Trinidad waste couture is the growing movement of makers turning discarded Carnival costumes and found junk into mas. It answers a real problem. Carnival in Trinidad is one of the planet's great fashion labs, but it also has a serious one-wear habit. Why Trinidad waste couture matters now Mas bands spend months engineering feathered wire …
Masquerader in a beaded, feathered costume at Trinidad Carnival, an example of Trinidad waste couture Caption: Costumes like this are built for one road march. That’s the waste problem sustainable mas makers are tackling. Credit:William ZALI
Trinidad waste couture is the growing movement of makers turning discarded Carnival costumes and found junk into mas. It answers a real problem. Carnival in Trinidad is one of the planet’s great fashion labs, but it also has a serious one-wear habit.
Why Trinidad waste couture matters now
Mas bands spend months engineering feathered wire frames, beaded bodices and headpieces that read as sculpture. Then the road march ends, and much of that craftsmanship has nowhere to go.
Estimates vary, but Carnival is thought to generate around 3.4 tonnes of waste a year, or roughly 7,500 pounds. Much of it is feathers, beads and synthetic fabric that gets tossed or burned after the party. A 2020 seminar co-organised by Carnicycle also heard that 52 materials commonly used in costumes are harmful to the environment.
How plastic got into mas in the first place
Here’s where the design history gets interesting. Plastic wasn’t always part of the mas vocabulary. According to the Trinidad Express, designer Geraldo Vieira brought it in around 1970. His King of Carnival presentation, The Human Mountain, used plastic moulds in its main structure.
Plastic made costumes lighter and more dramatic, and it made children’s mas more accessible. In other words, it was a design breakthrough long before it became a waste problem.
Carnicycle and the costume afterlife
Carnicycle began at the end of 2018. Two university friends, Danii McLetchie and co-founder Luke Harris, asked a question nobody was answering: “What happens to carnival costumes?”
They started by collecting 28 costumes. The next year they gathered 150, and by 2020 they had passed 250. There was no blueprint for taking a costume apart, so they learned by dismantling.
Sorted feathers and beads recovered from discarded Trinidad Carnival costumes Caption: Recovered feathers and beads are cleaned, sorted and sold on to designers and performers. Credit:Jhaye-Q Shares
Today, Carnicycle salvages feathers and beads and sells them to designers and performers. It also turns recovered materials into accessories like handbags and earrings. The running tally is more than 11,000 costume pieces kept out of the fire or the landfill.
The impact goes beyond materials. Over two years, Carnicycle trained more than 100 women at a local garment factory in sewing and costume design. It’s a circular-fashion model with a very Caribbean twist, because the supply chain includes the fete.
The island’s biggest band is on board too. Tribe, the largest mas band in Trinidad and Tobago, donated 300 excess costumes to Carnicycle. Its sister band, Lost Tribe, went featherless.
Berkeley Carnival Revolution: junk as protest
If Carnicycle is systems design, Cherisse Lauren Berkeley’s band is pure DIY punk. Berkeley Carnival Revolution started in 2017 with a simple problem: wanting to play mas without the money for a costume.
The answer was found junk. A community soon began sending in whatever the band asked for. In 2024, the band won an award for Eco-Conscious Sustainability. Its costumes also carry messages on gender-based violence, child abuse and social inequality. It’s budget-friendly, and loud about it.
Plastic waste reaching the sea is part of this conversation. UNEP-linked case studies note that plastic costume decor ends up in landfills and oceans. Meanwhile, designers at OCAD University in Toronto, including Trinidad-born professor Michael Lee Poy, run Sustainable Mascamp workshops using materials headed for landfill.
However, the best-documented work in Trinidad is about discarded costumes and found waste. It isn’t about plastic recovered from beaches. That’s the story worth telling accurately.
The policy layer
Government is getting involved as well. The Basel Convention Regional Centre, UNEP and Trinidad and Tobago’s Environmental Management Authority are behind a six-year programme. Its aim is to eliminate hazardous chemicals from Carnival fashion supply chains.
What Trinidad waste couture means for fashion
Fast fashion has a one-wear problem. Mas has it in its most extreme and most beautiful form. The people solving it in Trinidad are doing what good designers do, which is treating the constraint as the brief.
Trinidad waste couture won’t fix fashion’s waste problem on its own. Still, it shows that a culture built on spectacle can also be a lab for reuse.
