Rags to Witches

On Saturday 2nd November the Wycombe Creatives group staged a Halloween-themed fashion show. What was different about it is that every outfit and every prop was made from recycled or repurposed clothing and other materials. Huge congrats to the brilliant Wycombe Creatives Team and especially to the wonderful JULIET HAMILTON who was the driving force behind the event and also the costume designer and maker. She's a force of nature. Or supernature. 

But why did we do this?  

Firstly to help raise funds for Wycombe Arts Centre and Wycombe Refresh. 

But secondly because of this ... 

There are currently enough clothes on Earth to clothe the next six generations. The fashion industry produces around 100 billion items of clothing each year, which is nearly 14 items for every person on the planet. 

The fashion industry emits around 1.2 billion tonnes of carbon dioxide a year; that’s more than the combined emissions from the global airline and shipping industries and about the same as the total emissions of the UK, France, and Germany. 

We are buying at least 400% more clothes than we did just two decades ago ... but 40% of these clothes don’t even get worn. The average UK wardrobe contains 152 items, with 57 of them rarely or never worn. 95% of all textiles can be reused or recycled and yet we send around 350,000 tonnes of clothing (worth £140 million) to landfill every year in the UK. In 2020, 2.6 million tonnes of returned clothes ended up in landfills in the US alone. 

Only around 25% of donated clothes actually get sold in the shops. The remaining 75% are either sent for recycling or to landfill, or more often exported to countries in Africa and Asia. The massive amounts of clothing landing on their shores has decimated their native textile industries, and the associated waste is polluting rivers and soil. We are a very wasteful and polluting society and what we do now - for better or for worse - will affect the lives of our children, our grandchildren and our great grandchildren. 

But it's not all bad news ... the message is getting out there. 

Clothing sales dropped by 25% in 2020, the largest decline on record. At the same time, second-hand sales had a 200% rise in traffic and eBay reported a 1,211% increase in sales of preloved items (it makes clothes buying cheaper too!). 

And Harpers Bazaar recently reported that brands are designing ‘seasonless’ collections and Gucci announced last year that they would be reducing their five annual collections down to two in ‘a return to the essential and getting rid of the unnecessary’. 

Make do and mend, people! 

Recycle. Repurpose. Re-imagine. Be creative. Be unique. 

Be yourself.