Art, Manufacturing, Commerce, or Something Else: Why Circularity Policy Needs a New Category for Upcycling

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The Blind Spot in Circularity

Most conversations about fashion circularity focus on two moments: better materials going in, better recycling coming out. Design phase. End-of-life phase. Everything in between — a garment being worn, repaired, resold, altered, reinvented — is a black box. Not because it's unimportant, but because almost no one is systematically watching it.

Upcyclers live inside that black box. Every day, they work with materials that already exist, in conditions no spec sheet accounted for, solving problems no factory pattern was built to solve. That's not a side detail about how they operate — it's specialized knowledge about how garments actually behave over a lifetime, which is precisely the kind of evidence regulators are trying to build policy on and currently don't have.

Neither Fully Art, nor Fully Fashion

There's a categorization problem sitting underneath all of this, and it's not just semantic. Upcycled work is often one-of-a-kind, made by a single person or a very small studio, shaped by available material as the source of inspiration. That's closer to how art gets made than how a fashion brand operates. But when it comes to law, none of that matters. The legal system doesn't have a category for "somewhere between art and commerce" — it sees a garment being sold, and it applies fashion-industry logic by default.

That mismatch has real consequences. It means the frameworks being built right now — for durability, for material disclosure, for producer responsibility — are being drawn around an assumption of standardized, brand-scale production. Fashion upcyclers get folded into that picture for lack of better information, data, and awareness.

Is Upcycling Manufacturing?

Under EU law, what you legally are depends on what you do to a garment — not on how you'd describe your practice.

Resell a secondhand piece as-is, and you're a reseller. Repair or refurbish it while it stays essentially the same item, and different, lighter rules apply. But transform it — restructure it, combine it with other materials, change what it functionally is — and the law can start treating you as a producer. The same designer, doing what looks from the outside like a single continuous practice, can move between three different legal identities depending on how much a piece was altered.

That's not just terminology. Producer status carries obligations — documentation, compliance, in some cases certification — that were designed with manufacturing supply chains in mind, not a solo studio transforming a handful of garments a month. A small workshop upcycling denim jackets can find itself, legally, standing in the same category as the brand that made those jackets in the first place.

This is where it actually matters. If you're classified as a producer, you carry obligations for a garment's entire lifecycle — not just up to the point of sale. But a garment that reaches an upcycler already had a producer. Someone already made it, sold it, and is responsible for it. The "what you do" logic as a classification criteria doesn't account for the fact that remaking a garment isn't starting one — it's prolonging a life that was already underway, at a point where the original producer, the consumer, the upcycler, and everyone the garment passed through in between are all, in some way, part of the story. Right now, the law doesn't really ask that question. It just asks how much you changed the piece, and hands you full producer responsibility as if you'd made it from virgin materials.

Beyond Fashion

It's worth saying plainly: upcycling isn't a fashion-only practice, even though this podcast approaches it through a fashion lens. The same logic — working with what already exists, transforming rather than extracting, operating at small scale with high material variability — shows up in furniture, in textiles for other industries, in product design more broadly. Wherever it happens, the same misclassification tends to follow: treated as a marginal creative practice instead of what it actually is — a distinct model of production that circular economy policy needs, structurally, to understand and support. Right now, in fashion at least, it's more often hindered by rules built for a different kind of business.

The Case for a Common Voice

None of this gets resolved by one studio arguing its case at a time. A single upcycler flagging that the producer classification doesn't fit their situation is easy for a regulator to file away as an edge case. A hundred upcyclers saying the same thing, across different countries, is a pattern — and patterns are what policy actually responds to.

As Katarina put it in the conversation: it's always more effective to have a common voice than to go one by one. That's not a resignation to more regulation — it's the opposite. A collective voice isn't only useful for pushing back against rules that don't fit. It can be used to shape the rules that don't exist yet, to flag the barriers regulators aren't aware of, and to offer exactly the kind of ground-level knowledge policymaking usually lacks.

Upcyclers are currently underrepresented in Brussels. That's a real problem — and also, genuinely, an opportunity. The gap isn't just something to worry about. It's a seat that's still open.

Liste to Episode 4 of COM/VERGE

COM/VERGE is produced by RIVED, the digital ecosystem for fashion upcyclers.