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.

Designing the way to sustainable costume

My career as a costume maker was the catalyst that set me on the path to leading a more sustainable life, but as well as exposing concerns about the fashion industry it also led me to the uncomfortable realisation that the film and television industry is also far from sustainable. Unlike workers in garment factories I am paid a fair wage and considered a skilled craftsperson, but I still couldn’t help worrying about the environmental impact of the job I love. Fortunately other creatives in my industry have the same concerns, so on a sweltering Friday evening, in a blissfully air-conditioned room at BAFTA HQ, we heard from a panel of experts about the changes we need to make as Costume professionals. 

Aaron Matthews, the head of industry sustainability, opened the session and introduced the speakers. First up was Sinead O’Sullivan, Assistant Costume Designer and founder of the Costume Directory, an open resource for responsible suppliers. Alarmingly, a film or television production can produce more waste in a week than the average household will produce in a year, and the costume department of any show is inescapably linked to the fashion and textile industries. While many of us might be conscious of recycling and waste reduction on a personal level, we are likely to tolerate more wasteful behaviours at work because of lack of regulation or time to source better alternatives. 

The ever-changing nature of freelance work in costume departments makes it hard to stick with the same suppliers; fabrics that were perfect for an 18th Century costume drama won’t be right for a gritty modern film. Similarly, costume departments can generate a lot of waste if multiple copies of a costume are needed to be broken down or damaged on-screen. Sinead stressed the importance of individual as well as collective change: the change has to come from the people working in costume departments as it isn’t going to come from studios or producers. 

Sinead asked us to think about the small changes we could make that would add up to make a big impact. She gave a pretty comprehensive list that I think all of us in a creative field could get some useful ideas from. 

Could we: 

• Source more ethical fabrics?
• Ask for more comprehensive recycling facilities at work?
• Make ourselves aware of harmful chemicals in dyes etc?
• Find ways to filter microfibres from our laundry?
• Buy more costumes for contemporary shows from secondhand or charity shops?
• Re-use on-set items?
• Create less single-use costumes; make use of costume houses and reuse resources?

Next up to speak was Orsola de Castro, co-founder of Fashion Revolution. Set up following the Rana Plaza factory collapse in Bangladesh in 2013, in which over 1000 garment workers, mostly young women, lost their lives, Fashion Revolution set out to ask high street brands “who made my clothes?” A question which, Orsola says, it was almost impossible to find answers to. For her, the first step towards a more ethical fashion industry is transparency (“you cannot change what you cannot see”), and we should all be more vigilant and scrutinise what we buy. 

Orsola sees the wardrobe department of a production as being three-quarters of the way through a garment’s life-cycle, from textile to landfill, and reminded us that there was such place as “away” when we discard unwanted clothing! In Orsola’s eyes, we are not using design cleverly enough. We are using design to create a problem (pollution and waste) rather than solve a problem (we all need clothes to wear). This is a criticism I have thrown at the fashion industry in the past, and while I think that my workplace does well when it comes to creatively using available resources (more on that later) it is definitely something we could all pay closer attention to. 

As well as changing our own practices, Orsola reminded us of our responsibility to inspire young designers and students to learn a more sustainable way of working from the start of their careers. There are plenty of free resources on the Fashion Revolution website, like their fanzine, as well as their Transparency Report on high street brands. She pointed out that sustainability is not a passing trend; it has been a way of life for thousands of years, and it is excess that is the passing trend. We only have to look at the history of the modern fashion industry that started with the Industrial Revolution to see how it is built on exploitation. We have an opportunity to change things and, in the words of Joan Crawford, “care for your clothes like the good friends they are”.

We also heard from Charlie Ross, founder and director of Offset Warehouse, the first textile company in the U.K. to exclusively sell ethical fabrics. Charlie’s journey from student designer to ethical entrepreneur began when she watched the film “China Blue” at fashion college. The film revealed widespread exploitation within the fashion industry, and Charlie realised that the impact of a product occurs right across the supply chain, including textile production. The garment industry is responsible for tragedies that aren’t as well-documented as the Rana Plaza disaster; for instance thousands of farmer suicides in India as a result of the exploitative cotton industry, or the draining of the Aral Sea for cotton production in Uzbekistan. The textile industry also uses harmful and toxic dyes, so fabrics can keep making a negative impact on the environment when they are being laundered. 

Her talk highlighted the importance of considering the impact of the fabrics we buy: giving our money to exploitative, wasteful manufacturers is giving our unspoken approval to their harmful practices. While (sadly!) there isn’t a magic fabric that can solve all our problems, if we keep making small changes, buying from textile manufacturers who pay fair wages and don’t damage the environment, opting for organic cotton and dyes, we can start to make a positive impact. 

Oscar- and BAFTA-winning costume designer Jacqueline Durran joined the other speakers for a panel discussion and Q&A. Jacqueline spoke about creating a completely sustainable costume for Emma Watson in Beauty and the Beast, talking through the different fabrics used on the costume, on display at the side of the stage. Inspired by the Green Carpet Challenge and Emma Watson’s personal interest in sustainable fashion, Jacqueline created a costume made from vintage wool and cotton, nettle fabric, sugar cotton and fabrics from Offset Warehouse, making use of the expertise of her costume team to custom-dye, print and paint fabrics using traditional techniques. 

Jacqueline discussed the benefits of working with actors who wanted to wear sustainable clothing (a focus on sustainability makes designers aware of each stage of costume manufacture, and all the boxes they have to tick) and the downside of working with experimental new materials (“we ordered some mushroom leather, and what arrived was just a mushroom”). 

Sinead, who has worked with Jacqueline on a number of productions, described the specific needs of the industry which the Costume Directory is trying to meet. She features suppliers who can provide low minimum orders, and fill and ship their orders quickly. She acknowledged that this was just the start of the big change that the industry as a whole needs to make, and that we all need to be responsible for contributing to this.

Jacqueline sees the goal as normalising sustainability in costume departments, and suggested that if we weren’t in a position to demand change we were in a position to ask questions and get a conversation going about sustainability. Some studios like to draw attention to environmentally friendly policies because it is good for publicity, whereas others weren’t keen to feature a particular sustainable initiative in case it drew attention to all the unsustainable practices.

One of the questions that came up was what happened to costumes post-production. A lot of costumes are hired from costume houses and are returned when a production wraps and can be used again. Some costumes made specifically for a production may end up in storage, as intellectual property rights for a particular production might prohibit their re-use. Sinead spoke about the problems with closing down a large department quickly when a film wraps; staff often don’t have time to carefully plan where items can be donated or repurposed.

The panel discussed the problems of textile waste; the current facilities in the U.K. are pretty poor so one option is to donate to schools or colleges, or to educational programs that teach sewing skills. The topic of how to teach sustainability was also considered, with panellists discussing the culture of immediacy that has robbed us of our ability to plan! With better organisation, we can make better decisions, but we need to create a new culture that pushes back against the need for instant results.

The evening left me with plenty of food for thought.  The costume house I work at is actually surprisingly sustainable when it comes to making and re-using costumes. We use a lot of vintage fabrics, and my colleagues and I often end up adopting a zero-waste approach to cutting and making up so we can use every scrap of a precious piece of antique fabric! As well as mending costumes from the hire stock, we often end up re-making clothing that is well past its best in order to save beautiful bits of embroidery or embellishment.

I’d be interested to see what changes we could make to become even more sustainable; all my colleagues have re-usable cups and water bottles, and our communal kitchen is full of recycling bins, but we often spend lunch breaks trying to solve our biggest sustainability bugbear: plastic garment bags. The research that several of us have done into textile and plastic recycling for our particular needs has revealed a lack of facilities that deal with this sort of waste. As well as focusing on the changes we can make personally, or as a company, we also need to ask for national change to tackle recycling on a larger scale as we plan for a more effective way of working sustainably in the long term.