Nava Rose Is Giving Old Clothes New Life

To the wall of flashing cameras lining the red carpet, Nava Rose is a stunning vision in a custom gown. But what the lenses don’t capture is the fabric’s origin story: a discarded dress she salvaged from Goodwill bins stitched with thrifted accessories. For the Los Angeles-based content creator, this display of creativity is a quiet act of defiance against a fashion machine she once helped fuel.

Long before she was Nava Rose, she was Alexa Navarro from Orange County, California. She grew up playing Barbie dress-up games and watching her mother and grandmother sew clothes. By elementary school, she was already learning to navigate her way around a needle and thread. By college, the third-generation seamstress was sewing custom clothes for her and her friends.

But during the gold-rush era of online retail in the mid-2010s, Nava Rose landed a job after fashion school at Make Me Chic, a fast-fashion brand later acquired by the ultra-low-cost online retail giant Shein. Like many in her generation, she was quickly swept up in a system engineered for cheap, rapid-fire consumption. Across social media, influencers fueled the fast fashion boom, racking up billions of views. Nava Rose, still building her own following, also curated her digital feed with outfits-of-the-day from these brands to match the trend. “I don’t know if I really understood the implications of fast fashion at the time, because I had all these clothes and I was just doing a lot of fun content, but then at the same time I’m such a big thrifter, such a big upcycler,” she says.

Nava Rose experienced a sudden astronomical growth in her followers during the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic, when audiences flocked to TikTok for entertainment. She went viral for her incredibly creative, seamless outfit transition videos, her DIY thrift-flips, and videos where she created outfits styled after different emojis, anime characters, and her favorite K-pop groups like BTS.

But as her platform exploded to 5.5 million followers on TikTok and over a million subscribers on YouTube, Nava Rose began to grapple with her conscience. In her personal life, she has always cared for the environment—intentionally sorting her recycling by plastic code and even caring for pet worms that help with her compost. Eventually, a growing awareness of the environmental toll of fast fashion made her realize her complicity in a system that contributed to her own success. Realizing that the fast-fashion clothes she once promoted would outlive her in landfills, leaching toxins into the earth, she knew she had to change course.

She has since redirected that same digital influence toward a completely different mission: teaching her followers how to mend, thrift, and value what already exists. In recent years, she showcased her own upcycled designs in red carpet premieres like The Devil Wears Prada and even at the White House.

One of her favorite custom-made pieces was her red carpet look at the 2026 Actors Awards, formerly known as the Screen Actors Guild Awards. Nava Rose drew quite the media attention with her own design. Made from a four-dollar red dress she salvaged from a Goodwill bin, she stitched a mesh fabric and beaded trim sourced from the Remainders Creative Reuse, a craft store in Pasadena, then added a statement gold hand-shaped appliqué she fashioned from clay. “I’m just so empathetic for clothes; I’m like, ‘You don’t deserve to go,’” Nava Rose says. “I feel like if it’s ripped up and tattered and just so broken, it’s even cuter to me, and I think it’s because I have that savior mentality that I think it can be saved somehow.”

At the start of 2023, Nava Rose posted an apology video to her followers for perpetuating a system that profited from labor abuses and environmental harms at the expense of the planet.

Americans donate and throw away more than eighty-one pounds of clothing and textiles per person each year. According to estimates from the Environmental Protection Agency, the U.S. combusted 3.2 million tons of textile waste in 2018, while 11.3 million tons ended up in landfills—that’s roughly one hundred and thirty garbage trucks full of fabric every hour, around the clock. Still, much discarded clothing is shipped off to places like Ghana, where it is either upcycled and resold or tossed onto the shores, spilling into the ocean.

On a tour of Goodwill’s Atwater Village headquarters, Nava Rose saw the sorting process firsthand: workers inspect donations for quality, brand, and condition, sending top picks to retail stores and the rest to giant blue clearance bins. But the unsold items face a far different fate. Compressed into thousand-pound plastic-wrapped bales, these textiles are sold by the ton to third-party recycling and export brokers, trucked to the Port of Los Angeles, and shipped straight to South America, mainly Chile.

“There were still a lot of clothes that were getting shipped out, and that was another eye-opener,” Nava Rose says. “I didn’t think it was fair to leave the broken stuff for South America. They deserve the same clothes we want.“

This reality pushed her to build her own label: Nanaii, or ‘nanay,’ which translates to ‘mother’ in the Filipino language, Tagalog. The goal is to create upcycled, transformative, and versatile clothing that can be worn in many different ways.

For the first collection, Nava Rose emphasizes how important it is for her to use deadstock material, which many warned her not to do, but she just couldn’t bear the thought of using more of the Earth’s raw resources when there are warehouses full of unused deadstock materials.

“It’s challenging, but we just have to use the things that we already have,” she says. “We already have so many clothes and so much fabric waste to begin with, so how about I make a brand that I can use this fabric waste towards?”

After announcing Nanaii to her followers, Nava Rose says she lost more followers than she has in a long time. But at the same time, many followers started following her new brand. With her next step, she feels like she is staging a quiet revolution against the very industry that built her platform, trading the intoxicating speed of ultra-fast fashion for the slow, intentional art of upcycling. “If me moving toward sustainability isn’t what [my followers] resonate with, I’m not mad about it,” she says. “The people who stick with me, they’re why I do content anyways.”

Nanaii is currently in pre-production, after which Nava Rose hopes to host a small launch event that emphasizes the intersection of fashion and sustainability. “[Nanaii] is almost like a love letter to Mother Earth,” she says. “It’s also generational to me as a proud Filipina—it’s an ode to my grandma, an ode to my mom, and hopefully, I have a child that wants to sew, and it just passes down.”