Our Story

Originally born in Montreal, Quebec Canada Melissa was influenced by her mother who worked in factory garment production for large scale clothing distributors in that city. She can remember sitting at the foot of her mother's industrial sewing machine organizing buttons into their respective categories and playing with remnant scraps of fabrics to create colorful collages.

Melissa established Adhesif Clothing in 2003. in Vancouver, BC Canada where she resided for 27 years before making the leap over to Europe. She currently operates a permanent studio & showroom in the beautiful countryside of Königstein im Taunus, just outside of Frankfurt Germany with plans to expand to an Atelier in 2022.

Since experimenting with textiles most of her life, Melissa is proud to say she is a self-taught Stylist, Textile Artist & Fashion Designer.

Her first love has always been vintage clothing with over 20 years experience as a professional vintage clothing buyer. Melissa is endlessly inspired to create garments with reclaimed because of the often superior quality and special characteristics many of vintage textiles hold. Every one-of-a-kind, hand-cut garment is made with up to 95% preloved fabrics which are all lovingly created by Melissa's own two hands from start to finish.

There is a double advantage in using reclaimed materials; not only do they reduce waste in the environment, using second hand textiles also add distinctive personality to all of her eye-catching creations.

Additional special finishing details are added to her designs like zerowaste patchworking, vintage buttons, hand pleating, hand embroidery, natural dying techniques with the addition of Eco Printed natural fibers like wool, silk & cotton as seen in her most recent collections.

Over the years, this eclectic line has caught the eye of International media. Her design work has been featured in multiple outlets and publications including Microsoft Gears of War (Videogame main character design) LUCY'S, FASHION & FLARE Magazine to name a few (see Media tab for full list) as well as on the Knowledge Network & CBC Canada in previous years.

Melissa has been designing and creating all of her garments from reclaimed and vintage materials saving over 10 thousand pounds to date from the landfill over the past 18 years.

Melissa is proud to say that she has had many of the same happy customers returning since day one who have stuck to Adhesif Clothing because of the high quality and stylistic design qualities. It's what you might call a WIN-WIN scenario. Look fabulous and feel great about supporting this stand out, zero-waste, sustainable fashion line.