EDITORIAL: Back From The Dump

29 Oct

The season is turning and more than damp leaves are falling, twisted on the cold ground. A sinister single shoe, without its partner, shivers next to the bin, conjuring a vision of one wet sock tip toeing its way home. Or was it left intentionally? What happened here?

The visible debris of our overconsumption problem is piling up around us, discarded stories, thrown out gifts, forgotten possessions and evidence to crime scenes - all casually scattered about as if it could ever return to the ground, as if it wishes it wasn’t eternal.

A trail of clothing carries a chill that other litter just doesn't. A crushed plastic bottle beside the road may spark the shake of a head, a childs dirty rucksack tempts a second glance, and translates dread, in shivers, to the hairs on the back of your neck.

Clothing is so closely tied to humans that seeing it out of context, visibly abandoned, with no other purpose to serve when separated from its human companion - creates something uncanny. Whether slumped exhausted at the side of the textile recycling bin, or curled up together in the middle of the desert - it’s telling us something urgent, that we refuse to hear.

This halloween we looked to the items left out in the cold, personifying them into the characters from there past, relishing the humanity that every chucked out, £5 purchase has passed through - from garment worker, to designer, gifted to giftee, each item we throw to the foxes was touched by human hands at many stages of its life. To end up abandoned, cast aside to make room for the new - it’s a tragedy.

Through toxic articficial colours, eye catching and dopamine inducing shapes, and a combination of or tend led items with careful reworked designs using salvaged waste materials we tell a styling story in ‘Back from the Dump’.

We brought the spirits threaded into our clothing back to life, to remind us that every garment is handmade, the stories of the people who made them are not nothing, and that the piling up of this waste is a serious symptom of a huge fast fashion problem - even if all we see are the scattered, eerie remains.