Meet the Upcycling Wizard Behind Ellery’s Unexpected New Capsule Collaboration

Kym Ellery’s design process has always been about reconciling two halves: blending the refinement and technical know-how of her current home city of Paris, with the very Antipodean, wearable ease that reflects her brand’s beginnings in Sydney. Even so, this sense of two worlds colliding felt especially dramatic in her spring 2021 collection.

The reason for this bold aesthetic pivot became clearer upon learning that Ellery had decided to collaborate on the entire collection with another designer. And not just any designer: In a leap of faith, she handed over the keys to her archive to Duran Lantink, the Dutch upcycling whiz and 2019 LVMH Prize semifinalist whose ability to transform designer deadstock into strangely desirable sartorial confections have earned him a reputation as the Willy Wonka (or perhaps more appropriately, the Victor Frankenstein) of sustainable design.

“I first saw Duran’s work about two years ago on Instagram,” says Ellery of the origins of this unlikely collaboration. “So often in fashion, deadstock can have negative connotations, so I thought it was cool that he was taking things that have been misunderstood and giving them a new life. I liked how he brought positivity to a corner of fashion that isn’t always seen as such a positive thing.” On whether there were any nerves regarding sending her treasured archival pieces off to be spliced and diced into a new collection, Ellery seems remarkably relaxed. “For me, that was the exciting part!” she adds.

While Lantink’s aesthetic world, with all of its boldly intercut graphics, trippy proportions, and kaleidoscopic colors, might initially appear to sit at the opposite spectrum to Ellery’s understated chic, it turns out his backstory with the brand extends further back than one might think. “It’s funny, because there are actually one or two pieces from Ellery in my graduate collection [at the Gerrit Rietveld Academy] from 2017 mixed up with other brands,” says Lantink. “Obviously my aesthetic is a lot more eclectic and more is more, but I thought it would be a fun challenge to dive into the brand identity of Ellery and keep that alive while making sure my own identity didn’t disappear in the process.”

As it turned out, the process of creating the collection together ended up being just as unpredictable as the collaboration itself, with the pandemic forcing design meetings to take place over a mix of WhatsApp messages and Zoom. “I think in fashion, it’s easy to become a little bit tired of the monotony of creating a collection every three months and following the same path,” says Ellery. “It felt really good to be like, okay, we’re not following the normal checklist of things that we need to do to make a collection in the traditional way—it felt really free and exciting and new.”