Waste, dirt and desire: Fashioning narratives of material regeneration

Abstract

The consumption of clothing fashioned from recycled textile fibre waste poses a challenge for buyers not simply due to fears of a loss of quality, but also to fears of ‘dirt’ and contagion. These concerns appear to reside in cast-off clothing’s intimate links with unknown bodies, and cultural perceptions of the recycling system’s ability to properly ‘clean’ these materials and transform them back again into textile fibres that can be worn again on the body. The fashion industry currently recycles less than 1% of its own cast-offs back into clothing, despite mainstream economists’ claims that keeping fibres in circulation for longer is not only environmentally sustainable but also economically advantageous: closed-loop business models secure resources in an increasingly competitive market still focused upon growth. Here it is argued that the drive towards a more circular fashion system in Europe brings competing frameworks of purity into the same field, where cultural values ascribed to clothing hygiene and cleanliness are confronted with the goals of sustainability and resource effectiveness. In their attempts to re-make post-consumer clothing fibres back into desirable fashion, manufacturers and retailers are trying to negotiate these complex value systems, with variable results. This article explores three, very different, contexts where manufacturers and retailers experiment with adding value to fashion made from mechanically-recycled wool: an ethical fashion trade fair in Berlin, textile specialists working with a British high street retailer, and a yarn wholesaler in Prato, Italy. The examples reveal the current precarity of the symbolic re-ordering of recycled textile materials as ‘clean and green’ rather than ‘old and dirty’, and how corporate actors struggle to re-shape their narratives of material sustainability at this increasingly visible frontier.