Everything Must Go

On Saturday I went to see Everything Must Go, an exhibition by The Waste of the World held in the Bargehouse at Oxo Tower Wharf. The culmination of a five-year research programme funded by the Economic & Social Research Council, it aimed to raise awareness of global waste by following the journey of recycled clothing across the world. There were also workshops and discussions providing alternative perspectives on the used clothing trade. 

When I was sourcing materials for my collection Paradise Lost I visited some of the vast textile recycling units on the outskirts of London such as TRAID and LMB and was amazed to see the volume clothing that gets thrown away in London. This exhibition showed how many of these unwanted clothes continue their journey across the ocean to their final destination in an Indian factory. Apart from being totally fascinating, it was also beautifully presented in several rooms of an old brick warehouse building..

Photos around the exhibition showed factory workers sorting through bales of clothes, creating piles of coloured textiles

Bags of shredded fabrics which are eventually processed into new materials shown on the wall above 

This is a still from Meghna Gupta's film Unravel which follows the journey of the Western world's unwanted textiles to a factory in India. It documents the processes the clothes undergo to be slashed, sorted, shredded and eventually woven into yarn and shows the reactions of the female factory workers who are baffled as to why they receive so many unwanted clothes from the West. They wonder if Western women are too lazy to wash their clothes and prefer to give them away. Thought provoking, funny and so beautifully shot that I had to watch it twice..

A wall hanging by Kate Goldsworthy who used low grade materials to create art

Often clothing waste gets woven back into yarn. Pretty incredible.. 

All the different components of a red coat