Imaginative, sustainable clothing and textiles all handmade in Brooklyn, NY.

With dreamlike crochet shapes and sunprinted silks, these pieces are created for the curious to love.

Each piece is one of kind—from the textile, down to the seam finishing. While approaching clothing as wearable sculpture, Amalya's work marries beauty and grit.

The polished and exquisitely unrefined mingle through constant exploration in fabric manipulation, silhouette and upcycling. Experimental and distinctive in her design, Amalya practices zero-waste construction, and works predominantly with natural fibers.

Most recently she presented her latest collection, 'Fluence' at NYFW. Amalya has also shown at Paris Fashion Week, Miami Art Basel, Vancouver Fashion Week and has work currently on display in New York, Vermont, and Antwerp. Based in New York, Amalya Has Holds degrees from Central St. Martins, Parsons and Eugene Lang.  

​

​

 

Tell me something about you, how did you become a sustainable designer? 

​

I am just naturally a bit of a harder! I get sentimentally attached to interesting and beautiful things, and have trouble letting go so it is a welcome challenge to figure out how to give favorite scraps and treasures new lives. As a creator I find that I am also more creative within parameters

 

Why do you think up cycling is important? 

​

Most simply there is already so much stuff in the world, no need to create more. Working with what we've got is a much better way of creating, which we should of course still do. It also is a way to honor the past, and furthermore create a visual dialogue about how we view, appreciate and are impacted by the past-trends/design techniques/ideas.

​

 

How do you create your designs? 

​

My designs are often driven by textiles that I have either created or found-I really like to create a silhouette that will show them off. I often create an entire garment from a textile and then use a patchwork technique I developed to create multiple pieces using the remaining scraps. This way I can really get the most out of a textile. For this reason I favor prints that are not directional/literal.  I am strongly impacted by nature-the punk/raw energy of nature contrasting with an urban setting and how an overgrown root or moss in the cracks is ever reclaiming. This contrast, resilience, unexpected beauty is what is interesting to me. I think this sentiment is something we deal with ourselves existing in an permeating society, it is important to tease out that beauty that peeks through and nourish it.

​

​

How can quarantine be a good moment for becoming more conscious and sustainable? 

 

We can't get that much! Be it not wanting to leave the house, shipping delays or any myriad of the ways the Coronavirus has impacted what we came to be used to things are a bit harder to come by now. Instead of being frustrated by this, it really should be seen as a welcome crash course in sustainability. As little as reusing a shopping bag as a trash bag and as much as setting up an apartment farm of microgreens-we have a moment now to figure out how to be sustainable in a way that makes sense for each of us individually. On some level it is recognized that this entire situation is a result of prolonged universal bad habits, perhaps a silver lining of this will be new better habits that are carried on into the future. We should be buying less that we love, not just to fulfill the short term rush of a purchase.

​

​

​

http://www.amalya.com

 

​