Today, fast fashion—the trend of big corporations rapidly and unethically bringing low-cost versions of high-fashion designs from the runway to their retail stores—is the second largest source of pollution in the world. This statistic has made the sustainable fashion industry more and more essential to the preservation of our earth. In Bushwick, Ashley Wheat and Coleman Downing are bringing that eco-conscious sensitivity to members of the community in the form of their brand, OMNIA ex NIHILO.

Latin for “everything from nothing,” OMNIA ex NIHILO is a sustainable fashion line crafted entirely out of natural fiber fabrics like linen, organic cotton, recycled leather, and waxed canvas. Wheat, designer of OMNIA ex NIHILO, says that the inspiration behind the brand’s name comes from the idea that all things have to be created out of nothing.

“In terms of our clothing, cotton has to be planted and grown, harvested, spun into yarn, milled into fabric, and finally turned into garments after a few months of design development,” she says. With this in mind, she chooses to use natural fiber fabrics which last for the garments’ lifetime, and are also able to eventually decompose and not pollute the earth. “I believe our garments should be able to return to nothing instead of taking hundreds of years to decompose, which is the case with synthetic fabric,” she said.