Zero Waste Daniel Brings Eco-Couture and Cabaret to NYFW: "We're All Sharing One Mission" (Exclusive)

As I settled into my velvet chair at Manhattan's Midnight Theatre on Sept. 9, 2024, a glass of sustainable Element[AL] pinot noir in hand, chatting with the London West End actress to my left and the eco-conscious fashion buyer to my right, warm anticipation sank in. Ushers and guests strutted around in glittering patchwork pieces, repping the planet-loving, genderless, and inspired designs of Daniel Silverstein — aka Zero Waste Daniel.

“Tonight, I ask you to release your preconceived notions of sustainability within the fashion industry and immerse yourself in a world that values beauty, design, quality, and ethics equally,” Silverstein announced at the start of his Sustainable Fashion Is a Cabaret fashion show. “I invite you to witness the glamorous potential of this artistry, regardless of the origin of its source materials.”

Hosted by Glam Award winner Julie J, the show's performers included Broadway’s Wicked star Alexandra Socha, OG Broadway Rent star Daphne Rubin-Vega, celebrated cabaret performer Mx Justin Vivian Bond, RuPaul’s Drag Race Season 11 winner Yvie Oddly, Broadway puppeteer Joshua Holden, and burlesque icon The Maine Attraction.

For our Not so Fast Fashion Week campaign, Green Matters spoke exclusively with Daniel Silverstein days prior to the show about humanizing New York Fashion Week, the inherent upcycling nature of artists, and showing major fashion houses the power, beauty, and potential of sustainable fashion.

"It's a little bit meta; the inspiration for the collection is my inspiration," Silverstein tells Green Matters via Zoom. "The idea was to reach out to the performers and the industry that I get so much inspiration from, which is New York live performance, theater, drag, [and] cabaret. ... Theater is how I found fashion. My love of costume ... propelled me to learn about fashion, learn about construction, learn about fabric, and as I learned about all of those things and they didn't align with my core values, I got into the world of sustainability and zero waste."

The Zero Waste Daniel site relays that each unique piece diverts about 1 pound of fabric from entering a landfill. With a closed loop production system, ZWD is changing fashion one pre-consumer waste scrap at a time, but Silverstein also aims to change how we imagine a fashion show.

"This is a performance, and there is A-list New York talent doing what they do best. This felt like a really clear opportunity to say we don't have to think about this like a fashion show. Let's think about it like any other show, because we all know fashion is the only industry where thousands of people work on a collection ... and you only see one designer wave at the end," he tells Green Matters of Sustainable Fashion is a Cabaret.

"People say how wrong it is, so why are we still doing it? ... It's not about me all night, it's about everyone in the room uplifting each other. We're all sharing one mission."

The audience cheered as the powerful voice of Alexandra Socha (whose wedding gown was designed by Silverstein) filled the venue, laughed as Joshua Holden's snarky sock puppet encouraged Silverstein to just "throw out" his "scraps," and watched in awe as Yvie Oddly gave a fierce lip sync performance to a cover of the Frank Sinatra tune "My Way" — a fitting song for the show.

The non-traditional NYFW showcase breathed life and love into a notoriously rigid and cold industry.

"I don't like that language of 'the models are just hangers,'" he explains. "There's this notion that fashion is performative. Something becomes trendy. Inclusivity became trendy, and so now people are casting shows in a very performative way. ... We're not performative. We are inclusive. ... The performers genuinely are my inspiration. They run an age gamut of probably 40 years, and all different types of gender expressions, countries of origin, and ethnic backgrounds, and sizes, and shapes, and it's beautiful and inspiring."

Aside from these particular performers inspiring Silverstein, he recognizes the rarely discussed link between artists and sustainability.

"Artists look for potential in materials. We don't always think of it as a sustainable choice," he details. "I don't think that it is foreign to so many — especially queer people — drag artists and nightlife performers. We're used to being scrappy, so why not celebrate how that is almost like a superpower."

As for the colorful and textured pieces themselves, Silverstein mentions a recurring bird motif.

"Daphne Rubin-Vega shared an original piece that she wrote," he details. "The whole motif of it is a story of these two birds that were gifted to her by her late brother, and the symbolism in them. That was very moving to me, so birds became a huge touchpoint for this collection."

Additionally, Silverstein was honored to be able to make a gown out of Rubin-Vega's old Broadway costumes.

"We as humans are very sentimental about objects ... and she has this beautiful spirit and ability to say, 'These things do have meaning to me, which is why I kept them, but I see that they don't have the value they had when they were in their original context,'" he shares.

Though he's too polite to fully unleash it, Silverstein is clearly frustrated with the fashion industry as a whole.

"I've been doing this long enough that, as in the name, we know it's going to be made from scraps. We know it's going to be made in New York. We know there's a high level of ethics going into the planning of this, but it better be drop dead gorgeous," Silverstein says of ZWD, which will celebrate its 10th birthday in May 2025.

"Some brands might call me a small business, some people might call me an emerging designer. In the real world, and in my world, I've emerged. ... If I'm ever going to advance the agenda of sustainable fashion past where I am right now, I need to show larger brands that once they're ready to take sustainability seriously as a metric of success ... I'll have to have a body of work that proves you could pick me up from Zero Waste Daniel the way they picked Marc Jacobs up from Marc Jacobs and plopped him as a creative director at another house," he explains. "I'm just building a portfolio."

Silverstein unfortunately thinks "people are afraid to take risks," noting that "it's the same reason we get another Marvel movie, another remake."

"People need to see this brand not as a symbol of upcycling, but as relevant fashion," he continues.

All in all, Silverstein had a relatively simple mission with this couture collection: "To position sustainable fashion as just fashion."