An Australian NRL fan collects discarded fan towels from stadium stands, turns them into a jacket, and posts it to Instagram; one upcycling video gained nearly 100,000 views in under a week. She uses only secondhand materials and hopes to push clubs to allow multi-party collaboration on surplus merchandise.

Key Points

  • St George Illawarra Dragons fan Drina Weatherhead collects "raise the red" towels left behind in the stands at WIN Stadium and turns them into a denim-paneled bomber jacket; the video drew nearly 100,000 views in about a week.
  • She began posting upcycling work on Instagram in July 2025; her first video featured a puffer vest that took 20 hours to make from fabric bought on Depop.
  • She uses only secondhand materials, including thrift stores and the Sewing Basket in Caringbah, which donates all profits to people with disabilities and is staffed entirely by volunteers.

From the Stadium to the Wardrobe

Drina Weatherhead is an NRL fan from Sydney who moved to Australia from Toronto in 2022. She supports the Dragons because her boyfriend is a diehard fan of the team. She knew nothing about rugby league before, but found creative inspiration while watching Thursday-to-Sunday games with her boyfriend and listening to NRL podcasts — team merchandise on the market was hard to style in a way she liked.

So she dug out an old Dragons polo her boyfriend no longer wore and started cutting and reworking it. She had only taken up sewing as a hobby two years earlier, and at first she would just wear her own creations out, too embarrassed to admit they were handmade when people complimented them. It was only in July 2025 that she began posting upcycling projects on Instagram.

What she didn't expect was that a recent video involving fan towels would take off: after a home game in March, she and her boyfriend saw large numbers of towels discarded across the stands and hillside at WIN Stadium and began picking them up. She turned more than a dozen "raise the red" fan towels into a blended-fabric denim bomber jacket. At the Anzac Day match she went to collect another batch, believing they had to be turned into something else rather than left on the ground as rubbish.

The video's popularity also changed her audience — previously mostly women, now mostly men. It made her realize that men might also want fan apparel that looks good.

Why She Uses Only Secondhand Fabric
According to figures cited in the article, about 92 million tonnes of textile waste accumulate globally each year; fashion writer Clare Press says Australia is among the countries with the highest per-capita textile consumption, surpassing the United States. After encountering these statistics, Weatherhead decided to use only secondhand materials, sourced from thrift stores and the Sewing Basket in Caringbah, which donates all profits to people with disabilities.

She hopes to take on custom orders next, but is researching rules around licensing and brand logos on her own. Earlier this year, she contacted the club to ask whether she could use the team's idle merchandise; she received no reply at the time. She says she is 100 percent willing to work with the club, and speculates that sponsors change and that unsold merchandise may end up wasted every season.

What It Means for the Industry
This case shows the potential for sports licensed merchandise to go from single-use disposable items to raw material for redesign, and it also shows that fan communities in sports are creating new demand and exposure channels for remade old fabrics. When brand logos and licensing become the core barrier, whether clubs open up their surplus stock to collaboration will determine how far this kind of individual-scale upcycling can go.

Source: From stadium rubbish to the runway: Drina's leading the way in sports upcycling · Originally published 2026-09-29