Our Team
Gina Grunwald | Fashion Designer, London, UK
Matthew Needham
Director + Founder
Matthew Needham is a British-Czech designer, curator and art director best known for his contributions towards sustainable practice within the British fashion industry.
He is also the programme-wide Sustainability Lead at Central Saint Martins School of Art & Design for fashion design.
At Trash Club, Matthew’s forward-thinking vision and leadership have been instrumental in shaping our mission. His focus on fostering a network and creative community for independent artists has helped shape our organisation's objectives.
We live in a time where community is more important than ever.
“Over the past year, we have been met with a cost of living crisis, global political unrest, and updates about the increasing impacts of climate change, the biggest threat known to us all. The creative industries continue to conduct business as usual, but we will not stay silent among all that is happening worldwide. As creatives, we can use our medium to connect with others, present alternative ways of thinking, and speak out to dismantle systemic biases. Everything we touch, see, and interact with is designed, which is the power we hold as creative thinkers. Let us remember to use our collective skills to make change happen and support one another in the process.
Our connections thrive on shared values, which are embedded within the foundations of our practices and core belief systems. Now more than ever, we must come together, learn from one another, and join alliances in the coming months.”
Katy Mason
Co-founder
Katy Mason is an artist and jewellery maker whose work questions the value of everyday objects. She is the co-founder of Trash Club and Berlin-based brand Soup Archive. Taking influence from her fashion background, she describes her craft as ‘object draping’ due to its improvisational nature.
“The community has taught me how to be vulnerable in a space where I'm speaking as myself rather than trying to put on a front. It’s given me the confidence to speak in a certain way.”
Hub Hosts
Kayla Antonevich
Trash Club Boston Host
Kayla Antonevich is a designer and artist who works in slow fashion production and development. She graduated from The School of The Art Institute of Chicago’s fashion department in 2020. All of the materials used in Kayla’s work and development process are sourced secondhand in an attempt to reduce the amount of landfill waste. Typically, her materials help inform her design choices.
Trash Club Boston aims to build a community of like-minded creatives in and around Boston, USA. Through mending parties, coffee chats, and more, this hub fosters connections and space to amplify community member’s voices and creative work.
“Whatever you do needs to work for you primarily. You need to be happy in it and be right for you and your values. As long as it works for your ambitions and points you in the right direction. The most important thing is to be fulfilled as a person and fulfilled in your work. The two are interlinked if you’re creative. You need to be happy.”
Flyn Vibert
Trash Club Berlin Host
Flyn Vibert is a photographer and artist experimenting with ‘organic photography’: transforming images by hand through a series of alternative processes. These range from the more direct approach of burning or freezing the image to reusing everyday household items found materials and curiosities such as hair wax, soap, nail polish, slime, and toothpaste—the core of their practice centres around the idea that art can be made anywhere using anything.
Trash Club Berlin aims to create a space where all creatives can unite in an open, collaborative and supportive environment, without restriction on age, background, or gender. We look forward to hosting meet-ups, artist talks, workshops, screenings, and more for you.
Rachel Freire
Trash Club Santiago de Compostela Host
Rachel Freire is an artist and designer working in fashion, costume and garment technology. Rachel is self-taught in pattern cutting and trained in Design for Performance at Central St. Martins. Their work inhabits the spaces where disciplines meet with focus on intricate, evocative detailing, narrative garments and exploring the relationship between futuristic applications and traditional techniques.
Trash Club Santiago aims to create an intimate space for seeding collaborations. To establish an outpost: a studio space which can be used for residential location swaps and enable Trash Clubbers to experience a unique environment to make art and nurture creativity in the Santiago location, which is the convergence point of the Camino, an ancient magical destination with inspiring energy.
“Having such a diverse cohort - where your ethics and experiences don’t need to be explained - and a space to speak freely with peers is such a liberating thing. Trash Talk on a Friday lunchtime is the perfect way to discuss and review the week, and know you’re not alone out there. There’s always an amazing nugget of inspiration to take into the weekend. It can be as simple as reminding each other to have a weekend!”
Trash Club Jaipur Host
Bhaavya Goenka
Bhaavya works in the field of Circular Design, specialising in the reuse and upcycling of industrial textile waste through indigenous craft practices of India, building replicable systems that allow decentralised development whilst creating conversational products through zero-waste practices.
Trash Club Jaipur investigates what post-capitalistic decolonial futures of systems for making look like in the hyper-local context of Jaipur, Rajasthan, informed by a global consciousness. We want to take up inquiries responding to the climate crisis, for example, a future where farming for fashion is not necessary. These would help us imagine a future while learning from the past and perhaps come up with systems that could be explored and implemented today.
“Listening to ‘Trash Talk’ reminds me of why I am doing what I am doing. The pressures of the industry and structure of the industry can make one feel alone; through a community like a Trash Club, I find my struggles reflected, transcend borders and see my most intimate concerns about the climate and the fashion industry articulated by someone else. It’s a place to learn and grow but also for a concerned empathetic designer to feel less alone.”
Eunice Pais
Trash Club Porto Co-Host
Eunice works with photography, video, fabric manipulation and sculpture rooted in her Mozambican and Portuguese heritage. Her art analyses history, oral tradition, human-nature connections, identity, colonial legacies and imperialistic structures. Questioning the ethical implications of photography, Eunice founded Pais Ethical Image Making in 2020 to amplify diverse voices.
Trash Club Porto aims to catalyse the transformative potential of collective expression when combined with a dedication to ecological and social values. This hub aims to engage communities in intentional dialogues about how, collectively, we can reimagine futures and enrich our community and its connections. Through in-person Trash Talks and pop-up events with different themes and guests, their ethos is rooted in ecology, upcycling, organic processes, connection to nature and supporting local creatives.
Mariana Martins de Oliveira
Trash Club Porto Co-Host
Mariana is a multidisciplinary artist and educator. Her work aims to question contemporary art and the various possibilities of being and doing. Through her practice, she investigates food, roots and participatory practices in order to question contemporary times and the individual’s position in the creative, ecological and communitarian context.
Trash Club Porto aims to catalyse the transformative potential of collective expression when combined with a dedication to ecological and social values. This hub aims to engage communities in intentional dialogues about how, collectively, we can reimagine futures and enrich our community and its connections. Through in-person Trash Talks and pop-up events with different themes and guests, their ethos is rooted in ecology, upcycling, organic processes, connection to nature and supporting local creatives.
Sophie Ruane
Trash Club Shanghai Host
Sophie Ruane is a fashion designer and educator currently living and working in Shanghai, China. After graduating from Central Saint Martins in 2018 with an MA in Fashion Design, Sophie moved to Berlin, Germany where she co-founded Soup Archive. Soup Archive make distorted clothing with pre-used materials whilst demonstrating upcycling techniques. Their clothes reflect their humour and desire to re-use unwanted items in a contemporary manner.
Trash Club Shanghai hosts ‘Tea Talk’ events, a concept that has been an important part of Chinese culture and said that a tea ceremony can refresh the mind and clear thoughts. Creatives join this mending workshop as Sophie strives to grow the creative network locally through communication.
Advisory Board
Orsola de Castro
Founder of Fashion Revolution + Estethica
Orsola de Castro has been a leading figure in sustainable fashion for the past 20 years.
She is the co-founder of Fashion Revolution, the world’s largest fashion activism movement and Estethica, the organisation creating agency for change in the fashion industry. In 2021 she published her book ‘Loved Clothes Last’, providing ways to breathe new life into one’s wardrobe. London and an associate visiting professor at Middlesex University.
Orsola’s first book, ‘Loved Clothes Last’ was published by Penguin Life in 2021 and has been translated into Italian, French and German.
“Any organisation claiming that their values are C-R-A-P should pique one’s curiosity, especially when C-R-A-P is an acronym for Consciousness, Responsibility, Authenticity, and People.
Trash Club is a place, a space, a cohort, a network, and a community where those values are discussed and upheld creatively, intelligently, inquisitively, intimately, safely, and usefully. To be able to share solutions and upheavals, to benefit from others who have had similar experiences, and to benefit those who haven’t yet - this is what is needed at this time of mass everything; we need constant doses of reality to remind us we are not just a profile on social media.
Trash Club is the people who join, their lives, their work, their commitment to treading lightly but powerfully in a world beseeched by waste, using our creativity as a service. To me, Trash Club is a support system, a knowledge-sharing, well-being tool to understand my practice, to share my purpose and to grow as a person. Welcome.”
Niamh Tuft
Curator + Cultural Programmer
Niamh is a curator and cultural programmer working at the intersection of creativity, climate action and community. She trained as a fashion curator and has worked in various roles for the British Council, Fashion Revolution and University of the Arts across fashion, design and sustainability. She is currently a Cultural Programming Manager in Waltham Forest.
Rahemur Rahman
Designer + Filmaker + Academic
Rahemur Rahman is a fashion designer, filmmaker and Community Curator known for his significant contributions to the British-Bengali diaspora and innovative use of traditional Bengali block printing techniques through his eponymous menswear label. He is deeply committed to preserving and promoting his cultural heritage and reimagining how queer creatives in the South Asian community are perceived. His work is a constantly evolving investigation into sustainability, generational traumas and social inclusion through the creative arts.
“Trash Club, for me, is the space where creative entrepreneurs find each other when the systems in place that are meant to support us don’t. We’ve somehow managed to create a community and network of artists, makers and designers who all help each other grow through collaboration, conversation, and creation.”
Tanveer Ahmed
Anti-racist Educator + Researcher
Tanveer is a practice-led fashion design researcher and anti-racist educator, exploring ways to expose and rethink how dominant Eurocentric racial hierarchies are used in the fashion design process. She is a Senior Lecturer in Fashion and Race at Central Saint Martins, working across the fashion programme to support decolonial fashion perspectives. Her research emerges from experiences of teaching over the last twenty years and recognising the urgent need to explore alternative non-extractive, anti-racist and social justice-oriented forms of fashion design pedagogies.
