This Montreal studio transforms old furs into fashionable pieces

Creations Gama is designing new fashion out of old fur coats.

Upcycled fur is making it’s way into the thrift-store shopping trend, and creating no waste along the way.

Inside the Creations Gama Studio near Chabanel Street West, Founder Gabrielle Mailhot-Coté offers a peek into the temperature and humidity controlled storage room where hundreds of fir coats are stored. She says a well-cared for fur lasts decades.

“Fur is that it’s a material that is biodegradable, it’s natural, and it last very long. You can keep a fur coat for 70 years!” says Mailhot-Coté.

That’s long enough for styles to go out of fashion. Creations Gama remodels fur coats by hand in their Montreal studio — so your Grandmother’s vintage fur gets an upgrade.

“There’s a sentimental value about this coat, but they wouldn’t wear it like this. So what we can do, we can transform it to do something like younger with a hood and the zippers, so you can wear it like with a jeans,” Mailhot-Coté explains.

The before and after photos on the Creations Gama website show very imaginative makeovers.

The artists who remodel the furs make sure to stitch the name of the original owner inside the item to carry on the connection.

The remodeling is done by artists who have rare skills and are adept at using machines that are as vintage as some of the coats.

Mailhot-Coté says her timing is good

“The younger generation, I see them going to the thrift store and buying like vintage clothes and they look very good with that,” she says.

She says her business plan is based on a circular economy where she rarely buys new materials and creates little waste.

She holds up a large rectangle of colourful furs all stitched into one piece that will make a unique handbag: “Pieces that we would throw away in the garbage. But in putting them together like this, it makes a nice colored pattern like that.”

Retro, recycled, responsible — Mailhot-Coté says “what’s old is new again.”