Many things about zero-waste designer Janelle Abbott’s relationship to the fashion industry have changed since she was a kid growing up around her parents’ Seattle clothing business. Her stance on the industry’s waste problem isn’t one of them.
Calling it a problem undersells the issue. The United Nations Environment Programme estimates that the fashion industry produces 92 million tons of textile waste globally each year.
At least one of those tons must be in Abbott’s North Seattle studio space, crammed floor-to-ceiling with reclaimed textiles ready to be turned into new fashion creations.
“Every clothing swap in Seattle knows about me now,” joked the 35-year-old designer, surveying her stash during a recent studio tour.
Abbott designs clothing under her label JRAT, for which she creates pieces by reusing extant fabrics. She’s also growing a reputation as a collaborative artist and a costume designer for local dance and theater projects, with her values applying to all her creative projects. She’s not interested in participating in the destructive, exploitative fashion industry writ large, but she loves the art of creating clothing — and remaining accessible, ethical and sustainable while doing so.
“It’s part of my business model that I’m willing to take anything,” she explained. “I feel like it expands my creativity that much more, trying to resolve something I despise and make it something I feel proud to bring into the world.”
Family values
Abbott came by her values early. In the ’80s and ’90s (“kind of the last bastion of true American manufacturing,” Abbott said), her parents owned and operated Amanda Gray, a clothing line that was all cut and sewn in Seattle from fabric sourced from Canada, and garment-dyed in Los Angeles.
But then the 2001 New York Fashion Week was canceled after 9/11, and Amanda Gray missed out on critical sales to national store buyers. When Nordstrom later returned a large order after the company started producing its own fashion line, “that was the last nail in the coffin,” Abbott said, and it was compounded by the rapid expansion of fast fashion companies like H&M and Forever 21. Amanda Gray shuttered.
“We lost everything,” Abbott said. “I felt very resentful of the fashion industry because I saw how it conspired against independent companies.”
Now 13 and living in a new financial reality, Abbott turned to thrift shopping as a hobby, budget necessity and way to connect with her mom.
“She taught me to sew when I was young, so clothing was still an arena of play for me when things were really hard,” she said.
At 15, Abbott learned about the “human trafficking and modern-day slavery” behind fast fashion, which was all the more horrifying because she’d grown up knowing the garment workers at her parents’ warehouse in Sodo.
“I couldn’t imagine those people, if they lived in a different country and worked in the same business, the conditions they’d be working under,” she said. “It was egregious.”
Sustainable future
Though fashion as an industry repulsed Abbott, fashion as an art form still called to her. Nothing else scratched her creative itch and her desire for her creations to have a practical application.
Even so, Abbott was somewhat surprised that she ended up wanting to study fashion design. She arrived at Parsons School of Design in New York, committed to not buying newly manufactured clothing and only working with reclaimed materials.
“I fought a lot with my professors,” she said.
Junior year, she learned about zero-waste pattern drafting, a method that eliminates both paper and textile waste, and that has been integral to her process ever since. But after graduation, with no interest in finding a job in big fashion, she came back to Seattle to try and figure out how to ethically work with the art form she loved.
After some collaborations came and went, her solo label, JRAT, was born, and is currently carried by an assortment of adventurous boutiques around the world, from Seattle to New York to Beijing. (The name comes from a newspaper she created as a kid, The J.R. Abbott Times.)
JRAT pieces beg to be touched, resplendent with ruffles and puffs, bedecked with riffled, rippled textures created using multiple layers of fabric. Each piece is a unique maximalist fantasia: a layer cake of unexpected pattern, color and fabric.
“I don’t think I’m a fashion designer, I think I’m an artist who has a fashion practice,” she said. “I’m not trying to mass manufacture anything, and I wouldn’t want to make anything that doesn’t have a destination.”
Last September, she presented her first JRAT fashion show in New York during Fashion Week, a fittingly guerrilla affair. “I turn my shows into sample sales so anything on the runway is immediately available to people in the audience at wholesale,” she said.
Along with her creations for JRAT, Abbott’s other work has plenty of destinations too. Collaborators are drawn to her ethics and aesthetics, and she’s designed costumes for theater company ArtsWest, local dance/cabaret darling Cherdonna Shinatra and Pacific Northwest Ballet dancer Amanda Morgan, including her recent piece “Arrivals” at King Street Station and “Aftertime,” premiering at PNB in November.
While her artistic fingerprints are on everything she designs, Abbott said she enjoys meshing her aesthetic with the requirements of each new project. Her recent PNB collaboration was “very supportive but still really scary” because working with a major organization meant not manufacturing the pieces herself. Leveling up can mean relinquishing control, but she said PNB’s artisans have “been super game” to follow her zero-waste guidance.
She’s also worked with local fashion label Prairie Underground, choreographers including Alyza DelPan-Monley, and Cannonball Arts, which commissioned Abbott’s installation “149,520 Gallons.” On view through fall 2025, it comprises 70 of her signature 3T T-shirts, beautifully Frankensteined from three different shirts. Between growing the cotton, processing it, and distributing the shirt, a single T-shirt takes roughly 712 gallons of water to manufacture: 149,520 gallons.
In early October, Abbott said she’d made 370 total pieces so far this year; she made 604 in 2024.
And she’s doing it (mostly, with the occasional conscientiously employed intern) all by herself. “I’m a one-woman manufacturing facility,” she said.
These are the growing pains of a business aiming at sustainability for the Earth, as well as for the organization and the human behind it.
Making sure everyone in her supply chain gets fairly paid, while remaining remotely accessible for buyers, is a balancing act Abbott is still figuring out, while also figuring out her place in fashion.
“You need people like me creating innovative methods for reducing the waste that the industry continues to pump out,” she said. “That’s why I keep showing up and saying, ‘Hey, all your garbage is useful over here! But stop making so much garbage.’”
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