After a fashion | Auckland News | Local News in Auckland

Fun, funky and flamboyant, every garment in Upcycle Boutique is one of a kind. Rowena Orejana goes shopping.

Driving along Binstead Rd in New Lynn, Edna Trainor spots a mannequin dressed in weird clothes standing on the footpath holding a sign: "Upcycle Boutique".

"I couldn't stop at that time but I said, 'Next time I will'. So I went and had a look around and said, 'Yeah, I could do that crazy stuff'," says the 80-year-old.

Upcycle Boutique is the brainchild of Robyn Robertson, wife of House of Prayer Pastor Graeme Robertson. Mrs Robertson is an artist and a fashion designer.

"Word is getting around that we have an interesting shop," she says. "They love it. It has been tremendously accepted by the community."

The shop's personality matches Mrs Robertson's. It is cheerful and funky, flamboyant, yet friendly. Everything in it, from the coats hanging on the movable racks to the mat rolled out on the floor, is one of a kind.

Mrs Robertson says the shop came  about after a fundraiser for an outreach programme in Romania. "We had a lady in our church and she had work in Romania. She's teaching the parents how to care for their children and they really needed funds."

Mrs Robertson hit upon the  idea of selling donated clothes that have been embellished and restyled. The fundraiser was a huge success, raising $7000.

From that, Mrs Robertson held three more sales and found herself stocked up on inventory. "We kept making and making and making until I had 600 garments. So, I thought, I need to open a shop and I need to teach others, too, because we need to stop wasting resources."

Upcycling in some form has always been around. "But it has really come into its own in the last year or so," she adds.

Mrs Trainor is one of six designers, including Mrs Robertson, whose creations feature in the shop. Mrs Trainor's  include colourful scarves stuffed and tied to become necklaces of cloth beads. Mrs Robertson's own line is called Woman of Joffa.

"In the Bible, she was a sewer of fine clothes. She was raised from the dead by Jesus' disciples," she explains. In Mrs Robertson's case, she brings life back to old clothes.

Used clothes given to the church are cut, rearranged and adorned to become something new. A quarter of the sale price goes to the church for the use of its space and the rest goes to the designer.

"We don't pay rent here because we're a co-op shop. The church takes a percentage of the sale which they use for outreach ministries. We still support Romania," she says.

Upcycle is also a "pop-up shop". The boutique is the ministry's cafe three days a week. The clothes that hang on the wheeled racks are stored and "pop up" from Wednesday  to Saturday.

"People just love the fact that everything here is not the same as everything else. We love our things to be really good fun."

Buy cycle

Upcycling uses waste materials and goods, converting them into something new and useful with a better quality or higher environmental value. It is a term first used by Reiner Pilz of Pilz GmbH in 1994. Pilz GmbH is a German firm that specialises in safer automation technology.