As a board-certified physician, Nina Vallejo is no stranger to approaching her work with care and intention. When she founded the fashion design house Boneyard Star (boneyardstar.com), she brought the same meticulous, sustainability-focused mindset from her patient-centric medical practice to a longtime creative aspiration, turning it into a reality.
“What you focus on is what you become,” Nina exclaims, and Boneyard Star is tangible proof of that. “We are here to help heal the planet, and therefore everything we do needs to aspire to be planet centric.”
This is far from a trendy, eco-friendly belief to attract business; it’s a core mission carried out in every detail of each uniquely designed Boneyard Star piece. The evidence is in the single garbage bag of reduced waste that the design house discards every four to six weeks, a result of the brand’s continuous refining of their practices at the Las Vegas facility where no piece of fabric is wasted.
“No textiles that come in leave our facility as garbage, not even thread clippings,” she emphasizes. “Every fabric gets used.” For Nina, who once dreamed of going to fashion school after learning to sew her own clothes out of necessity, there is immeasurable value in preserving existing material not only to protect the planet but also to honor fashion as a true art form. This concept, she says, is lost in an industry increasingly influenced by fast fashion. The consequences of a profit-over-passion model were impossible for Nina to ignore, and Boneyard Star was officially born.
She credits two statistics with shaping the couturier that exists today. “One pair of jeans takes, and contaminates, about 1,800 gallons of water to make, and there are enough clothes on the planet right now to dress the next six generations. Not the next six years, the next six generations.” After learning those facts, she says, “I had to do something.”
Each step of the Boneyard Star design process is an answer to a call for help—a methodical system handcrafted with purpose and passion for both people and the planet. “With the intent of mainly using existing materials for our apparel, we knew we could not easily replicate pieces, so instead, we decided to really lean into it and celebrate each piece as fashion art,” Nina says.
From donations of large fabric remnants from local ancillary businesses to salvaging unused textiles from upholstery companies, Boneyard Star operates on moxie. “We will go and rescue [textiles] from going to the dump, which saves [companies] dumping fees and the cost of paying an employee to load and unload them,” she adds. “A win for them, a win for us and more significantly, a win for the environment."
No two pieces in the Boneyard Star collection are alike, and Nina draws inspiration from the evolution of each creation. “One pair of jeans typically takes 45 to 80 hours of work from start to finish,” she says, “including the process of sorting materials, sketching, hours of cutting and playing with textile placement, pinning and ironing and sewing.”
“We might attract people with the uniqueness of our garments, but we hope that when they see the details and feel the weight and quality of our pieces, they will want to have them in their wardrobe for many years to come, and maybe even pass them down to their future generations, like art.”
“No textiles that come in, leave our facility as garbage, not even thread clippings."
“With the intent of mainly using existing materials for our apparel, we knew we could not easily replicate pieces, so instead, we decided to really lean into it and celebrate each piece as fashion art."
“When they see the details and feel the quality of our pieces, they will want to have them in their wardrobe, like art.”