‘Uncovering Fashion’: Richmond artists featured in textile waste exhibit
VENN
RICHMOND, Va. (WRIC) -- An exhibit titled 'Uncovering Fashion' features Richmond designers shedding light on textile waste, which includes any fabric or clothing that gets thrown away rather than recycled or reused.
For Kimberly Guthrie, chair of Virginia Commonwealth University's (VCU) Fashion Design and Merchandising, so much thought goes into the clothes she buys.
Kimberly Guthrie looks at Cate Latham's piece titled "Loved and Laid to Waste."
“I love fashion so much and I just have seen it change so much over the years as a consumer of fashion and as an educator of fashion," Guthrie said. "And I’ve seen that its value has kind of died.... Uncovering Fashion is a way to talk about that there’s so much more that happens behind just the clothes that we just take off a rack and take off a hanger and put on every day.”
Guthrie said the pieces are an "evolution of an existing research project.”
She invited faculty from the fashion institute to collaborate and they began working in July through a grant from the VCU Dean's Office, bringing to life the relationship we have with our clothes.
“If people could just pause for a moment and think of clothing like they would their food," Guthrie said.
After putting boxes in 10 local businesses and organizations, they gathered over 700 pounds of discarded clothes, sheets and towels.
“After we got all that in, we brought it into school...[and] we just dumped it all out and essentially we went into designer mode," Guthrie said.
They sorted the clothes by color, the designers naturally gravitating to the piles that spoke most to them.
For Guthrie, it was the color black. She titled her piece Dead Dress. To her, it represents the death of fashion, the only intact piece made of polyester.
"Dead Dress" by Kimberly Guthrie.
“Those dresses are all different dresses coming together, so it’s almost like they’re trying to come back together to live again," she said describing her piece.
According to the United Nation's Environment Program, 10% of global carbon emission comes from textile waste. The most recent data from 2018 shows over 11 billion tons of landfill in the US yearly.
“If you no longer want to use it, let somebody else use it," Guthrie said. "And don’t take in more than what you need.”
When shopping for herself, Guthrie said the first thing she looks at when shopping is the fabric. If that passes her test, she considers if she has something similar and how much wear she’ll get out of it.
She said when it comes to getting rid of something, it doesn’t happen often because of how much thought she puts into buying it in the first place. Even then, she tries to find another purpose for it, like a dish rag.
Her preferred fabrics are cotton, wool, silk and Tencel made from lyocell. No’s include virgin polyester, because laundering polyester and other synthetics is the leading contributor to microplastics in the ocean.
“Was that the designer’s intent? To have their piece to be created, produced and then just left for naught," she said.
Uncovering Fashion exhibit at The Gallery at Main Street Station.
You can visit the Uncovering Fashion exhibit in The Gallery at Main Street Station through Oct. 30.
The fabrics used in the exhibit were contributed by Blue Bones Vintage, CVWMA, Diversity Thrift, ICA, Shift Retail Lab, The Gallery at Main Street Station, Maggie L. Walker Governor's School, Top Stitch Mending, Visual Arts Center of Richmond and VCU Student Commons.
Other artists featured include Hawa Stwodah Muhajir, Kevin Sellars, Michael-Birch Pierce, Cate Latham and Jeannine Diego.
