Buckle Up: how belts are pulling fashion back together

by Ryn Hagi

Leather, longevity and letting things age. Ryn Hagi sits down with Eliza McCullough to discuss craftsmanship, the recent rise of belts, and her experience founding Eliza Beatrice London.

There is something slightly strange about the return of the belt.

Not because it ever really left. In fact, it has always been there, quietly doing its job at the waist, occasionally promoted to statement piece whenever fashion remembers that an accessory can have a personality of its own. But this time feels different. The belt is now becoming an outfit.

I put this to Eliza McCullough directly, the founder of Eliza Beatrice London. From Moroccan leather belts and Marrakech’s tanneries flooding social media, to independent labels like her own building real followings, why does it feel like people are suddenly paying attention to belts again?

“There's definitely been a shift in the last couple of years,” she tells me, “of belts being a practical item, literally just something that keeps your trousers up, to something that can actually make and elevate an outfit. I'm not sure they've always been like that. I think it's more of a realisation of what they can actually do to an outfit, and to fashion.” 

It's a small distinction with a lot folded into it. Not necessarily a new object, but a newly noticed one. Belts, in the 2020s, are about refocusing the image of the outfit. It’s a new, quiet revolution from small brands that are willing to make ‘forever’, heritage pieces.

Eliza's business began, fittingly, with the same kind of subtle recognition. Eliza Beatrice London was founded in 2024, during a stretch of time in Hoi An, Vietnam, home to a concentration of leather artisans. 

“I noticed a theme in all of the small shops there,” she recalls. “They sold loads of colourful bags and shoes, but all the belts were in neutral colours. So I asked if they could use the same colourful leather to make belts, and they could.”

She designed seven belts, working alongside three artisans, and knew almost immediately she'd found what she'd been looking for: “colourful, timeless, well-made leather belts which would improve any outfit.”

What followed was less a business plan than a gut decision. She put some money she'd earned waitressing toward producing more belts, had all of them shipped home, and started selling them on Depop that summer. By the time she started university in Newcastle that September, she had a small operation running. She has worked with the same family of artisans in Vietnam ever since.

Eliza's approach is unusually explicit, wanting to keep humans, not systems, at the centre of the process. 

“Especially now, in an AI age of huge technological advances, the focus on human creativity and craft has never been so important,” she explains. 

The people she met in Vietnam shared invaluable skills with her, which have subsequently been transported back home to England. She now knows how to shorten and finish the belts herself. 

“Humans are at the heart of [the production process] instead of a huge business, where I think human creativity and talent is sometimes lost.” 

It's a quiet rebuttal to the industry's current obsession with speed.

“With social media, the speed of trends changes so quickly that it's almost going back to basics, like focusing on good quality products, instead of this really fast cycle where some clothes are sold at almost the price of single-use items,” Eliza tells me. 

While she’s introduced new collections and new colours, the basic design of the belts remain the same. Nowhere is that philosophy of longevity more visible than in her hardware. Eliza sources the buckles for her women's belts in Vietnam, but the men's collection uses deadstock hardware salvaged from a closed-down factory in England, where assortments of buckles had simply been left behind. 

“There's so much that's already been produced that you may as well use it,” she says. “Especially today, when there's so much being made and so much waste, it's so important to use what we have. It definitely adds to the character of something, too.” 

She hopes to source all her buckles from deadstock eventually. 

The same instinct shows up at the smallest scale of the operation. Nothing from the leather goes to waste, she explains, even the trimmings from cutting the belts to length become keyrings. It's a detail easy to miss and hard to argue with. Eliza’s business ethics places sustainability at its core.

Leather ages in a way most fashion refuses to photograph. I ask Eliza whether the industry should make more room for that, and whether signs of wear deserve celebrating rather than disguising. 

“I think so, definitely, or at least the ability to age,” she says. “I feel like some clothes don't have that ability. But leather does. It should last.”

That belief shapes how she runs her business, not just how she designs these belts. Rather than chasing a constant release schedule, she launches only a handful of drops a year, timed around university terms.

 "When I'm busy with uni work, I can slow it down, and then do a drop when I come home for the holidays," she explains. Every stage, including choosing the leather, designing, getting the belts made, shooting them, launching, takes time. "A lot of thought has gone into how they're made and how they're designed. So they will last."

Running a label from a university room has shaped the brand more than Eliza initially expected. Her friends model the belts and they turn up to help at fairs; their opinions simultaneously feed back into her designs. She reaps the benefits of volunteers as well as one-on-one discussions with her target demographic. “It's made it more fun, and more young, I'd say,” she says. “It's been a good thing.”

Being at university, she thinks, made this easier rather than harder. Mainly because it took the pressure off the business needing to be a full-time undertaking from day one. She believes it opened doors she might not have found otherwise, from local fairs to DUCFS’ Market Square Takeover, one of her strongest sales events to date. “I think it would definitely have been different [outside of that environment] ,’ she says, ‘It's opened me up to more opportunities.” 

What comes after graduation is still loosely sketched. She's considering a formal business course to complement a largely humanities-based degree, and is open to expanding into other products if demand holds. “I don't know,” she says. “I guess I'll see.”

I ask her the question I'd been building toward: if someone found one of her belts in a vintage shop twenty years from now, what would she want it to say? Not just about the brand, but about this moment in fashion?

“I hope it would mean I'd put out a product that stood the test of time,” she says. “I think so much of what's being made right now won't.”

For as long as she can, she wants to keep making things that are thoughtfully designed, consciously sourced, and made by people she actually knows. 

“I've got lots of ideas,” Eliza announces, “but I think they'll have to wait until I leave uni.”

It's a modest ambition stated plainly, which may be the point. The accessory of the belt has never asked to be the centre of attention. That it has ended up there, being a small, functional piece, quietly capable of outlasting almost everything else in the wardrobe, is a testament to its longevity. Such a product feels like less of a trend than a reminder. It almost proves a point that industry brands are too scared to say: the most interesting objects aren't always the ones that give us something new. Sometimes they're the ones that teach us to look closely at what we already have.

The belt, one might argue, is fashion's most elegant act of rebellion, dressed as convenience, functioning as defiance. Everything else in our wardrobes is encouraged to disappear by the next season; the belt alone is permitted to stay, and worse, to improve by staying. Fast fashion depends on our capacity for amnesia (buy, forget, buy again) and there is nothing more insulting to that machine than an object that insists on being remembered. 

A belt does not become last year's belt. It lives on in the outfits you piece together, creased where you have leaned, softened where you have reached, aging into a kind of authority that nothing bought yesterday could possibly claim. 

To wear the same belt for a year is not at all a failure of one’s style. It is, if anything, the last luxury capitalism cannot expedite. It is the luxury of time, worn quite literally at the waist. Eliza Beatrice London can attest that.

Pull outs: 

The belt is fashion’s most elegant act of rebellion