Take Care, Repair, Rewear: Using Creative Methods to Evaluate the Practice of Upcycling in Managing Textile Waste

Abstract

Overconsumption in the fashion industry leads to large volumes of accumulated textile waste moving through global commodity chains. This textile waste moves through global hierarchies, established under colonialism and maintained by processes of racial capitalism, to end up in the Global South. In this way, countries which import secondhand clothing in the Global South act as a sacrifice zone, absorbing the unequal economic, social and environmental harms caused by textile waste. However, participatory fashion practices such as making and mending have been identified as an important tool for possibly generating a sensibility for sustainability and for potentially combating the harms associated with political economies of fast fashion. Making and mending practices which use secondhand clothing items, or textile waste, are forms of upcycling. In turn, upcycling is positioned as a key design strategy for circular economies. This dissertation employs a fragmented ethnography approach of the UK and Ghana to understand the ways in which textile waste moves through global commodity chains. Interviews and a making-as-method approach explore the role of upcycling as a strategy to manage textile waste in both London and Accra. This dissertation highlights the importance of community networks for creating and sustaining circular economies at local and global scales. Therefore, care ethics and sustainability literature are drawn upon to theorise new global relationalities which might better support circular economies for textiles which then have the potential to reduce the economic, social and environmental harms which are perpetuated under the current geographies of textile waste.