Patch that favourite shirt or skirt to make it the one you love again or turn it into a necklace? Anything is possible if you begin to think outside of the box about that bag of clothes waiting to be delivered to your local op shop. Jane Milburn from Textile Beat has been thinking about clothes in a different way by imagining how they can be re-used; not only to have a new life as clothes but how they can be turned into something new. ‘It is about reusing natural fibre resources,’ said Jane.
Australians are the second largest consumer of new clothes after America and on average buy 27kg of new clothes each year compared to Africa, the Middle East and India that average just 5 kg per person per year. Local council waste departments report about 4% of the household waste is textiles and most people donate unwanted clothing for charitable recycling. Charities say about 15 per cent of donations are on-sold through op shops, 15 per cent are ragged, 15 per cent go to landfill and 55 per cent are exported into the second-hand clothing trade.
‘In the same way we are aware of what we eat and want to know more about cooking and growing food, we are becoming more conscious about what we wear,’ said Jane. ‘We are swamped in cheap imports that are made in sweat shop conditions where the true costs aren’t incorporated. We need to at least know the basics about how clothes are made, and how to make simple repairs to extend their lifespan. There are a lot of mediocre garments that we donate that get sent to the third world and they end up in their landfill.’
The slow clothing movement wants to change our material footprint. To this end Jane will be running a free community forum Slow Clothing in a Fast World on Wednesday January 18 at Workshops of Byron Bay at 6.30pm. This will be followed by a series of up cycling workshops between 19 – 22nd January.
The workshops cover a range of areas from simple clothing restyle, repair and repurpose skills to thinking about what the materials you have to hand can become.
‘I teach creativity,’ continued Jane. ‘It is about taking the potential of existing resources and asking “what else can I do with this?” The t-shirts reworked is a session where you turn old shirts into necklaces, phone pouches and beanies etc. It is about being creative and thinking about what the clothes can become.’
Contact Jane at Textile Beat for more information or book into workshops here.
There is a thread to every story and the thread to life weaves its way into covering the emotions of the thinking part of the body, human mind. That is the physiological.
Then there is the physical covering of the human body called clothes as they clothe the body and enhance the body and become entwined with the mind and the psychological and that is called fashion. That is my fashion of describing the part of human culture as clothing is part of culture.
The Hat was once very important in coving the head on Sundays in Church, for status. Henry Ford was the boss and at his factory meetings was the old one to wear a hat. Anyone else wearing a hat was told to take it off. He was the boss and a hat told people he was the head man.
The Shirt, well when someone would give you the shirt off his back meant he was very generous indeed.
And just who wears the pants here. The pants are male meaning testosterone and aggressiveness.
Have we addressed everything, not really as there is the dress, as the dress became known in the over-all look in how you dressed and at the dinner table were were always dress appropriately.
That is a shoo-in. Sock it to me baby and I just love in that frock.
Thanks for those fabulous insights Len, drawing together the threads about how clothes communicate who we are. When we buy into someone elses’ brand, we are not expressing our own kansei and individual spirit.
Have been recycling/upcycling/customizing clothing/fabric for years…with my mother & grandmother being dressmakers/creatives….it’s all in the family! Now leading the way for my two daughters, and baby granddaughter!
Good on you Serena, upcycling is such a great way to express creativity. And thrilled to hear you are passing on skills to the next generation in your family!
For clothing that has deteriorated beyond the upcycling stage, it would be environmentally beneficial if there were at least one industrial fibre recovery plant in Australia. In the absence of one, at present low-grade waste textiles tend to go to landfill.