Does Fashion Upcycling Have to Scale? - COM/VERGE Episode 01 with Angie Aguirre

COM/VERGE — The Business and Art of Fashion Upcycling — opens with a role reversal. Instead of Angie Aguirre, founder of Berlin upcycling brand tHERAPY Recycle & Exorcise, interviewing a guest, her co-producer AnaMaria interviews her. The result is part introduction, part manifesto for what this podcast will spend its episodes investigating.

Go straight to Episode 01 >

From a Wedding Dress to a Catwalk in Kreuzberg

The episode opens at SO36, a legendary club space in Kreuzberg, Berlin. In December 2025, five performers walked a runway for tHERAPY's collection Waste is Privilege. A donated wedding dress. Neighbours' curtains. Vintage tablecloths. Parts of shoes from a closed factory in Argentina. Nothing bought new — everything already in the world, waiting to be used.

The collection's title carries the episode's first real argument: the ability to throw something away and call it worthless is not universal. It's a privilege. Most of the world — including Angie's grandmother, who remade old pullovers into clothes for her grandchildren — never had that option.

Building a Fashion Brand Without Meaning To

Angie didn't study fashion. She studied journalism in Argentina, and moved to Berlin in 2004. tHERAPY started in 2012 not as a business plan but as something closer to repair — fixing clothes she found on the street, because she couldn't understand why people discarded things still worth using.

"I would have never started a fashion brand. When I started, I started to fix something — it was maybe to fix something about me."

The brand became real when her sister, Paula, joined from Argentina and designed the logo. Today tHERAPY runs as one business across two continents: Paula produces and sources in Córdoba (Argentina),, Angie does the same in Berlin /Germany), and once a year they meet to build a collection together.

That split geography surfaces one of the episode's clearest insights into upcycling as a business, not just a craft: the same practice solves different problems depending on where you are. In Argentina, quality clothing is expensive, so upcycling makes unique, sustainable pieces affordable. In Berlin, the problem is the opposite — overproduction and material abundance — and upcycling absorbs the surplus the fashion system keeps generating.

The Question This Podcast Exists to Ask

Angie names the tension that upcyclers live inside daily: how do you stay critical of an overproducing, overconsuming fashion system while still operating a business within it? She doesn't resolve it in this episode — and that's the point. It's the question COM/VERGE is built to keep returning to, episode after episode, guest after guest.

A second, related question runs through the conversation: does an upcycling business have to scale to be legitimate? The industry's default assumption — grow bigger, grow faster, grow forever — is one Angie pushes back on, not by rejecting growth outright, but by asking whether scale is even the right goal for upcycling at all, or whether staying small and staying connected to community is its own viable model. It's a live debate, not a settled position, and future guests will bring their own answers.

What COM/VERGE Is For

Angie is explicit about the gap she wants this podcast to close: upcyclers tend to work alone, in ateliers, solving the same problems in isolation, with little shared knowledge across the field. Traditional fashion runs on gatekeeping. Angie wants COM/VERGE to run on the opposite — sourcing tips, business models, operational realities, shared in the open.

But before COM/VERGE can fix that, it has to make upcycling visible on its own terms.

"Our role as upcycling designers is to be loud. We have to bring disruption. We have to make noise. We have to make people wake up."

That's a deliberate stance, not just energy for its own sake. As Angie puts it:

"When people think about fashion, they don't think about upcycling — there is this general point of view of glamour and big catwalks in Milan. And upcycling is a disruption from inside that system."

COM/VERGE is for upcyclers and everyone building circular fashion's future.

Listen to Episode 01