proved something I had only felt until then.
The material was not the limitation.
The eye was the difference.
Once you realise that, it becomes difficult to look at discarded textiles in quite the same way again.
I was one of two designers behind Neuthread. Neither of us arrived through the traditional route into fashion. We came through styling, vintage, curiosity and a growing fascination with the things other people had already overlooked.
What some people saw as waste, we saw as raw material.
Not because we were interested in preserving the past, but because we were interested in what might come next. The challenge was never to erase a material's history, but to bring the best of it forward.
Ideas became concepts. Concepts became collections. Eventually, collections became a brand.
When the British Fashion Council opened the doors to London Fashion Week, I remember how improbable it felt. What had evolved through necessity and styling in the North East was now standing inside one of fashion's most visible spaces.
We had been invited, yet some part of me still felt as though we had slipped in through a side door.
The route had been unconventional. The materials had already been judged. The people behind them often had been too.
That is why the models mattered. Neurodivergent people were not added at the end of the story; they had been part of Neuthread at every stage. From design to casting to the runway, the collection had to be shown by people who understood what it meant to be seen differently.
When the lights came up, the imposter feeling began to fall away. The collection was not met as an apology, a compromise, or a worthy idea trying to look like fashion.
It was met as design. We had not slipped in through a side door. We had arrived. And our arrival was overdue.
Nobody was looking at what the garments used to be. They were looking at what they had become: secondary raw materials, classified as waste, transformed through neurodiverse design into fashion with presence, intention and desire.
The material had not gained value. People had recognised the value that was already there.
Looking back, perhaps that was true of more than the garments. We had arrived carrying materials others had finished with, still half-expecting to feel like imposters. We left with something quieter and more powerful than permission: the understanding that neither the materials, nor the people behind them, had ever needed permission to matter.
We were long overdue.
But we were here.
Different by Design.
Desired by Nature.
— Neeraj Sharma
Founder & Designer
