Shirts! The beginning of Reworked-Wear

We’ve mastered circular understuff: 100% organic cotton underwear, tanks, and base layers designed to be recycled. You wear them out, we take them back, and the process begins again. (It’s almost that simple.) By closing the loop, we’re making a small but mighty dent in the 11 million pounds of undergarments that end up in landfills every day. 

Naturally, the next step for The Big Favorite was to design pieces you can wear on top. For us, a big button-down checks every box: It’s genderless, seasonless, and it’s typically made in durable, high-quality cotton, and they're abundant in second-hand outlet bins. The only snag? With seams, buttons, a placket, and a collar, a shirt just isn’t as easy to break down and remake again, so most of it ends up in outlet bins on its way to the global south.

It got us thinking about a different kind of reuse. And it wasn’t just the limitations of (current) circularity tech. In our research — i.e., scouring secondhand outlets — we realized that, actually, the button-downs of a few decades ago are far superior to the ones you’ll find on the market today. Shirts made before fast fashion and rapid production lessened the quality of almost everything we consume. The shirts of our parents’ and grandparents’ generations were literally made to last: beautiful cotton, impeccable stitching, shell buttons, collars that don’t droop on your hanger.

So instead of working on new shirts, we’re REworking vintage gems. We added smocking to oversized Oxfords, shot elastic through the shoulders of corporate button-downs, deconstructed poplin shirts into wrap tops, and made sleeve lengths modular. Already have a shirt that could use a little something extra? Send it to us, and we’ll work our magic — for under $100. Check it out here!

This is how you improve on perfection — and as a bonus, you’ll help us keep unwanted clothes from jamming landfills and secondhand markets in the global south, where a whopping 70% of American clothing ends up. Much of it NWT.  

With this exciting new category, we’re leveling up our commitment to sustainable,  innovative, and creative wardrobe solutions. We can't wait to see what else we have up our shirtsleeves.