Every summer, hundreds of thousands of people head to European festivals for a few days of music and escape. What they leave behind can last far longer. A small group of designers is now treating that waste as raw material, not rubbish.
A Designer Who Salvages What Festivals Leave Behind
Manchester designer Jess O’Riley launched J.O.STUDIO in 2023, after graduating from Manchester Fashion Institute with a First in Fashion Design in 2024. Her brand collects tents abandoned at UK music festivals and turns them into jackets, vests, tote bags, and keyrings. The idea began on a solo bikepacking trip. She found a brand-new tent dumped in a bin and strapped it to her bike. She treats festival tents themselves as raw material, not simply “old fabric.” And, she works with their waterproofing and durability, rather than against it. Working with the material also reshapes her process. She has to reverse-engineer designs around what she salvages, rather than design first and source materials later.
The Number Behind the Story
An estimated 250,000 tents are abandoned at UK music festivals each year. That figure is widely cited by sustainability campaigners and university researchers, including the University of Brighton, which puts the equivalent waste at roughly 900 tonnes annually. It isn’t a precise government count. It’s worth treating as an estimate rather than official statistics. Still, it’s been used consistently across recent years, suggesting the scale is real even if the exact number moves.
Glastonbury Is Actually Getting Better
The picture isn’t uniformly bleak. Glastonbury has reported 98% to 99% of tents taken home every year since 2019, a dramatic shift from the festival’s earlier reputation for abandoned fields. With over 200,000 attendees, though, even a 1-2% leftover rate adds up to thousands of tents. The problem is no longer simply that people leave tents behind. The deeper question is why festival equipment was ever designed to be disposable in the first place.
Budget tents built for a single weekend, often priced under £40, were never engineered to last. Yet they’re made from polyester, nylon, metal poles, pegs, and guy ropes. They’re genuinely complex products for something treated as throwaway. A festival may last four days. The materials used to build that experience can last for decades.
Designers Are Starting to Notice
O’Riley isn’t alone. In June 2026, University of Brighton student Tilly Lawless launched Bâche, a project turning salvaged tents into limited-edition clothing. Lawless has said she loves festival culture for its creativity and community. That made the waste left behind after each event feel especially jarring. Her project and O’Riley’s brand approach the same material from different angles. One comes from design education, the other from commercial fashion. Together, they suggest designers are increasingly viewing festival waste as a legitimate design material, not just an eco-friendly gimmick.
The idea has already reached the runway. At London Fashion Week 2024, Bristol designer Alice Bowen-Churchill built a dress from two discarded festival tents and a second-hand anorak. She incorporated guy ropes, hooks, and rings directly into the design. The piece appeared on Oxfam’s Style for Change catwalk after roughly a month of construction. The gap between muddy festival field and London runway is exactly what makes the story land.
Rethinking the Tent From the Start
Some European projects are skipping upcycling altogether and redesigning the product itself. The Dutch initiative KarTent builds recyclable cardboard tents specifically for festivals. Each one is collected and recycled after the event, cutting production-related CO2 emissions roughly in half compared with conventional tents. Where O’Riley and Lawless work with what already exists, KarTent asks a different question. What if the tent were built for its next life from the start?
That question connects to a wider shift already reshaping fashion’s relationship with waste. As explored in The EU Has Banned Brands from Destroying Unsold Clothes, regulators are increasingly forcing the industry to confront what happens to products once demand ends.
Upcycling has real limits, though. O’Riley herself has described the challenge of scaling production, keeping prices accessible, and preserving a circular ethos while building formal partnerships with festivals. Turning 250,000 tents into jackets isn’t realistic. Upcycling was never meant to function as waste management. It’s a way of giving a fraction of that waste new value, nothing more.
The point isn’t to turn every abandoned tent into a jacket. It’s to stop designing products as though their usefulness ends the moment the event does. That lesson extends well beyond festival campsites, into how Europe builds outerwear and sportswear from durable, purposeful materials more broadly.
Key Sources
- ‘I turn abandoned Leeds Festival tents into fashion worth hundreds of pounds’ — Yorkshire Evening Post
- Sustainability Series: J.O Studio — D&T Association
- Stitching Together Circular Fashion & Community Spirit with Jess O’Riley — Future Fashion Fair
- Brighton student transforms abandoned festival tents into sustainable fashion collection — University of Brighton
- Glastonbury Festival: 99% of tents taken home amid ‘Leave No Trace’ message — Hello Rayo
- Bristol fashion designer used discarded festival tents to make Fashion Week dress — ITV News
- KarTent: recyclable cardboard tents for European festivals — European Circular Economy Stakeholder Platform
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