In the warren of corridors beneath London’s Somerset House, two machines are reknitting the fashion industry. It seems appropriate that they’re 20m below where London Fashion Week’s models used to walk, since their aim is to puncture the bloated cycle of seasons that means 10 per cent of all new clothes end up in landfill. As they whir away, the question they ask is: why would you accept what you’re offered twice a year, when you could design your own wardrobe?

The brand behind these machines, Unmade, has lofty goals. “We’re trying to transform how fashion is made,” says Ben Alun-Jones. Bespectacled, bearded, he looks more like an engineer than a fashion designer.

Before founding Unmade with two friends and collaborators from the Royal College of Art, Kirsty Emery and Hal Watts, he worked in computer art and industrial design. It’s why he approaches clothes with a coder’s eye, why he looks for problems to solve. Rather than drape and movement, he talks about disruption. About making fashion “more responsive, more responsible and more sustainable.”

His knitting machines tick off all three. Behind us, red, white and blue wool pours through metal teeth, which knit it into a unique pattern that a customer just designed on Unmade’s website. This windowless room, yards from the Thames, is far in concept and distance from the Bangladeshi factories where designs are churned out identically, by the thousand, for fast fashion retailers. But the machines they use are exactly the same.

Unmade’s studio-factory at Somerset House, London

After graduating, Alun-Jones, Emery and Watts launched a design consultancy, which did work for UK Sport. “Our recommendation was to use industrial knitting machines to make one-off performance clothing,” says Alun-Jones. Bespoke pieces would be snugger, more aerodynamic than off-the-rack options. “They said, ‘That’s not possible, it will never work.’ And with their budget and time frame, it wasn’t.”