For some years now I have been exploring used t shirts as a ‘new material’ for making jewellery. In the course of my research I came across Andrew Morgans video The True Cost. Although I was aware of the backstory behind mainstream fashion and had heard the horrific news stories of garment workers deaths in Bangladesh and Pakistan, the links between consumerism, fashion, greed, vanity and exploitation exposed in the video were profoundly disturbing. It became clear that the ubiquitious tee shirt is responsible for many areas of extensive pollution worldwide, workers ill health and death, and landfill issues.
On talking with friends I realized many of us had many t shirts. T shirts that sometimes no longer fitted us or we kept because they reminded us of a time and a place, or we couldn’t throw away because they were gifted by someone special. Many of us are trying to spend less on clothes, to downsize our wardrobes and rather than relegate t shirts to landfill I thought of a way to reuse them. You trust us with your t shirt and fran_co will make it into a necklace for a koha. A small trade, a tiny step to start to minimize our current capitalist predicament!
