About

Brett Mettler, a female artist with short blonde hair, smiling at the camera, wearing a black turtleneck and upcycled green vest, with decorative beetle wall art and a black-and-white photograph in the background.

My practice stems from two personal legacies. My mother's studio, where I dragged crayons across paper by her feet while music filled the air. And my father's passion for the natural world, helping us look closely at nature and understand what we owe it. Thanks to this interplay, I learned early that making things and taking care of what already exists are not separate instincts.

I trained in womenswear at Central Saint Martins, then completed postgraduate study in pattern cutting at the London College of Fashion, going on to design within some of fashion's most exacting houses, including Alexander McQueen and Gareth Pugh, and across film, music video and private commissions. For over a decade, my measure of a garment was ambition: how far a material could be pushed, how new a silhouette could feel.

Becoming a mother in 2019 shifted that measure significantly. I could no longer separate the beauty I made from what its making cost, and I founded Generation Upcycle, committing my practice entirely to what East London discards: broken garments, dead-stock fabric, textile waste.

The work draws on Orphism, the early twentieth-century movement that used pure colour and geometric abstraction to move a viewer emotionally, the way music moves a concert hall. It is also, I have found, close to how a small child already sees the world: in shape and colour, before language. Each reclaimed piece of fabric carries a history before it becomes part of mine. My work asks what we are weaving into the next generation, and tries to hand back something worth inheriting.

I am currently developing a room-scale textile sculpture built on exactly that question, made entirely from reclaimed textiles from East London.


Career & Practice

Education

  • Central Saint Martins, Graduate Fashion Womenswear

  • London College of Fashion, Postgraduate in Creative Pattern Cutting

Industry

  • Alexander McQueen, womenswear design team

  • Gareth Pugh, womenswear design team

  • Breathless, specialist materials production team

  • Sava, womenswear design team

  • Emaliomada, womenswear design team

  • Mettler London (own label), bespoke womenswear for private clients and media costume

    Film & Music Videos

  • You Know Productions: Alpha Omega Costume and specialist material production 

  • Numinous Pictures: Apex, Triskelion: Costume design and production

  • Universal Pictures: Hobbs & Shaw: Costume design and specialsit material production

Generation Upcycle

  • Designs and makes childrenswear and womenswear entirely from reused textile waste, dead-stock fabric, and broken garments

  • Young V&A Display & Sold Out Collection: Created an Orphism-inspired childrenswear collection for sale at the Young V&A Museum

  • Runs reuse-focused workshops for children and families at schools and galleries, incorporating art history.

  • Creates large-scale textile sculpture and abstract textile art, drawing on Orphist colour theory

Notable commissions

  • Heather Watson Commission, Wimbledon Ball gowns, 2015 to 2017

  • Advertising Campaign, Pretty Polly with Jessie J

  • Henrietta Lovell, founder of Rare Tea Company, numerous commissions

  • Ellie Goulding, bespoke commission for her newborn daughter

  • Bompas & Parr, Ice cream museum: staff uniforms and promotional costumes for the opening

Exhibitions & workshops

  • Guts for Garters Gallery, London

  • Muse Gallery, Philadelphia: Suburban Wild exhibition

  • Young V&A, London: Sustainable Pop-Up Market capsule collection (Sold-out)

  • Ongoing family and children's reuse workshops, including at the Young V&A, London, Gatehouse School, London and in numerous East London art studios

Current work

  • Fabric of Life (in progress), a room-scale dress built entirely from East London textile waste, exploring inheritance, beauty, and the true cost of what we create. Currently half-made: the front finished, the back sketched and underway. [Full project page →]

Press

  • "From McQueen to Green," Hackney Citizen, March 2025. Read →

  • "Interview: With Brett Mettler, Founder of Generation Upcycle," The Sample Room, March 2022.

  • "Behind Watson's 2016 Show-Stopping Party Look," WTA Tennis, June 2016. Read →

  • "British No.1 Heather Watson Wears Mettler London at WTA Pre-Wimbledon Party," Tennis World USA, June 2015. Read →