From Meanjin to Sài Gòn, You Took Your Time is giving clothes a second chance
IMAGE VIA @YOU_TOOK_YOUR_TIME/INSTAGRAM
AS TOLD TO MARYEL SOUSA
Rough, layered and messy.
At last month’s Sớm Space pop-up in Melbourne, I had the pleasure of seeing an incredible curation of some of Vietnam’s talented emerging designers. Many were debuting in Australia for the first time, while others had connections a little closer to home. Among the latter was a pre-loved standout: a raw, evocative upcycling brand called You Took Your Time.
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Designed between Meanjin (Brisbane) and Sài Gòn, each piece starts as a mass-produced garment, then gets Frankensteined with paint and unconventional materials like car seatbelts and boat sails until it becomes a new creation. The result mirrors the brand’s inspiration: graffiti-lined inner-city alleyways, vintage punk T-shirts and childhood doodles.
In conversation with the label’s founder, who asked to remain anonymous, he tells me that the brand is a direct response to the flagrant waste generated by the fashion industry. “My goal is to sell these bullshit clothes back to people so I can give them a second chance and, hopefully, keep them out of the landfill longer.”
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Hey there! Tell me a little about yourself. What’s your fashion background and where are you based?
I’m a 1999 baby and have always loved drawing and expressing myself through art. When I was a kid, my má would enter her sewn garments into the Australian Wearable Arts Festival and I’d just be around her while she made her pieces.
I’ve always had fun playing dress-up with my friends, wearing all our crazy op shop finds. Fashion has been a way for my friends and me to express ourselves, and having access to such cheap clothes meant we had room to be as creative with our outfits as possible. I’ve now linked up with one of my most stylish and best friends, Sao Doan, who takes care of the Southeast Asian side of You Took Your Time.
How did the label begin?
As a teenager, I worked at a screen-printing company and would take the discarded screens home and use my pastel paints to experiment with printing on my inside-out T-shirts. Five years ago, I came back home from living in Japan and found some of the shirts I used to print, so I sold them on my Instagram story. Friends bought them and shared pics of themselves wearing them.
I started getting more inquiries, and then it became a snowball effect. My stupid little art and photography account on Instagram became a platform where I sold clothes with my designs on them. After a year of that, I started feeling a little more serious and enrolled in a sewing course to expand what I could make.
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What are you hoping to communicate through the brand?
Love, honesty, integrity and authenticity from the start! We’re continuing to move toward sustainability and circular fashion. The brand is a response to the impact of the textile industry and the oversaturation of the clothing market, where many garments are produced cheaply and designed to be quickly discarded. We mainly take these disposable clothes and sell them back to you all.
How would you describe your label’s aesthetic or ‘feel’ to someone discovering it for the first time?
You Took Your Time is, most of the time, rough, layered and messy, expressing our childish playfulness and society’s vices while exploring self-expression and pop culture. Inspired by graffiti and hard electronic music, it expresses the inner-city culture of creativity across the art and music scenes.
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What inspires you most when you’re upcycling and designing?
Failure and imperfections. When I intend to do something a certain way and it doesn’t go as planned, I just let it lead the way. I also get inspiration from the music I listen to while printing and making clothes; the textures and graffiti I have come across in city alleyways while visiting or living in different cities; artists and designers I look up to; old vintage punk screen-printed T-shirts; my drawings from all my journals I’ve kept while growing up; and my friends.
What kinds of materials do you most love working with?
We source the clothing and materials we work with from thrift shops and op-shops, or they’re handed down to us by friends and family. My goal is to sell these bullshit clothes (all unethically mass-produced) back to people so I can give them a second chance and, hopefully, keep them out of the landfill longer. So I favour any material of that kind. Some materials I have used recently are car seatbelts, vinyl tarp, boat sails, bed sheets, gift cards, debit cards and pillow stuffing.
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Tell me about the team – what’s it like working on the brand between Meanjin and Sài Gòn?
The team’s pretty much just me and Sao. Since we live in different countries, we normally just pay friends to help us when we need it. It’s been great! I have to actively communicate with one of my favourite people in the world. It has its difficulties, but overall we’ve been having fun grinding at it. Spending time in Vietnam, helping set up the work studio and connecting with more shops has been so much fun.
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Where can we find your pieces?
On our website. I’d also like to shout out some of the shops we’re stocked at: Practice Studio, Array Store and Middle Store in Brisbane; Kissing and Love and Pop in Sydney; and Sớm Space, which has pop-ups in Sài Gòn, Sydney and Melbourne. We’re also stocked in shops across Vietnam, Malaysia and Japan.
Find You Took Your Time’s storefront and a complete list of its stockists here.
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