Over the past few years I have thought deeply about my consumption habits. I lined up all the things I consumed, metaphorically, and I took stock of any behaviours that might be mentally and physically unhealthy for me. Anything I thought wasn’t serving me anymore I stopped doing, one of them was buying new clothes.
I had just moved to New York from London and throughout the city there were billboards— on buses, the subway and in the street— telling me if I bought the thing they were advertising then I might be happy. “Buy this dress, eyeliner, or shoes” they enticed, “it will give you what has been missing all along”. It was potent, and alarming. I agonised about what type of consumer I wanted to be. As a solution I decided to completely opt out, I was not going to buy anything new at all. That was a year and a half ago, and apart from some household goods, I haven’t bought anything, and most importantly I haven’t purchased any new clothes.
Within the sustainable fashion movement there is often an emphasis on the consumer to take responsibility for their purchases. In my conversation this week with fashion designer, educator and founder of The Or Foundation, Liz Ricketts, she draws attention to this idea by highlighting the sustainable movements catchphrase to vote with your dollar, which is rooted in the idea that by shopping better you can save the planet. She teaches 11 to 14 year olds and asks us to envisage an unlikely scenario where she would “stand at the front of the classroom and tell these students that the way that they could enact their moral code and ethics would be to shop better. I don’t even know how you would go about presenting that as a solution to a child”. She explains that “too often blame falls on the consumer, when in my opinion consumers are more pawns than anything else”.
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Liz’s work looks at overconsumption and overproduction within the fashion industry and attempts to engage people in alternatives. In 2011, with her partner Branson Skinner, she founded The Or Foundation that aims to liberate young people from their dominant consumer relationship with fashion, one they describe as riddled with excess and exploitation. “Our interest is in helping people recognise that the choice is there and exists. We work with different communities to manifest alternatives to the dominant model of fashion, and specifically the dominant way in which people relate to consumption” she told me.
They have spent almost ten years carrying out extensive research into Kantamanto Market, one of the largest second hand markets in the world, and the surrounding landfill sites in Accra, Ghana. This is where many of the global North's unwanted clothes are sent, and since 2016 Liz and Branson have traveled to Ghana five times to collect data. They have conducted interviews with 120 “used” clothing traders, importers and market leaders, surveys with both traders and consumers, toured the landfill and informal dumping sites where excess clothing is sent, worked alongside informal waste pickers and spoken with the directors of solid waste management for the city of Accra. In addition they have interviewed authorities at the Accra Metropolitan Authority, including the City Manager and senior officials from the Departments of Planning and Urban Development. They have interviewed a former mayor of Accra, leaders of the major traders association affiliated with Kantamanto Market and spoken with senior executives of a major textile manufacturer in Ghana. Their research is extensive and in 2016 they launched the multimedia project Dead White Man’s Clothes as a space to publish it.
We are at a juncture where the fashion industry is going to have to have to begin to stop overproducing, and address overconsumption, if we are to make serious changes to meet the demands needed to slow the effects of the climate crisis—
at this point we know the planet can not be saved. In the interview Liz talks at length about the impact our behaviour has had. Did we think that all this fashionable waste we were producing was going to evaporate into thin air? Or did you, like me, think that once we washed, folded and placed our unwanted clothes, neatly, into a bag and left it at a charity shop it was going to be sold to someone with a need?
Liz questions the fundamental idea of the circular economy as a solution, is it merely a way for us to continue our unhealthy behaviour? She explains that she thinks the ideas behind it are driven by “our tendency to turn everything into a frontier and put everything into a capitalist framework. I am a big fan of having a conversation about the need for reparations”. She continues “reparations are the main thing missing from any of these conversations about sustainability, because unless we correct the wrongs of the past, and empower new groups of people, we are going to be using the same thinking, from the same people, to solve the problems that those people created in the first place”.
Click here to read the interview.
See you in a couple of weeks!
Shonagh
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