Material Matters with Grant Gibson

Anna Foster is the founder and creative director of the sustainable fashion brand ELV Denim – a company that has saved thousands of pairs of jeans from going into landfill, upcycling them into something genuinely desirable instead. 
She started her career in magazines and worked as a fashion editor for 20 years at titles such as Exit and i-D, before becoming fashion director at Lula and fashion director-at-large at Australian title RUSSH. 
Since launching ELV – short for East London Vintage – in 2018 she was won a slew of awards, nominations and accolades, including Responsible Brand of The Year from Country & Town House and Walpole’s Brands of Tomorrow 2025. 
In this episode, she talks about: why women are born to innovate; what happens to our old clothes; reworking existing garments into something new; finding all her makers within a three mile radius of the studio; celebrating skill; the issues with denim and how ELV strives to solve them; valuing things other people don’t want; her dislike of stretch denim; being an ‘environmental enthusiast’; extending her material palette and making pieces from old hotel linen; the importance of collaboration; and the meaning of the word luxury. 
Important fact check: Grant misread some of his statistics in this episode. We produce between 4.5 to 6 billion pairs of jeans a year and a pair of jeans uses 3,800 litres of water to produce. We’re happy to correct these errors. 
Support the show

Rodrigo Garcia Gonzalez is the co-founder of the seaweed-based packaging company, Notpla. He and Pierre Paslier started working together in a kitchen while students at the Royal College of Art and Imperial College in 2013 and have since gone on to create a genuinely global brand. 
Essentially, Notpla aims to replace single-use plastic products – a huge issue with the world producing somewhere in the region of 400 million tonnes of plastic waste annually, and packaging estimated to account for 33 per cent of that. 
Like many people, Material Matters first came across the company a little under a decade ago when it launched Ooho, an edible bubble made from a seaweed membrane that contained water – or in some instances a rather strong cocktail – and, since then, the company has gone on to win numerous awards, including the inaugural Earthshot Prize in 2022.
In this episode we talk about: the mis-use of plastic; Ooho’s curious name; using seaweed at the London Marathon; why the material is the perfect replacement for plastic; the historic uses of seaweed – in glass, medicine and even beer; making paper and spoons from the material; flying water balloons over Hyde Park; how Notpla started as a side project; the importance of crowd funding to its beginnings; working from a kitchen table and being ‘parasites’ of Imperial College; scaling up; meeting resistance from the plastic industry; concerns over bio-plastics; the effect Covid had on the company; and not wanting to be an architect.
Support the show

Shubhi Sachan is a multi-disciplinary designer and the founder of Material Library of India. The New Delhi-based library was the first of its type in India and acts as a research and design consultancy committed to unlocking the potential of industrial and agricultural waste – of which India, a country with a population of over 1.4 billion people, has plenty.
Over the years, MLI has worked with brands and organisations such as IKEA and the British Council, as well as presenting work and ideas across the globe, including at last year’s Material Matters London where it reimagined cotton as a climate-adaptive, culturally rich material.
In this episode Shubhi discusses: setting up MLI in 2017; why she decided to tackle waste in the first instance; India’s relationship with textiles and ‘waste colonialism’; the importance of the ‘rebirth’ of industrial materials; how natural materials can look after themselves; her recent project on cotton and why the crop needs to be re-thought; opening a thrift store where textiles are the currency; refusing to reject capitalism; curating seeds for IKEA; creating streetwear from rejected condoms; studying in England; becoming a successful surface designer; and why her family have questioned her career choices.
Support the show

Carole Collet is professor in Design for Sustainable Futures at Central Saint Martins. She is also director of Maison/0, the CSM – LVMH creative platform for regenerative luxury and co-director of the Living Systems Lab, a research group at the same university. 
During 2000, she founded the Textile Futures course at CSM, which went on to become Material Futures and has spawned a string of brilliant students attempting to get to grips with some of the most important issues of the day. Several have appeared on this podcast. She is, in many respects, the grande dame of new materials thinking. 
In this episode we talk about: the two platforms she runs at CSM; how creativity can be a catalyst for regenerative luxury; what terms like bio- and regenerative design mean to her; working with UNESCO in Bolivia; creating lab-grown fur; plastic problems in the Philippines; her groundbreaking BIOLACE project; founding the Textile Futures MA and creating ‘disobedient’ design courses; a brief history of fast fashion; the magic of mycelium; growing up in the French countryside and working in her mother’s flower shop; becoming interested in ecology; and the importance of collaboration in her work.
Support the show

This episode of Material Matters is as much about an object as it is a material. Tom Broughton is the founder of Cubitts, a modern spectacles company based in London’s Kings Cross. The company started in 2013 from his kitchen table and has grown to 20 stores across the UK and US, serving 250,000 customers across 100 countries. It offers frames in a number of materials – such as stainless steel and titanium – but is renowned for its use of acetate.
According to the company’s website Cubitts was ‘founded to help more people live better lives through spectacles they proudly wear – and create a better, and more responsible, industry along the way.’
In this episode we talk about: how early Modernism influenced Cubitts; living in (and loving) the Isokon building; founding his company and ‘literally doing everything’; not having a business plan; the joy of acetate and how the material defines his brand; a brief history of spectacles and London’s making legacy; why he has a problem with the word ‘eyewear’; being prescribed glasses at the age of 14 and collecting vintage frames in his 20s; getting bored easily and enjoying failure; disrupting the optics industry; being 'unrelenting' and making sacrifices in his personal life; and having an addictive personality.
Support the show