Worn Out: the story of the clothes we throw away

Last year, people in the U.K. sent 350000 tonnes of clothes to landfill. I don’t know about you, but I find this impossible to visualise. Even breaking it down to a figure per person - approximately 5kg - it’s hard to imagine what that might look like. So I created Worn Out.

My sister and I, both recovering fast fashion addicts, had bags of clothes that we were absolutely planning to take to textile recycling. One day. When we got around to it. When we weren’t busy with something else. I combined the contents of these bags, and it turns out that this is what 5kg of clothing looks like! 

Before you ask why we didn’t donate these clothes - these weren’t clothes that charity shops or clothes swaps would accept. Threadbare pyjamas, ratty t-shirts, leggings that had burst at the seams, even (gasp!) my old knickers! These are the clothes that are most likely to end up in landfill. 

Even with the best will in the world, our clothes aren’t going to be wearable for ever. While more and more people are embracing secondhand shopping and swapping as a way of ensuring their unwanted clothes won’t go to waste, not every item of clothing is going to be a desirable pre-loved purchase. Most of us are going to end up with a collection of t-shirts, leggings, underwear or worn-out clothes that no one else wants.

While fast fashion isn’t “designed to fall apart”, the choice of cheap fabrics to keep costs down means that basic everyday clothing might be more delicate than we think it is. A washing machine cycle with a high temperature and a fast spin, or tumble drying, can wear down fabrics even faster, leading to a high turnover of clothing in our wardrobes. 

If we send these clothes for textile recycling, they are likely to be downgraded, into stuffing for pet beds, car seats or insulation. At the moment it’s a difficult process to re-use fibres from old clothes, as natural fibres need to be separated from synthetics, and most fast fashion clothing is made from a mixture of both. The shredded fibres then need to be mixed with new fibres in order to spin them into a good quality thread.

While businesses like Rapanui/Teemill and Swedish Stockings are closing the loop in their own supply chain by incentivising customers to return their worn-out clothing, this isn’t happening on a large enough scale to make our current consumption of clothes sustainable.

I’ve constructed Worn Out to show the sheer volume of fabric that could be re-used if we create a more circular fashion system. Think of the possibilities! I wanted Worn Out to look equal parts comical and overwhelming; this is a garment that wears you, and isn’t designed to look flattering (the passing resemblance to the memorable scene in Friends where Joey wears all of Chandler’s clothes isn’t entirely coincidental). The amount of clothing we throw away is absurd, and the way we are encouraged to consume clothing as though it was disposable is absurd. We can’t wear more than one outfit at once, and overconsumption isn’t making us happier or more fulfilled.

Ideally I’d like Worn Out to be an interactive piece of wearable art, something that other people can touch and even try on. It’s going to be making an appearance at the Ethical Influencers meet up and clothes swap for Fashion Revolution Week so hopefully this will be the first of many outings.

As a costume maker and a vintage fashion fan, I’m passionate about clothes as a means of storytelling. Worn Out tells a story about my wardrobe, but it's not the story of favourite clothes or treasured heirlooms. It’s the story of the hidden side of fashion, the parts we don’t show off on social media. It is partly a story of fast fashion failures; the t-shirts with warped seams, the leggings with insufficient elastic, the mistaken belief that fine jersey embellished with metal or plastic can survive a 40 degree wash and spin without ending up full of holes. But it’s also the story of the life I’ve led while wearing these clothes, and how some of them have come to the end of their useful life naturally. My body shape has changed over the years so certain bras no longer fit. Old t-shirts have been downgraded to painting clothes until they are so threadbare that paint has gone right through them. I’ve worn pyjamas for thousands of hours, despite the fact that I don’t really remember it. These clothes have kept me warm in winter, and cool in summer. Some of these clothes have travelled to different countries with me, others have never left my house.

The weight of Worn Out as it settles around your shoulders might feel like a burden, but I prefer to think of it as a reminder of our responsibilities. To look after and appreciate the clothes that hardworking people have made, and to think carefully about what happens to your clothes when you part ways with them.

In case anyone’s wondering what’s left over from Worn Out; it’s not a perfect zero waste garment but I did diligently save every scrap that didn’t make it onto the final design. This little bag of scraps creates an accessory to accompany Worn Out, and serves as a reminder that we can keep improving our ideas for a zero-waste fashion system.

Can we start a Fashion Revolution by telling new stories?

Any fashion or costume creative will tell you that design is about telling stories. You are creating a mood, setting a scene, filling it with memorable characters. It’s easy to see this when we look at a catwalk collection or a lead actor in a sumptuous historical costume, but it’s all too easy to forget when it comes to our own wardrobes.

Bridget Harvey's work in Fashioned From Nature, V&A

Fashion exhibitions have become must-see events in recent years, and alongside sell-out retrospectives like Alexander McQueen and Dior at the V&A, other more personal fashion showcases have also proved extremely popular. The V&A exhibition Frida Kahlo: Making Her Self Up stayed open overnight so visitors could enjoy a glimpse of the artist’s unique clothing collection. As well as exhibitions of picture-perfect couture, like the Azzedine Alaia retrospective at the Design Museum, curators are also choosing to emphasise the relevance of everyday items of clothing with special cultural significance, like the Fashion and Textile Museum’s T Shirts: Cult, Culture and Subversion exhibition.

Bridget Harvey, V&A artist in residence

The clothes on display don’t have to be pristine pieces in order to make great museum exhibits. I was fascinated, seeing a selection of Isabella Blow’s enviable clothing collection at Somerset House, and realising on closer inspection that these fabulous examples of couture dressmaking showed distinct signs of wear and tear. Even as a dressmaker who knows how much time and effort goes into making a couture garment, it was hard to be annoyed. Isabella Blow has obviously been someone who loved her outlandish clothes so much that she simply had to wear them, even if they weren’t really appropriate for the occasion. 

Signs of wear and tear on a garment are often seen as a bad thing, a sign that the garment is “ruined”. But when the wedding dress I made for my sister ended up with a muddy hem, someone said “ooh, I love the ombré effect!” and we both thought this was brilliant. The dress tells a story of the day; a walk down a woodland path, a sudden cloudburst, a photo shoot in a meadow full of wildflowers.

Visible mending by Bridget Harvey

We are too hard on our clothes, rejecting them before we have even had the chance to get to know them. Maybe because they are so cheap, we see them as disposable, maybe because many of us don’t know much about the processes that go into making clothes. It seems so strange to me that most people will happily spend money on pre-distressed new clothing, but throw a garment away as soon as their life makes an imprint on it. 

Visible mending by Celia Pym

One of the V&A’s current artists in residence, Bridget Harvey, creates work that explores the art of repair and re-making. Discarded pieces of clothing are transformed with a combination of traditional mending techniques and more thought-provoking embellishment. Textile artist Celia Pym has also turned darning into an art form at the V&A, copying every bit of visible mending she completed on garments brought in by members of the public onto a tracksuit as a record of her work. I saw the tracksuit at the Subversive Stitch exhibition at TJ Boulting, alongside work by James Merry, who embroiders discarded logo sportswear with tiny intricate flowers, as though nature is slowly reclaiming our cast-offs.

Embroidery by James Merry

In the run-up to Fashion Revolution Week, Fashion Revolution have launched their latest zine: Fashion Craft Revolution. I submitted a story about my family’s sewing and crafting history, and although it didn’t make it into the zine it did get an honourable mention in this Fashion Revolution Blog Post. I’ll share my story on my blog separately later, but I’d love my readers to see the other beautiful and moving responses to this topic that are also featured in the post. We are sharing our stories in the hope that we can help everyone to see our clothes as part of the fabric of our lives, something rich in storytelling potential. For the sake of everyone on this planet, our clothes (and the people who make them) deserve more than our current throwaway narrative.