From Waste to Wear
Meet the designers transforming animal by-products
Each year, over 20 million tons of animal by-products from the meat and seafood industries go to waste—materials some designers are transforming into high-concept fashion. In conversation with two creatives at the forefront of this movement, we explore their methods and motivations in the name of sustainability—and ask whether using animal remains can ever move beyond another form of exploitation.
Waste and unwanted animal products continue to pile up as demand in the meat and fish industries shows no sign of slowing down. The meat industry's annual projected market growth in Europe sits at 5.12%, and the fish industry is not far behind with 4.03% annual growth. From slaughterhouses’ discarded blood, bones and internal organs to fish viscera, bones, fins and scales written off at processing plants—waste within these exploitative industries is inevitable. As the fashion world scrambles for more sustainable materials, designers Shahar Livne and Isabelle Taylor have turned to these animal remnants, rebranding waste as innovation.
Skinned Potential by Isab
Isabelle (Isab) Taylor, founder of Skinned Potential by Isab, has harnessed the by-product of fish skin to create handmade leather fit for draping and sculptural creations, such as the “Head in the Clouds’ shoulder garment. Her work is an emotive response to the beauty of the aquatic world, combining surrealism and molded elements. Inspiration didn’t begin with the issue of waste management in the fish industry, but with her fascination with the underwater world and its inhabitants. Taylor explains, “Having gone snorkelling I've experienced the beauty of fish in real life. The way their scales capture the sunlight when they’re swimming, I see as quite a surreal experience.” She adds, “Dead or alive, I'm just seeing fish as beautiful, both spiritually and objectively.”
Her exploration in fish skin began as a response to a sustainability project during her bachelor's degree in Edinburgh. Walking back and forth to university, she noticed a local fishmonger collecting unwanted fish skin in a bucket. Ripe for the taking—albeit from the bin—Taylor quickly began asking Eddie’s Seafood Market to collect the skins so she could begin fashioning them into garments. Sustainability and supply chain transparency are at the heart of Skinned Potential and were a driving factor in choosing to partner with independent fishmongers like Eddie’s, known for their sustainably sourced fresh fish.
“I realised I could make the most difference working with independent fishmongers, as they don’t have enough waste to warrant their own by-product disposal system.” Taylor goes on to describe the overwhelming support from local fishmongers, with small businesses now reaching out to her, eager to be a part of her fish-skin future. “I have never had any resistance or problem sourcing. People do see them as unvaluable—that's how you know it's sustainable if they're being disregarded.” She adds, “The point of doing the whole [making] process myself is to ensure transparency.”
Taylor’s process starts once she retrieves the skin, usually salmon, from the fishmonger’s freezer. “I begin preparing the skin by scraping all the excess fresh and film off with a knife. Then I clean them with a cleaning process that I've developed over time.” Cleaning begins with oil and dishwasher soap, followed by a week-long process of vegetable and mineral tanning.
Mineral tanning, which uses mineral salts, produces a soft, pliable leather and is the preferred method for producing most light leathers. Vegetable tanning, a traditional leather tanning method, utilises natural tannins derived from plants like tree bark, leaves and roots and is often considered the most sustainable tanning solution for leather manufacturing.
Once prepared, the leather is fit for multi-use. Taylor continues, “I can either drape if I'm doing a sculpted piece, or I can lie them flat and pin them to a wooden board allowing them to dry flat to make pattern pieces.” Taylor’s designs are not only made of fish but inspired by them—from their shapes and forms to the armoured nature of the scales, the material which has a tensile strength up to nine times stronger than cow leather. “All my design work is revolved around the fish leather as a texture and a textile. I look at how the fabric moves, and I design in response.”
“Dead or alive, I'm just seeing fish as beautiful, both spiritually and objectively.”
“I realised I could make the most difference working with independent fishmongers, as they don’t have enough waste to warrant their own by-product disposal system.”
Look 1: Sculptural Bird
Look 2: Head in the Clouds
Shot by Eliza Craig
Modelled by Silky Swim
Styled by Anna Dewhirst
Regardless of her use of a by-product that would otherwise be discarded and incinerated, is this so-called sustainable solution simply exploitation repackaged? According to Taylor, resistance to this leather by-product stems from a lack of education. She states, “To say leather is or isn't sustainable isn't really a question because it's too general,” pointing out that leather's sustainability is much more nuanced than simply focusing on the fact it’s an animal product. For Taylor, sustainability lies in the sourcing of the skin, the quality of the animal’s life, the quantity used in the production and the manufacturing process. She sources all her skins directly from fishmongers who follow sustainable fishing practices, or through her ongoing partnership with Inversa Leathers, a company that removes invasive lionfish to support native biodiversity. Her fish-skin creations offer a solution to a by-product already occurring at rapid rates, with 40–50% of a salmon’s body being disregarded as waste.
“Cow leather is very commercial,
so why not fish?”
The Meat Factory
and
Blood Sneakers
by Shahar Livne
Similarly to Taylor, Livne’s work with animal blood began while studying for her Fine Art bachelor's in The Netherlands. Meat Factory was born out of the tension between disgust and attraction we feel towards food, using blood as a means to explore how we distance ourselves from the natural world when animals are reduced to products. Livne explains, “It’s about looking at how humans deconstruct nature, as if it was just pieces of a puzzle and then just making whatever they want from it – it's a human idea of controlling nature.”
“They handed me a bucket, and it was still warm. I was walking around with a bucket of something's blood.”
Blood, fat, and bones are just a few of the many animal byproducts discarded by abattoirs. The European Commission estimates that humans directly consume only 68% of a chicken, 62% of a pig, 54% of a bovine, and 52% of a sheep or goat. The exact volume of blood lost during slaughter depends on both the method and the species, but it’s estimated that 40–60% of an animal’s total blood volume is lost during exsanguination.
Livne describes the meat industry as part of “our material flow,” pointing to how little we know, as consumers, about what does or doesn’t contain animal products—and how, in many cases, interacting with them is unavoidable. “Everything is so entangled in the meat industry and the world. When you sit on a train, they use animal-derived products as a lubricant for the train brakes.” This often-unseen reliance on the meat industry is enough to make even the most animal-conscious individuals question how they can navigate their dependence on such an exploitative system.
Sneakers and Blood Collection By Shahar Livne and Nat-2
Photography by Adam Boom
Edited by Eliza Craig
“The moment you use the word blood, people have connotations that are very different from leather."
“There is a confrontation with blood as a material because it smells like a corpse, whereas meat for most people triggers something delicious,
Using animal by-products is not a new idea; it taps into practices found in many Indigenous cultures across the globe—traditions rooted in survival and the principle of using all parts of the kill, not just out of necessity, but often out of respect for the animal. Taylor points out that using this waste as material isn’t novel but is instead embedded in the histories of Indigenous groups across Scandinavia, Alaska, Hokkaido (Japan), Northeast China and Siberia. She clarifies, “I've never once claimed to be the first one to do fish leather or tried to take that dominance, I'm just trying to do my best in this sector.” Taylor adds, “I want to innovate and show fashion all the diverse ways in which it [fish leather] can be used.”
Even though she works with a resource that is already being expended carelessly, she acknowledges the ethical complexity of working with animal by-products. She adds, “I don't mind it being complex or that some people get the wrong idea. All I can do is spread the right information about the fish I use.” Leather today holds many negative connotations, but Taylor finds beauty in what she describes as a natural material. “In this age, with so many unnatural materials and plastics, it's quite grounding to be touching a natural textile.”
Vegan opposition often poses the question: how natural can something be if life is taken to create it? However, if this market is already deeply embedded in mainstream culture, what hope do we have of stopping the system? Perhaps working to reduce waste is the most merciful outcome in an industry that feels so difficult to dismantle.
The process from catch to creation is long and arduous, yet Taylor sees a marketable future in this underutilised material. She continues, “The end product needs to be worth the length of time it takes and then it can be commercial,” adding, “Cow leather is very commercial, so why not fish?” Fashion’s transition to sustainable materials cannot be limited to the practices it adopts—it must also address the volume of materials produced. Taylor states, “We should be working towards a diverse range of fabric. That would be more sustainable, that way we're not overproducing or mass producing. We're just working with what's local to us and not exhausting the planet's resources.”
Skinned Potential by Isab is a story of turning something seen as undesirable into something beautiful—unlike the fish industry, which capitalises on marine life with little regard for its many discarded parts. While the waters of this moral debate may be murky, there’s no denying that one less material thrown in the trash can only be a good thing.
Her journey into animal byproducts began with blood pigment, later expanding to include fat and bones in her creation of ‘bio-leather’. She started by drying blood in her own home until it became a powder, which she describes as resembling thin splinters of glass. Livne added, “The material transformation was interesting—this raw material that is really confronting is also a fascinating, shiny, beautiful material.” However, the transformation of the animal’s blood didn’t end there. When rehydrated with water to make dyes, the smell changed from one of death to something unexpectedly alive. Livne elaborates, “It [the blood] starts smelling like flowers, a little bit like lilies.” While she never reached a scientific explanation for this phenomenon, it marked another moment in the process that echoed her central idea: how nature is deconstructed and reconstructed by human hands.
With a desire to provoke discussion, blood became a deliberately confronting focus in her work. “There is a confrontation with blood as a material because it smells like a corpse, whereas meat for most people triggers something delicious, something you appreciate – it creates a hunger.” Livne recalls a moment when the process itself overtook the final product in importance. “I had ordered blood from the butcher. They handed me a bucket, and it was still warm. I was walking around with a bucket of something's blood.”
Livne’s own emotional response drives her practice as a discursive designer. She adds, “Making people emotional in such a way that they feel like, oh, I have to say something, is beautiful.”
Inspired by a time when the nose-to-tail philosophy was part of everyday life, her collection of material experiments challenges the moralistic stance on using animal-derived products. Livne harnessed disregarded animal blood from the slaughter process to create blood ‘bio-leather’ and dyes.
These findings evolved into a collaboration called Blood Sneakers with
Nat-2, a luxury state of the art sustainable footwear brand based in Munich, Germany. Together her blood leather was used to create made-to-order footwear. Livne states, “it's less about the aesthetics of the shoe, it's more about the characteristics of the leather. It's quite a thin material so it became a panel within the shoe — more of an aesthetic element”.
In a world where waste is the byproduct of unchecked consumption, designers like Taylor and Livne challenge us to confront the uncomfortable realities behind our materials. Their work doesn’t offer easy answers—it asks harder questions: Can innovation born from exploitation ever be ethical? Or are we simply rebranding the remnants of a deeply entrenched industry? As fashion searches for its conscience, the line between sustainability and complicity grows harder to trace.
If we are all, in some way, complicit in the loss of animal life, should we be thankful that designers are at least making use of a body we’ve already condemned to death?
The release of Blood Sneakers led Livne to a marketing dilemma: how to promote her ‘bio-leather’ to the public. She explains, “The moment you use the word blood, people have connotations that are very different from leather. Leather is skin, we don't say skin.” Language, she points out, has long been used by the meat industry to obscure its exploitative origins—with the term leather dating back to the 1700s. Livne believes the future of blood ‘bio-leather’ lies in luxury fashion, where many brands are renowned for their leather work and craftsmanship. She continues, “I think then the marketing is different because luxury companies can really invest in storytelling. It's not necessary about products, but it's really about creating conversations.”
Sparking dialogue sits at the heart of this blood thirsty practice. Livne has faced pushback from the vegan community, who question why she doesn’t use plant-based leather alternatives. But for Livne, her dyes and leather are not about offering a perfect solution—they're about addressing a broken system. “The industry's here, meat consumption is growing. So, let's be honest and not put it aside and ignore it, but deal with it.”