On Saturday I took the L to Morgan Ave and spent five hours sorting donated clothes in a basement in Bushwick. My day job is fashion. My weekend, apparently, is also fashion, just the honest end of it.
The collective runs it out of a space with one flickering light and a dehumidifier that sounds like it's dying. You show up, you get a bin, you sort. Wearable in this pile. Damaged for textile recycling in that one. Too far gone in the bag nobody likes to fill.
I sorted maybe forty pounds of donated clothes and I want to tell you what forty pounds of donated clothes actually is.
It's a wedding lehenga someone shipped from home and wore once. It's nine identical black H&M tank tops, all pilled, all bought to be disposable and behaving accordingly. It's a hand-knit sweater with a name tag sewn in the collar, Margaret, and I held that one a long time. It's fast fashion that fell apart before it was ever loved.
Working in fashion, I sit in meetings where we talk about "the consumer" and "drops" and "newness." Down in that Bushwick basement, sorting donated clothes with a stranger named Devon, there's no abstraction. There's just the physical evidence of how much we make and how little we keep.
Here's the thing I keep coming back to. The clothes that survived best were the ones made well and made with intention. The lehenga will find someone. Margaret's sweater will find someone. The nine black tanks are going to be shredded into insulation, if they're lucky.
I design things for a living. I want to design things that end up being fought over in a thrift bin, not shredded.
We finished at six. I smelled like cardboard and other people's closets. I took the L home feeling weirdly clarified.
Buy less. Buy better. Someone in a basement is sorting the rest.
Love,