Beneath the Seams

Final project which began during a trip to China and concluded in South London as part of my degree. The community project was based around fast fashion practices and the devaluation of craftsmanship. Exhibition rationale: My research project began whilst on a three-month placement in Southern China. Following my discovery of Chinese ‘charity shops’ (pictured below) where heaps of new, disregarded clothing piled into five-story high buildings I began to question where the true value of clothing had gone. Nearly 200 years on from the industrial revolution, we have seemingly turned clothes from luxury, everyday items to disposable and (often) single use commodities. Not only is this impacting our bank accounts, but it is also having detrimental effects on the environment. Fast fashion currently stands as the second highest global polluter after oil and the second largest consumer of water (McNeill, 2015). The low cost and high turn-around of trends has allowed fast fashion to quickly shift to disposable fashion, seeing 300,000 tonnes of used clothing going to landfill in 2016 in the UK alone (Miller, 2018). This rampant consumerism sees high street stores such as Forever 21 to stock 529 new products each week and H&M to open more than one store a day on average (Miller, 2018). The urge to constantly be on trend and is reflected in the cuts of rigid denim seen in the top half of the garment, in which buckle style fastenings and Nike bag straps enclose the body. The use of denim also provides reference to the environmental impacts of fast fashion - manufacturing a single pair of denim jeans requires a staggering 1,800 gallons of water (O’Dell, 2013). The values of craftsmanship and our drift away from them can be seen as an indictment of capitalism, in which the education system we have built further perpetuates (craftsmanship.net). Through my live performances I visualise the human, the craftsmanship and the labour which we so frequently and flippantly disregard during our acts of rapid consumption. The clothes which sit chaotically in front of you are disregarded unwanted items from inhabitants from across the South of London. Not wanting to take the life of fully functional clothing, I have represented the sheer volume of clothes I collected through removing and reconstructing their care label tags. This not only provides a physical representation of removing the care which has already been disposed of by the consumer but also allows for the myriad of countries, fabrics and patters to be represented, acknowledged and celebrated. Additionally, the care labels strip the garments of any aesthetic quality and bring the viewers’ attention back to the lengthy process of construction. Fashion is a complicated business involving long and varied supply chains of production from farmers, labourers to transporters and vendors. However due to the spatial distance between our consumptions and the source of the products we purchase a ‘moral distance’ is created allowing for a lack of responsibility, distance and indifference to permeate mentalities (Cottingham, 2010; Bauman, 1998). The set-up of this instillation provides a visual representation of the complexity of the fast fashion supply chains. The dress sits suspended within a chain of clothes, marking the only manifestation of this process in which a connection is felt to you as the consumer – the garment.