Fabric is very difficult to make.
You have to harvest fiber plants or shear fiber from animals. You have to clean the fiber based on the type of fabric (boll it for cotton, thrash it for flax, skirt and wash it for wool) and then you still have to spin the fibers into threads, then you have to weave or knit those threads to create a fabric.
Fabric has, historically, been extremely valuable.
In Victorian England, wealthy households would let their servants take any of their old clothes or household items that they no longer wanted. While household servants would have uniforms for work, they would have access to ‘last year’s fashions’ and relatively new fabrics for their free time wardrobe. Those household servants would wear those clothes for quite a while and they would use overly worn fabrics to patch their other clothing. Those wealthy household’s height of fashion outfits that they would NEVER be caught in twice, were still reused.
Eventually, once the household servants were done with those clothes, they might pass them on to relatives or friends who had less lucrative jobs.
The working class would happily wear fashion from five years back, assuming it would keep them nice and warm. At that point, they were more concerned with functionality than fashionability.
They would wear those clothes for years, mending and repairing them as needed. Until, finally, the clothes were not even functional for this group of people.
And then, the rag and bone man would come by.
The rag and bone man would buy both very old clothing (that was almost reduced to rags), and also meat bones that had been boiled again and again to make weaker and weaker stock. Those items that were very clearly approaching the end of their functional life would then be sold to the least wealthy levels of society.
At what point does repair (or reuse) become exploitative?
What if we were to develop systems that reuse materials for that ‘upper crust’ of society and not just passing it down through thrift store systems to excuse the most affluent in buying new things again?
Have you (as a western, relatively well off in terms of global economies) ever donated a perfectly good clothing item? Maybe just because it wasn’t fashionable anymore? Or it didn’t fit your current aesthetic?
But you felt alright about it because you were ‘benefiting the less fortunate’?
It was totally alright to exploit those of a ‘lower class’ if it made us feel better right?
What if we took it upon ourselves to repair what we had instead of passing it down the societal chain?
What if we took responsibility for the cycle of repair maintaining the materials in our own lives?
~Aline Harris
