Rentrayage (Q9011)
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Rentrayage is a fashion house from FMD.
| Language | Label | Description | Also known as |
|---|---|---|---|
| English | Rentrayage |
Rentrayage is a fashion house from FMD. |
Statements
Rentrayage’s Erin Beatty is experiencing a bit of a professional existential crisis. “I’ve found that my interest in fashion…doesn’t exist,” she said on a Zoom from her home in Connecticut. “The idea of fashion in this time and this moment feels so self-aggrandizing, and I’ve really had to sit with it because that’s what I’ve spent my life [doing]. So I had to ask myself, What am I interested in? What do I care about?” She discovered she still cared about clothing and getting dressed, but specifically, she cared about the clothes women wear and choose to wear.It makes sense that her interests lie in denim, which people, in general, tend to feel close connections with and which is meant to be worn as many times as possible, with the reward that it gets better with wear. As a kind of palate cleanser, Beatty started the season with cream-colored denim, which she used on a jacket with darts at the waist that made it more fitted and added a bit of flair. She also used the fabric on a wonderful A-line circle skirt and a new style of trousers inspired by a workwear pant with a high waist and a clean flat front. A ’90s-style maxi denim skirt made by cutting open the legs on a pair of jeans (you know the one) was updated by turning the usual triangular inset into a curved one that followed the lines of the body.Elsewhere her signature collage style shone: a vintage graphic T-shirt with the graphic covered by a variety of crochet doilies; a half-zip sweatshirt with an unorthodox floral fabric inset; and another with princess seams for a close fit and contrasting balloon sleeves. A polka-dot slip dress (“polka dots never expire,” Beatty said during our preview) had a pretty lace trim at the V-neck and side seams: It would likely go on to live a long life in someone’s wardrobe.
9 September 2024
There are some people who would rather be overdressed than underdressed. Rentrayage’s Erin Beatty is not one of them. “I would always rather feel underdressed and cool,” she explained at a recent appointment. “With everything that’s going on in the world, I wasn’t feeling very frivolous, and fashion that felt frivolous felt wrong to me. I wanted to make sure I felt really grounded in other ways.”Beatty does not reinvent the wheel every season; she knows what she likes and she knows what she’s good at and she keeps refining her vision. For fall, there was a new jean jacket silhouette inspired by a workwear jacket, and a wide-leg jean with a patchwork inset at the legs, both made from deadstock denim. Her experiments with grommets made for some really fresh pieces, like a blue-and-white striped button-down with all over grommets on the front, or the skirt cut from the bottom half of a suit jacket with grommets trimming the hem. She also continued working with mixed media pieces, like a jacket that was half jean jacket on the top and quilted surplus on the bottom, a cardigan with two “collaged” rows of button plackets that allowed for an adjustable fit, or the tweed blazer with a surplus quilted sweetheart inset on the front. An easy silver hammered silk gown with a V-neck and slightly voluminous sleeves expertly captured Beatty’s mood for the moment; elegant, but grounded.
15 February 2024
In a week full of shows in iconic New York locations, Rentrayage’s presentation at ABC Carpet and Home fit right with the theme. But Erin Beatty had an even better reason for showing there: She is launching a line of home goods at the beloved institution. “We’ve had ‘home’ on the website for a while, but this is the first time we’ve launched our own pieces that we’ve developed,” she explained.The spring collection was thus inspired by the home collection. A striped button-down shirt had a patch pocket appliquéd with a small embroidered handkerchief, and was paired with a hybrid maxi skirt made from the hips and waist of a pair of jeans and a skirt made from the body of a trench coat. “We had all these vintage trench coats where we used the tops but hadn’t used the bottoms, so we’ve just been trying to figure out ways that we could use them,” Beatty said. Vintage lace tablecloths were turned into frilly bralettes and drape-y blouses, whose romantic frills were grounded by a shirred-waist army green maxi skirt and a pair of long denim shirts with a reconstructed sand-color camo print jacket. Beatty is well known for her upcycled denim pieces, but lately it is her tailoring that has been center stage. Take a simple two-button jacket in a floral printed deadstock fabric Beatty sourced in Portugal: It was a modern version of a New Look–style jacket, with its cinched waist and slight flared volume that ended right at the hips. Worn with a pair of jeans with two rectangular pieces of the same floral fabric appliquéd down the front of the legs, it became the Rentrayage version of a power suit.“The collection came together during the smoky days of New York City,” the designer said, referring to the few days earlier this year where the city was covered in a cloud of orange smoke from the Canadian wildfires. “I was like, ‘Is this what it looks like as we head into the apocalypse?’ And then I thought, ‘Well, what do you want to wear?’”
11 September 2023
Erin Beatty hosted Rentrayage’s fall presentation at a cafe in the West Village. The buzzy energy inside matched the collection, which leaned heavily on reworked denim, one of the brand’s great strengths. “We’ve gotten much more into denim,” Beatty said. “I love the idea of playing with something that’s quintessentially American, but taking it to another level. But also there’s a lot of old jeans out there you know…”There’s also a lot of really wonderful deadstock wool suiting fabrics in Italy, and this season they came together beautifully with the denim. She spliced the legs off a pair of jeans to turn them into a high-waisted skirt, with added cotton ruffled insets, while a longer-length plaid tweed blazer had an appliqué of a patchworked denim bustier, its silhouette borrowed from a traditional women’s riding jacket. She also reworked a denim jacket, and pieced it together with a quilted glen plaid fabric. On the front, about an inch or two of the bottom part of the pockets hung out from underneath—a nod perhaps to that classic look of too-short jorts with the visible pocket lining. Except the vibe here was less hair metal and more Queen Elizabeth at Balmoral. (See the cotton trench coat collaged with one half of a tweedy blazer, or the glen plaid coat with a removable quilted black vest which was definitely one of the best pieces of the collection.) It had the sensibility of certain Japanese designers, but done in Beatty’s unique way.Complementing the collection were casual separates in sturdy caramel cotton twill, and a beautiful black and yellow floral deadstock silk viscose which she mixed with a gray and black floral to create tiered ruffle dresses and skirts. “I don’t feel like I need to prove myself in a certain way anymore, but what I do want is to make clothes that people really want to wear,” Beatty explained. “High-fashion pieces and elegant dresses—things that you want to invest in, that you see and you’re like ‘I want to put that on my body.’”
17 February 2023
At the spring Rentrayage presentation held in the penthouse of a Soho apartment, Erin Beatty was in a good mood. “I finally picked up some major stores, so that’s really exciting,” she said. Beatty’s process remains the same; she sources deadstock fabrics in Italy and combines them with vintage items that she reworks into her signature pieced dresses and jackets. As she showed me some of the looks from the collection, she pointed out their provenance: “Vintage! Vintage mixed with deadstock! Deadstock.”This season there were great dresses in mixed floral prints with hints of neon colors—a half-shirt dress with a tiered skirt (deadstock) looked cool with a denim jacket with an eyelet insert under the sleeve (vintage mixed with deadstock). Her reworked denim items, like skirts, pants, and jackets, are always a standout, and it should only be a matter of time before a big denim label approaches her for a collaboration.Elsewhere, T-shirts collaged from other T-shirts and embroidered with the wordsPro Roemade a statement in black sequins. “They’re also an homage to where [the label] came from,” she added. When we last spoke, she explained that suiting fabric is always easy to find, and her explorations of tailoring are another place where Rentrayage shines—a shorts suit in a mixed blue plaid fabric had a relaxed vibe. Though her creative process depends on the things she comes across on her sourcing trips, Beatty welcomes it as a design challenge and part of her process. “It’s a less wasteful way to design, you know, because this idea of unlimited design capacity is frankly part of what’s driving this over-consumption.”She’s happy to see that other designers are now joining her in her quest for more sustainably-minded design. “So much of this project is about getting people on board, about trying to inspire the consciousness of others,” Beatty added. “Now that other people are doing it, I think it’s awesome. That’s how it grows.”
16 September 2022
There was a certain exuberance to Rentrayage’s collection this season. “This was the first collection I’ve designed in a long time where I was like, ‘Oh! We’ll actually get to wear this to somewhere’,” the designer Erin Beatty said over Zoom. “We know that people are gonna be wearing them out, and they’re wearing them out into this kind of whole new world.”These joyful—and hopeful?—emotions translated to ruffles, lace details, and lots of menswear-inspired pieces, though she revealed that some of the key themes in the collection are “femininity” and the intangible area between “girlhood and maturity.” That tension could be seen in the princess-y blouses made from a mix of a floral print fabric (the shirred-detail bust) and black lace (the gathered sleeves and a-line bodice), which she paired with cropped, straight leg, dark blue wash jeans with an eyelet detail at the pockets and the hem; and it could also be seen in the windowpane plaid suit made from two contrasting fabrics, one black with a light gray pattern and another in shades of blue. Worn with nothing underneath, the suit had a laid-back, playful vibe, but it could still make for a handsome selection for the boardroom.The menswear fabrics had a two-fold reason to be present, one is that Beatty is attracted to them, but the second is more practical. “Lots of the fabrics that we choose are just fabrics that are highly available or easy to find, and men’s suiting is something that we can always locate,” she explained. Similar is her use of men’s shirting, which showed up in ultra feminine dresses with ruffles and lace details. At Rentrayage, Beatty works exclusively with deadstock and upcycled materials, and last season was the first time she was able to go to Italy to source deadstock fabrics, which she considers “a game changer.” It was a group of mixed floral print dresses that captured her ideas for this season best: a tea dress in matching-but-mismatching cream and brown floral with black lace inset at the bottom, in particular. She showed it with and without an oversized (upcycled) denim jacket with anorak details.Along with materials, season after season, Beatty returns to similar silhouettes and construction—always refining, always trying to make things “sharper”—and as a result, her clothes always look good with each other, no matter the season, as evidenced by the designer’s own look at the day of our appointment.
Wearing a denim jacket “probably from our second or third collection,” along with a dress made from light blue striped men’s cotton shirting with lace at the bottom (“spring collection, currently on our website”), Beatty was her own best model.
22 June 2022
Deadstock fabrics. We hear a lot about them, but they’re not so easy to track down. Though Erin Beatty launched her sustainable brand Rentrayage three years ago, it wasn’t until recently that she was able to make her way to Italy to source the materials first hand. The pandemic played a role in that, but it had more to do with the fact that the industry has been designed to support the manufacturing of virgin fabrics. It takes a long time to turn a ship, but we can all see the giant iceberg that is climate change. Fashion owes a lot to Beatty, and other designers who think like her, who are changing the system with their persistence.It’s not sexy stuff, but it’s worth addressing all the barriers Beatty faced before she was able to buy deadstock in bulk. There’s the factories that charge high rates for small production runs, and then there’s the e-commerce sites, which push back against garments made from materials with inconsistencies. Better access to better deadstock “changes our model,” she explained. “We’re chasing new fabrics but repeating silhouettes, so factories can charge us for quantity over all, not quantity per run.” And if an e-commerce site sells out of a Rentrayage piece, as they consistently do with the vintage blazers she retrofits with deadstock military jackets shaped into corsets, they know the same style in different materials is likely to sell too.All that to say, the newness here was in Beatty’s fabrications. Runway watchers will recognize a pink wallpaper floral from a not so long ago Balenciaga collection. There’s a luscious emerald silk, which she cut into an easy but elegant ruffled hem dress, and black guipure lace, which she used as an accent on a reconstructed denim skirt. Knits have been a category she’s more or less avoided because she felt like the quality wasn’t there, but that’s changing too. The wool-cashmere blend she chose uses 99% recycled yarns and the wool donegal uses 90%, but you wouldn’t know it by touching them. “It doesn’t feel like a compromise,” she said. Beatty is nothing if not committed.
15 February 2022
“How do I continue to exist in this industry?” That’s a question that many have asked themselves this year, in the face of overlapping climate emergencies. At her presentation in an East Village garden today, Erin Beatty said she did a lot of soul searching during the pandemic. “I decided I could do it only if I don’t add additional waste,” she said.Upcycling has been the backbone of her Rentrayage project since she launched it in early 2019. In between now and then, sustainable brands have proliferated, but circular fashion has been slower to catch on. The truth is, it’s still easier to buy virgin fibers than it is to source deadstock and vintage clothes. “We’re always trying to find things we can always find,” Beatty said. For the system to work, much larger brands will have to participate, but it’s little brands like hers that are laying the groundwork. She’s actively looking for partners with whom to scale up.Beatty’s new collection builds on her last. Taking a spin through the presentation she asked, “Why should we make a collection with 100 new styles every season? We want to bring back certain styles over and over again.” That brings up a whole other line of thinking about the American capacity to overwork, which, as a mom of two young children, Beatty doubtless has opinions about, but it’s the clothes we’re talking about today.Jeans reconstructed from two separate pairs, and sliced, diced, and reconstituted sweatpants are among the pieces that she brought back, but there are novelties, too, like a slip dress sewn from cut-on-the-bias men’s shirts (great) and a denim jacket with a blouson-cut inset of white lace in back (even better). Beatty also pointed out a camisole stitched with antique table doilies, which marries her fashion sensibility with her interest in interiors, and a house dress made from deadstock Marc Jacobs material. Marc, if you’re reading this, Erin is onto something. May we suggest a collaboration?
11 September 2021
“To change the whole system,” Erin Beatty says, “requires changing what people want.” Beatty learned to love old, used things a couple of years ago. Her two boys were still babies and the weight of climate change and the waste produced by the fashion industry were weighing heavily on her. And so she launched Rentrayage, a collection of rebuilt vintage.In the interim, pushed along by the privations of the pandemic, many have started to catch up with Beatty. The resale market is now growing faster than the retail market—a lot faster. Sustainable brands are proliferating. And even designers that don’t brand themselves as sustainable are talking about deadstock these days. With factories shuttered during lockdowns it was often the only option.Beatty’s new Rentrayage collection consists of riffs on styles she’s had success with and timely additions made with an eye to the way we’re living now. In the former category are used denim jackets and vintage blazers spliced with military surplus jacket liners, and tops and skirts patchworked with sweats. In production no two pieces will look exactly alike. The fresh ideas included decorative, shoulder-spanning collars that tie on and off at the throat, and Fair Isle knit dickies for the days when Zoom meetings call for a little extra oomph.Knits are an experiment for Beatty. She’s using organic, sustainably farmed yarns, and the sweaters are knit on machines with no wastage, no cutting fabric. They’re new materials, yes, but new materials employed in responsible ways. This is progress.
17 February 2021
When we look back we’ll call spring 2021 the tipping point for upcycling, a moment when the earth was telling us it’s now or never (those wildfires, the collapse of two major Antarctic glaciers), and designers were responding by committing to using only deadstock and vintage fabrics. Erin Beatty of Rentrayage is part of a growing cohort of mostly women designers leading this movement. Responsible sourcing won’t reverse global warming, but Beatty and New York peers like Gabriela Hearst and Collina Strada’s Hillary Taymour are setting the example for real change. Humans over-consume. “Overshoot Day,” the moment when we’ve used up more natural resources that the planet can renew in 12 months, came on August 22 this year.“We have to align everything we do with our values,” Beatty said over Zoom. You could call it her brand mantra, and she was proud to report that 100% of the fabrics she used this season were upcycled. Trims, like buttons and zippers, are harder to come by, but she’s trying. And it’s not just in used clothing stores that she’s finding her supplies. A handkerchief-hem dress and top made from vintage table linens are among the most charming pieces in the new collection. Beatty likes print and pattern, so a soft wallpaper-print blouse gets paired with a skirt spliced from two different plaids. Elsewhere, she mashes up camouflage and pinstripes. Rentrayage spans the sweet to sturdy spectrum, which seems like the right way to go about it. Saving the planet—or at least slowing down humanity’s consumption cycle—will take all kinds. She made a cool bustier top from thrift store tees and there’s also a great jean jacket that combines faded denim with pinstripes.
18 September 2020