DISCARDED
Discarded is an exploration of the short and uneventful lives led by fast fashion garments from brands with headquarters in the UK, focussing on brands with their headquarters in Manchester. From garments in charity shops that have never been worn, to garments thrown out with household rubbish, this project seeks to highlight the waste of resources, the exploitation of workers and the pollution problems that the overproduction of fast fashion causes, and to create new and exciting realities for these unwanted garments. A mixture of textile art and photography, Discarded will be on display at Kiosk, Quayside Shopping Centre, Salford Quays, from 26th April to 21st May. The opening week coincides with Fashion Revolution Week in 2023, to commemorate the 10th anniversary of the Rana Plaza factory collapse, which killed 1134 garment workers who were making clothes for international fashion brands.
Artists Elly Platt and CL Gamble use unwanted clothing to create a series of varied works, from playful polaroids of a capsule wardrobe of street finds, through upcycled and refashioned clothing carrying messages about our current fast fashion industry, to works of wearable art conveying messages about our relationships with our clothes, from the personal and private to the public and global.
THE EVENTS
To launch the exhibition and to coincide with two of Fashion Revolution Week’s ongoing campaigns, Elly Platt and CL Gamble will be running two events at Kiosk.
Loved Clothes Last is a storytelling and stitching performance: Elly and CL will speak about their family textile connections, and practices of sewing or mending as acts of healing and care, as they stitch textiles that hold a special meaning for them. This will be followed by an informal chat with Alison Carlin, creator of Kiosk, focusing on how to build more meaningful relationships with our clothes.
Wednesday 26th April, 4-6pm.
The Clothing Love Story workshop is a chance for anyone to share their thoughts about their favourite clothes by writing a short love letter to a beloved garment on upcycled fabric patches. These patches will be used to create a textile installation that will remain at Kiosk after the exhibition finishes, a reminder that a genuine love of clothing is at the heart of the sustainable fashion movement.
Saturday 29th April, 1-4pm.
THE ARTISTS
Discarded is a collaboration between Elly Platt and CL Gamble.
Elly Platt (she/her) is a costume maker and textile artist, also known as Take It Up Wear It Out. Her love of telling stories through clothing has taken many forms, from visible mending to stitching or painting protest textile art in response to injustice against garment workers.
The pandemic led her to create site-specific work over the course of two years. The Wandle Wardrobe project drew its raw materials from a series of walks along the Wandle Trail in South London where Elly collected lost or discarded textiles, which she then transformed into precious objects or wearable works of art.The River Wandle has a rich history as a site of textile production and is also an ecological success story. The Wandle Wardrobe explores how our relationship with the river has changed, how our lost clothes might suggest the ways we interact with the natural world, and how we view the clothes we own and wear today. In an era where clothes are so cheap and plentiful, have we lost our emotional attachment to them?
As a person who makes clothing, Elly seeks to spotlight the disrespect fast fashion brands show to the skills and expertise of garment workers when they sell their clothes as disposable.
CL Gamble is a queer, disabled artist whose work delves into politics, protest and collective action. Their current body of work “Above The Law” is an intermedia work set in a world they describe as “The Paris Commune meets No Deal Brexit in a Handmaid’s Tale-style speculative fiction future”.
Examining ideas around commodification, market forces and socioeconomic deprivation, the use of hobbycraft subverts the idea that refined skills create value in some objects and not others. Using a mix of installation, graphic design, performance and world-building, they centre the transactional nature not only of art itself, but our everyday survival needs.
The use of salvaged materials and locally foraged gemstones asks us to examine our consumption habits while describing a group of rebels consciously objecting to a society ravaged by austerity and psychogeographical borders. ‘Artistic Anarchy’ aims to destroy those borders, bringing approachable, affordable jewellery from a provocative conceptual world into the white cubes of traditional gallery spaces.
As we face a climate crisis, cost of living increases and the impact of more than a decade of funding cuts to vital services, you are invited to add your voice to the call of the many, not the few: Bread for all, but roses too.
WHAT IS THE BACKGROUND TO FASHION REVOLUTION WEEK AND THE RANA PLAZA DISASTER ANNIVERSARY?
On the 24th April 2013, the Rana Plaza factory in Dhaka, Bangladesh, collapsed. 1134 garment workers died, and more than 2500 were injured, many of them severely. They had been making clothes for fast fashion brands and other western retailers whose labels were found in the wreckage. Workers had noticed cracks appearing in the building the previous day, and were reluctant to return to work. The threats of docked wages for people who have barely enough money to survive sealed their fate. The factory collapse made global news, and led activists to campaign for change in the industry on many fronts. Better transparency from fashion brands, so consumers would know where their clothes really came from. Better pay, conditions and the right to unionise for garment workers. And more knowledge of what really goes on behind the scenes of popular fashion brands.
The hope was to slow the fast fashion juggernaut, leading to better choices being made by more conscious and ethically-minded consumers, and better lives for the people who make our clothes. In reality, the pace of fast fashion has only increased, with new brands producing clothes that are considered almost disposable. The exploitation of garment workers in the Global South continues to be a huge problem, but it’s happening here in the UK too, where we assume minimum wage legislation, working time directive rules and other checks and balances would prevent this mistreatment of the people who make our clothes.
WHY MANCHESTER SPECIFICALLY?
Historically, Manchester has a place at the centre of the UK textile industry as the site of hundreds of cotton mills and other textile factories. Today, Manchester is home to the headquarters of some of the UK’s worst offenders when it comes to creating fast fashion from exploited labour. Activists have protested outside the Manchester headquarters of BooHoo when the company attempted to prevent unionisation by workers. The 10th anniversary of the Rana Plaza disaster will see creatives and activists come together in Manchester to commemorate this tragedy, spotlight the ongoing problems with the fast fashion industry and highlight the need for better regulation and legislation to control the industry’s exploitation of people and the planet.
WHY ARE ELLY AND CL DOING THIS?
We both love clothes! We love the theatrics and the creativity of expressing ourselves through our personal style. We both keep clothes for decades, adding to our wardrobes by hunting through thrift stores, charity shops and even finding things by the side of the road! We love the freedom of feeling truly yourself in an outfit that’s perfect for a certain moment, and then remixing those clothes into a totally different style for the next month, or year, or decade.
We don’t love the conformity that underpins so much of the fast fashion industry, where hundreds of thousands of styles are available every day but somehow everyone looks the same. We want all garment workers, wherever they might live, to be paid a living wage, to have a safe work environment and to be respected for their skills and expertise. We want clothes to be worn again and again, to hold memories, to be considered precious. We don’t want clothes to be unworn, unloved, discarded.
