I seem to always have known about clothes, textiles, sewing, knitting and crochet – my mother is a skilled dressmaker and craftswoman and I watched her mend, stitch curtains, make costumes for school plays, patch worn jeans, and knit jerseys in winter, all my life.
Clothes in pure cottons, wools, silk and linens are my favourites, and I don’t really participate in “fashion”, my wardrobe while full is a lot of second hand, upcycled and often hand-made garments. I go to swaps.
As commercialisation and globalisation grow, the sustainable clothes I love, are less available, replaced by millions of quickly produced items made from shiny cheap plastic mixed-fibre.
Collecting and telling stories is how I make sense of my world. I love to share stories as I think they carry ideas and experiences we can all gather from – stories are treasure that grows with gifting!
I once watched in horror as a laden shopper outside a large Oxford Street store dropped one bag out of a bunch of department store carriers. She just walked off not taking any time to bend and pick up the bag containing two BRAND new white cotton t-shirts.
She’s not alone – factories scap tonnes of unused fabric offcuts, retail stores literally slash the unworn items from previous “seasons”, people buy cheaply online for specific events, often ordering multiple sizes and wearing only one, once, so a huge amount of waste. Thrift and charity shops cannot sell less attractive items and tonnes of textiles are wasted.
The piles of discarded clothing we bought and hardly wore, are an environmental hazard. Our modern fibre clothes often cannot be repaired, reused or recyled. That discarded textile fills warehouses and landfill. Some is incinerated but a lot gets buried in landfill – where toxic dyes, plastic and metal fastenings remain intact for centuries. This is getting worse, capitalism, advertising, and mass media are implicated.
There is a modern story of why we all love our easily collected fast fashion clothing, despite its ugly future, how internet low-effort shopping is addictive, and what people think about all this, and how some take action. We need stories about finding”enough” clothes, identifying what are “necessary” clothes for us individually, and the stories that underly the modern fashion industry are worth retelling, and investigating.
Redress.earth is a space for telling these stories, and creating a better story.