Constructing Guiltless Atmospheres

The Charity Shop Problem

For the western fashion industry, the “charity shop” is a sponge for consumer guilt, in both purchase and donation. It creates an illusion of a fabulated closed circuit [purchase – use – donate – purchase – use again]. The “charity shop cycle” is an idealisation, designed to continue support for consumerism and mindless wastefulness for those who are “environmentally conscious”. Donators chose charity shops over the bin, assume their items will be resold, and rarely question where they will go if not. Charity shops to not advertise that 80% of stock is exported, almost exclusively to Ghana, where if not sold in Kantamanto market, it is illegally dumped or burnt, polluting land, air, and sea (Johnson, 2023) (Choat, 2023) (The Revival, 2023). Donating to charity shops is to step outside of consumerist and colonialist guilt although the action itself directly, but silently, contributes to neocolonialism. Purchase from charity shops is more sustainable purchase than direct from manufacturer/new from store, but it is so far from solution to fashion wastage, or an industry that alienates us from ourselves so it can sell us an identity.

f.16 Fast Fashion Landfill in Ghana (n.d.) Via The Revival Earth

f.17 Kantamanto Market (n.d.) via The Revival Earth

Industry is toxic (Marx, 1887). The drive to produce more *sustainable* materials by clearing land and planting hemp instead of cotton, throwing away all our *non-sustainable* clothing and adopt something new is toxic - we might as well say the solution to industrial textile waste is growing new industries (Simmons, 2023)! An economy built around purchase through an abstract value (money) is toxic. Trying to make a new form of currency, shop, material, fashion, is toxic! We don’t need new, we need garbage, we need to stop perceiving things as broken, we need to learn to make with one another, without the fabulations of independency that monetary economies reinforce in us!

In discussing Divine Craft, note it’s separation from the term “upcycling”. Upcycling is the act of using of older/broken clothes as a basis to make new clothes, through mending, reworking, dying etc. When upcycling, the goal has end, creating an “upcycled garment”. Divine Craft is an action, the process of experimentation, exploration and engagement, conversation, and care for materials, it does not reach an end point as it recognises the constant fluctuation and entanglement of material reality. Something Upcycled is an object, has boarders, Divine Craft is a boundless, spiritual act. The process of upcycling also engages with a drive to make “end products”, whereas Divine Craft has no noun nor adjective it can reach, nothing can be “divinely crafted” because this language suggests its process to be finished, it is always present tense. Upcycling is a linear, goal oriented, process that mimics its predecessor: manufacture (the process of taking resource, laborious manipulation of resource, to reach consumable product, which will then be purchased, used, discarded, and replaced). Divine Craft will never reduce the materials it engages with to “resource”, weighting them as less important their manipulator. Divine Craft is and endless collaboration. Upcycling mimics manufacture, only differing in its resources strictly being second hand, and as a process, makes no effort to step outside of capitalist structure. Though upcycling begun as fixing/morphing one’s old clothes for themselves, it’s popularisation has created is new markets, and *conscious consumers*. ‘There is no ethical consumption under capitalism,’ (collective origin, approximately 2014) whether it be upcycled or new product, the process of maintaining a monetary market, trends cycles, and compulsive consumption (of *sustainable* goods) that is violent and perpetuates the ecological damage which upcycling claims to fix (Žižek, 1989) (Fisher, 2009). Divine Craft is purposefully unpurchasable and unmarketable. It is a continuous intimacy between substances that are entangled, it is a spiritual acting, a response-ability to a damaged planet.

f.18 Tote (2024) via V&A

The Revival Earth is a Ghanian artistic collective working in response to the excessive fast fashion waste, majority from western countries, that lands in Kantamanto (THE REVIVAL, 2023). Local craftspeople and designers are employed to upcycle from the masses of waste to create *upcycled* products that western audiences deem purchasable, selling through partnerships with British institutions such as the V&A - upcycled tote bags 55GBP (V&A Shop, 2023). Their products are unaffordable to the mass population of Ghana (Ghana minimum wage is approximately 32.5GBP/month as of January 2024 (TRT Afrika, 2023)), who do not require the upcycling tag to buy second hand garments – they can get those directly from the Kantamato market. There is little public transparency regarding wages for Ghanian manufacturers, nor the split of profits between their employees and the institutions once items are sold in Britain or online. The Revival offers short courses in ‘upcycling and the circular economy’, how upcycling, ‘can transform fashion waste by generating jobs, reducing inequality, and minimising the environmental impact of the fashion industry,’ (Future Learn, 2023). The weighting on creating economic prosperity outweighs the core issue - Western countries enforcing neo-colonialism through the exportation of waste to African countries. Avoidance of this conversation could almost be perceived as though the west is doing Ghana a favour by dumbing their garbage there (Symmons, 2023). The ‘creative [capitalist] solutions’ feeding back into western consumption habits may disperse some fashion industry income to Ghana, though this cannot be confirmed without direct conversation with The Revival. The collective is “not-for-profit” but revolves around money-commodity exchange, thus the need for transparency regarding wage distribution is absolutely necessary. Upcycling is a neo-liberal solution to a neo-liberal problem, and due to its mimicking of an exploitative structure, knowing who is making money from production matters.

Sustainability, good moral fibre, is what The Revival, like the majority of upcycle brands (i.e. Rokit Originals, Beyond Retro, Patagonia Recrafted, Urban Renewal, etc.) are really selling. Their value in projecting “upcycle culture” and conscientious consumption/disposal is stunted completely by its place as commodity – it is the market that is the issue! The streamlining from genuine emotive interaction between co-existing, inter-connected and inter-dependant agents to exchange of abstract values.