The butterfly effect

Upcycled fashion has come a long way in two decades. When Lucire first began covering sustainable fashion, truly inventive labels were few and far between, understandably attracting a niche interest. In the 2020s, that has changed: designers have come to work with the many roads to sustainability, be it sourcing well or, in the case of the Chrysalis Lab (TCL) in Malibu, Calif., taking what the label calls ‘chrysalization’, a more transformative upcycling process.

Founded by New Zealand native Emma Trask, the Chrysalis Lab brings considerable taste and style to its upcycling process. The origins of the Chrysalis Lab in 2021 lie in a gallery-meets-retail space, their Malibu Upcycle Atelier, which brought together a community of sustainable designers, and hosted local artisans and served organic food and beverages. Since then, she has opted to focus on her own brand internationally. Looking at her output of wearable art—a term she uses, and with which we wholeheartedly agree—the Chrysalis Lab has the design integrity and strong concept to go beyond Malibu.

Trask begins with a high standard, by selecting vintage pieces, which she and her team then reimagine through knitting, embroidery, crocheting, rope art, macramé, or adding new trim and details. She sets the vision and it’s over to artisan knitters to execute her vision by hand, adding on panels or even transforming the entire garment, depending on the desired complexity. As a result, every piece is unique.

She takes things even further: clients can come to her to commission pieces, which also vary in complexity. This is the ‘Lab’ part of the business, with a turnaround time averaging just two weeks.

Trask draws a parallel between her work and the metamorphosis of a caterpillar into a butterfly.

It’s been a huge journey for this award-winning stylist and entrepreneur from her roots in Tokomaru, to a horse stud farm outside Levin, and then growing up in Waitarere Beach in New Zealand.

Attending Victoria University of Wellington in the 1990s, Trask was selected for an internship at Hewlett–Packard in Auckland, New Zealand just two years into her degree, organized by the business school’s marketing dean, Dr Peter Thirkell.

‘Honestly, the HP internship really was such a great opportunity and launching pad for me career-wise. It was kind of random or fate, however you look at it, but my roommate saw it advertised at Vic and suggested I apply.

‘I actually didn’t get it initially: they were looking for an intern to assist their marketing manager, but I was runner-up. A week or so after they gave [the internship] to someone else who was way more tech-savvy than I was, they called and said they also wanted an intern to assist their marketing communications manager, and would I be interested? Of course, I jumped at the opportunity, moved to Auckland and was in training with their very experienced, rather old-school marketing communications manager, who after a month suddenly resigned, and they just chose not to replace him.

‘So I was it left to handle all their PR, event marketing, and sponsorship programming, which was kind of a lot for a 20-year-old. It was pretty much sink or swim, and, as drowning was not how I saw myself going down, I gave it my everything.’

During this time, Trask worked with advertising agencies Ogilvy & Mather and Saatchi & Saatchi. She noted that the creative types that she was introduced to were the best dressed, and she recalls that New Zealand’s fashion industry had not properly developed in the first half of the 1990s. Through Ogilvy & Mather’s account manager, she was introduced to one of his clients, Telecom New Zealand, which had descended from the country’s former state telecommunications’ monopoly.

Telecom had just created an event marketing team, which Trask recalls as ‘a very new thing at the time.’

She continues, ‘As that is what I had excelled at and enjoyed most at HP, I was excited to be at the forefront of this in New Zealand. And event marketing pretty much became my speciality for a while.’ She stayed for over a year at Telecom before doing a similar role for Television New Zealand, ‘until I spontaneously packed up and moved to NYC with a boyfriend and that’s where I kind of fell into fashion as you do!’

The gutsy Kiwi opted to be self-employed in New York, initially in event marketing, before becoming a fashion stylist and costume designer. ‘I was like a kid in a candy store in NYC … to me exploring that aspect of NYC was everything. And the individualistic street style in that city is just so inspiring, especially in the ’90s! So much so I didn’t stop at just shopping and styling myself: I started styling my boyfriend and his finance friends, and was pretty much the self-designated shopping tour guide for all our overseas guests.’

During this period, an American friend saw her work and suggested she make a career out of styling. ‘I really didn’t know it was a thing but investigated and went down the image consulting route, which was a thing in NYC then, but wasn’t really my thing creatively.

‘However, while I was getting into that, I was quite by chance introduced to a fashion–celebrity stylist who took me under her wing as an assistant and asked me to set up an office for her and another stylist friend of hers, who at the time did all Annie Leibovitz shoots.’

After learning the ropes for nine months, Trask made the move to go out on her own. ‘I had prepped a lot of advertising jobs with the Vanity Fair stylist, and she was kind enough to refer me for my first advertising job, which I remember was a Millstone Coffee shoot with a Vanity Fair photographer, featuring a celebrity chef shot on location in Rockport, Maine.

‘Coming from a marketing background, I realized I felt very at-home in this advertising styling world, spoke the same language as the ad agency folks and understood the big picture. So I quickly saw advertising as a way to supplement all the fashion editorial work I was doing largely for free, as you do, especially when you’re starting out in fashion.’ Since then she continued to have advertising clients and excelled in commercial styling.

Go west

Although based in New York, she had visited Los Angeles when doing event marketing, and fell in love with Venice Beach. ‘[I] realized how much I missed the ocean and just saw myself there in one of the apartment buildings off the boardwalk. Which is where I ended up.’

It was perfectly timed for her as the new century unfolded. ‘The entertainment and fashion industries started to merge: celebrities began to replace models on the covers of magazines and all my editorial work just switched from models to celebrities.’ TV networks came calling for her expertise in advertising, and she included beauty in her offering.

During the 2000s, Trask styled all the advertising campaigns for the CW network, and she began getting a name for herself as a costume designer. When the network wanted to remake Melrose Place in 2009, the executive producers of the new series and the cast liked what she did for the CW’s advertising, rather than her portfolio of celebrity styling.

‘[They] were all like, “We want the show to look like this,” so that was my in.’

She believes that the line between costume designing and styling had become blurred, something that she believes “celebrity stylists” have spurred, and was confident to take on the gig.

‘I really had no idea what I was signing up for. Episodic TV is apparently the hardest TV experience, but once again, for me, it was just sink or swim. I definitely threw myself into that show. At the time my kids were young, and I don’t think I slept much at all that year. To be honest, it was kind of a relief for me when the show got cancelled. To quote New Zealand’s most quotable leader [former prime minister Jacinda Ardern], I probably didn’t have enough gas in the tank for another season.’

Nevertheless, Trask won the award for TV’s Most Stylish Show at the Hollywood Style Awards, and says that Nolan Miller (‘an absolute legend’) was an influence. ‘I’m not shy about throwing in the sequins and lamé when costume designing for Carrie Underwood, and I have to admit some vintage lamé and pouffy shoulder silhouettes may have found their way into the latest TCL collection I’m currently working on.’

She recalls that she wasn’t sure if she had time to attend the awards. ‘I had to also dress one of the lead actresses to present it to me. That night is a blur … I have no clue what I said when I accepted the award.’

She also styled the notable Just the Right Amount of Wrong campaign for the Cosmopolitan of Las Vegas, which she still regards as a career highlight. ‘I still find advertising jobs, for the most part, creatively fulfilling.

‘I like to think of myself as a triple threat: stylist, costume designer, fashion designer [laughs].’

continued below

Above: Trask’s styling for Just the Right Amount of Wrong for the Cosmopolitan Las Vegas was a career highlight.

The idea of her own brand appealed to her. A year before the pandemic, Trask took a ‘magical’ trip to Sedona and came up with the name, the Chrysalis Lab.

With the lockdown, she decided to design for herself rather than a client. ‘The fashion face mask to me was the ultimate challenge to dip my toe into the world of product designing. I … selfishly was inspired to do something as I did not want to just put anything on my face. From a stylist’s perspective, that’s a lot of real estate when it comes to your overall look. So I created a butterfly mask that was upcycled from organic ring-spun cotton Ts. The butterfly really opened up the whole concept of transformation which is obviously core to my brand.

‘My first mask collection was picked up by Revolve, but the idea and experience, however, of mass producing and wholesaling just didn’t sit right with me. The mask collection I was most proud of was the limited-edition collection which I made from damaged vintage designer garments such as a McQueen bodycon dress, a Roland Mouret top and a Jean Paul Gaultier cyberpunk dress, and this experience lead me back to the idea of transforming garments, as I had always done as a teenager in New Zealand. I realized then that this was the mission and purpose for my brand.’

Trask regards Alexander McQueen as a ‘true artist and a real rock star of the fashion world.’ She explains: ‘I’m very inspired by the convergence of art and fashion and I think McQueen’s work always embodied this, incorporating elements of sculpture and fine art into his garments.

‘His collections pushed the boundaries of fashion and challenged traditional notions of beauty well before anyone else was doing this. He used fashion as a medium to express his thoughts, ideas, and emotions, creating pieces that were not only visually stunning but also thought-provoking. I was always moved and inspired by all of his collections. I do think he was an influential factor that lead me down the path to a career in fashion.’

The Chrysalis Lab’s emphasis on knitting, meanwhile, has been influenced by Swedish designer Sandra Backlund, known for her hand-crafted, sculptural knitwear and, as Trask recalls, a young designer she met at Australian Fashion Week who had knitted garments with wire. ‘I stumbled across a talented self-taught knitter and seamstress who was actually the mother of an artist I was doing an upcycling collaboration with. We just started experimenting with knitting on to garments, changing their form with different knitting techniques, covering areas of damage or parts I didn’t like, embellishing design features I did, and just really transforming garments into something very unique and unusual.

‘Over the course of a year or so, my first collection was born and shot in Preveza, Greece. I really thought knitting would just be my means of transformation for my first collection, but there is still so much to explore in terms of techniques, applications and artistry, it’s kind of become my thing.’ She wonders if being from New Zealand, with its sheep and wool, had a part to play.

‘I have gathered a team of master knitters, crochet artists, macramé artists, rope artists and sashiko stitchers from all over the us who work with me on my collections and custom pieces for clients. Our next step is to establish artisan production bases in New Zealand, Greece, India and Sweden—all places I source yarn from or have talented knitters!

‘… One of the unique skills I bring to every creative project [is] finding the perfect team to collaborate with in order to execute my vision. At TCL I love working with artisans from all different backgrounds and cultures, some technically trained, some self-taught, some having learnt from their parents as part of their upbringing.’

Her styling has also influenced her design. ‘I love making pieces more sculptural, less flat. I’ve always done that in editorial styling, like cheating a piece or layering for the photo so it looks more voluminous. To do it with actual garment design is very fulfilling. And to transform a garment into something completely different never gets old for me.’

She also recognizes the wider environmental picture, extending the life cycle of a garment. ‘We are one step closer to this way of consuming fashion becoming the norm, which will ultimately have a real impact on protecting the planet from all the harm overproduction in the fashion industry causes.

‘My thinking is that individuality and empowering consumers to tap into their own unique personal style is the key to slowing down the fast fashion churn. If everyone isn’t trying to look the same, then it’s very hard for fast fashion to know what to overproduce.’

Trask sees the Chrysalis Lab’s Custom CoLab Service as part of this mission. If clients are involved in upcycling, they will take more ownership of their style choices, ‘rather than being force-fed what they should be wearing.

‘As an industry, we won’t solve the problem of overconsumption by just making sustainable versions of everything that is currently being produced. If things are to change consumers need to be a bigger part of the change. It’s like a reprogramming of sorts: teaching them, showing them, inspiring them to reuse, repair, reinvent, rather than just turn to the current knee-jerk reaction of wanting to replace, replace, replace.’

The Custom CoLab Service was launched at the Upcycle Atelier, where Trask and her team understood how customers could be brought on board. The first step was helping them choose the piece to upcycle. Once they took that first step, she said that clients took a different look at their wardrobes, and it became far easier for them to select future pieces to upcycle. ‘We get a lot of repeat customers once they get the hang of upcycling.’

It is a very personal service, with Trask working with the client on what their goals are: covering damage, repair, or making it something more special and unique. She asks whether the garment is for a special occasion, daily wear, or making it more suitable. They can alter the fit. ‘Once the collaborative process starts customers who may have been hesitant at first actually have a lot of ideas and visions for their piece,’ she says.

After the consultation, Trask produces a design plan with the client’s goals and budget in mind.

‘I ask or gauge how involved the customer would like to be in the rest of the design process, something that just comes naturally for me from years of styling. And with that in mind, [I] will share progress pics or ask preferences on material and detailing options if needed. But sometimes the final presentation is the first time they will see their piece again, and the reaction customers have to seeing and trying on their “chrysalized” creation is really all the reward for me.’

The next step is for the Chrysalis Lab to take its show on the road, partnering with other sustainable designers and platforms, and doing pop-ups around the world. Prior to the interview, they were in Franklin, Tenn., and Soho in NYC. In March, St Barth’s is their destination.

Trask explains, ‘Being part of sustainable platforms, in particular upcycling platforms, and supporting other sustainable and upcycling designers is of the utmost importance to us. To really make a difference and promote concious fashion consumption, there needs to be more options for consumers in this realm. We believe the more independent designers, brands and platforms that are doing appealing things in the slow fashion space, the more quickly it will become the norm.’ •

You can find the Chrysalis Lab at thechrysalislab.com.

Jack Yan is founder and publisher of Lucire.

Above: The Chrysalis Lab’s Syros collection, a summery follow-up showing that its techniques can be applied to beachwear.

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