When More Or Less catches up with Sebastian A de Ruffray, the designer behind Sevali, he is on a family holiday. Most of us might head to a country cottage or a beach retreat, but de Ruffray is in Los Angeles. It’s his first time in the City of Angels but, he says, he feels right at home. “People say the Sevali aesthetic has an LA vibe, or is a more American type of brand,” he says. Also, as a child of the Noughties, he is enjoying a look at this hub of celebrity culture. Is he going on a tour of the houses of stars? “Oh we’re definitely doing that,” he laughs.
De Ruffray, born in 1990, is part of a generation that grew up with both instant celebrity culture on tap and the impending climate crisis on their timeline. Sevali, a label that he launched in 2018, is a (perhaps unlikely) product of both of these influences. Collections have taken inspiration from Y2K faves such as Britney Spears and Paris Hilton, employing moto details, short pleated skirts and slip dresses. De Ruffray is also committed to upcycling, sourcing materials from diverse and varied locations – including the street outside his Paris apartment.
The designer says this combination is essential to the label’s success. “I love it when the upcycled pieces don’t really feel upcycled for me,” he argues. “I want to appeal to a customer that isn’t necessarily ecologically conscious or even interested in sustainability… I don’t want that to become a strong asset. I think it’s just the way we operate. We have a sustainable background, but that’s not part of the aesthetic. It’s important to prove to people that you can deliver gorgeous garments that are sustainable.And that’s it.”
De Ruffray grew up in Santiago in Chile and moved to London to study in 2012. After graduating from his MA at Central Saint Martins, he moved to Paris and worked at different brands. He says time at Vetements, when Demna Gvasalia was still the creative director, “was pretty exciting. They were the brand that everyone was talking about and it seemed to be that they were working in a way a little bit outside the box.” That was an exception, however. “I freelanced for different brands in Paris. I realised that it was not what I wanted to do in the long term,” he says. “I wanted to evolve as a designer. So I decided to give myself a chance.”
It was a leap worth taking. Although only four years old, Sevali has been worn by Blackpink, Doja Cat, Rosalia and Lourdes Leon – celebrity endorsements that help de Ruffray speak to his target demographic. “I think it’s cool,” he says of his A-list fans. “It aligns to what I aim to do – make upcycled pieces more mainstream, and to appeal to a younger audience that is just exploring or starting understanding about fashion.”
We have a sustainable background but that’s not part of the aesthetic. It’s important to prove to people that you can deliver gorgeous garments that are sustainable. And that’s it.
If, these days, de Ruffray’s aesthetic appreciates the old, and making it into something new, his own formative experiences with fashion were very different. “[In Chile], we’re pretty influenced culturally by the States,” he says. “So there’s this culture that everything should be new.” Now, in Paris, he enjoys the “secondhand culture. They’re very into street markets. It feels very authentic still… I once bumped into Catherine Deneuve at one of the markets.” (Sidenote to thrifters: de Ruffray says the secondhand shopping in Chile is “amazing, because no one really buys so much. When you go to London or to Paris, you have vintage boutiques, and then you have charity shops. In Chile the stores look like charity shops, but with much nicer things.”)
Sevali has directly benefited from the streets of Paris. “People are always throwing away beautiful things,” says the designer. “For me, coming from Chile, I found it’s very nice, what they are throwing away.” A case in point is a mattress that he spotted outside his apartment on the way to the airport to catch a flight. “I asked the taxi driver to stop and for him to take me back to my place just to take the mattress. This was the first upcycling exercise, because we picked the whole thing by hand.” Removing the topper of the mattress, it was cleaned and redeployed for different clothing pieces. “We decided to work on this deconstructed jacket with all the padding,” remembers de Ruffray. “There was obviously some stains that couldn’t be removed, so we embroidered on top of those. It was a long process and ended with a really poetic piece.”
Working like this has unexpected results, which perhaps rankle with fashion traditionalists. “The collections, you will see, they’re quite discontinuous. And for some people, I’ve heard, it feels kind of incoherent as well,” he laughs. But these sceptics aren’t welcome – happy accidents and working with what you have are ideas ingrained deeply in the brand’s DNA. “We don’t keep to the same colour or prints, and it’s a small collection as well. We always do 12 looks.”
De Ruffray says as a designer he is inspired by “everyday life or the mundanity of things – I think that’s the starting point for everything.” With this as a jumping-off point, working with found objects, such as that mattress, makes sense. “From there, it’s kind of a transformation or an array of different elements or objects that people relate to, transformed in a way that feels fresh,” he explains.
If this process has necessitated one-off pieces so far, de Ruffray is keen to scale up his work with upcycling. “We’re in a transition to becoming a more organised brand,” he says. “I’m trying to develop pieces that we can reproduce, which is really challenging for upcycling.” One way to do this is to create “fabrics” out of discarded clothes, by stitching them together. “It’s working with a textile more as a patchwork than with the garments as a deconstructed piece,” de Ruffray explains. “We’re doing T-shirt dresses so we’ve resourced different T shirts, then we open all the T-shirts and create a textile.”
If de Ruffray sees the future of fashion as about making sustainability innate to the production of clothes rather than as part of their aesthetic, he is engaged about what is happening with fashion and the environment. In May, he travelled to Atacama in Chile with his best friend, to see the landfill in the desert – where it is estimated that over half of the nearly 60,000 tonnes of secondhand clothing imported to the country each year ends up. An area “near a slum which is very dangerous,” he says it is difficult to access. “If you notice, so many pictures on the internet were taken by drones.” He describes the Atacama experience as “overwhelming” but also inspiring. “There are people [there] actually doing things… it’s very communitarian,” he says. “People are like ‘Let’s fix this problem’.”
While the problem of fast fashion is certainly too much for one designer to take on, de Ruffray’s Sevali does represent an alternative to the new-first culture that currently dominates the way most people consume clothes. For him, going forward, it is creativity that’s the thing. “We’re working on our new collection, which is kind of a transition from our previous one,” he says.
“I’m also interested in collaborating with other institutions, projects, or people. I’m very fluid in that way. I worked with the Margiela exhibition in Paris which was so, so fun and very different. I’d like to navigate between being a brand and being
a creative – one that can work in other creative fields as well.” Much like the upcycling plus the Noughties, that sounds like a Sevali combination with staying power.
Model: Rhenny Alade at Elite. Casting Director: Esther Boiteux. Set Design: Sati Leonne at Bryant Artists. Hair: Yann Turchi at Bryant Artists. Make-up: Hélène Vasnier at Bomba. Photography assistants: Jeremy Konko. Styling assistant: Juliette Dumazy. Production: Lotti Projects. Production Coordinator: Ines Saccani. Production Assistant: Tosca Poilliot.