Continuing on my circular fashion series, I’m taking a look at how an independent designer can drive change in the industry. In addition to building a system for remanufacturing of garments at larger companies like Eileen Fisher, education and grassroots efforts are an essential part of shifting the consumer mindset on clothing and creating a circular economy. There is only so much an apparel brand can do if consumers are unaware of the social cost of the fast fashion they are demanding. How do we educate people on the value of handmade goods?
I caught up with Margaret Burton, a Pratt graduate who created a collection of deconstructed clothing made into new garments. Her main goal of the collection was to show the human labor that goes into making the clothing we wear. Her passion for shifting the industry has led her to Charlotte, North Carolina, where she teaches inner city and underprivileged kids how to sew.
Read about her journey – which has taken her from wasteful high-end fashion brands in NYC to the textile recycling industry in India – and how she hopes to change the industry in the interview below.
How did you get involved in sustainable fashion?
It wasn’t until the end of my sophomore year at Pratt when I did an internship over the summer that I became interested in sustainability. It was a big company with a lot of money, but the people at the head of the company didn’t have any design experience or knowledge of the field. They wasted a lot of money on samples and back and forth between factories in China. My job was to go in the back and cut all of the samples.
In addition to the samples, they had a lot of clothes that were made and had never been sold. I had to go in the back and cut everything in half. It was a high-end company so they had a lot of nice details. I was just imagining a woman overseas that was making all this stuff, and I’m just cutting all her beautiful work, it horrified me. After that experience, I started looking into what was going on. I watched documentaries and read Overdressed and To Die For. I also had a good teacher that talked to us about sustainable fashion.
There was also a video I watched that was on the shoddy industry in India, where unwanted western clothes are sent to. They cut off tags and they turn garments into reusable thread. I had an opportunity to go and visit a shoddy factory in India like the one from the video. I saw the waste produced first hand in NYC and then see it come full circle in India where the garments were being recycled.
How do you incorporate sustainability into your own work?
My senior year is when I really approached how I could solve this problem with my own work. How can I communicate and make people understand what’s going on? My approach is that I take clothes that have already been made and then I seam rip it and get it into a flat form. My thought process behind that is to have people see how many pieces are inside their garments. Have them think about, how is this put together? How does this get sewn together? Looking at it in a different way than how they looked at it before. A lot of people think that machines are making clothes, that there are no humans behind it.
Do you think it’s truly possible to have a circular production model in the fashion industry?
I feel like that is the goal of what I’m trying to do. My ideal dream is to do that. Right now I’m just kind of creating whatever I want because I don’t have enough clientele. I’ve been doing some custom orders here and there. Ideally, one thing I’m working on now is a jacket from a woman who’s father passed away and she wants me to turn his jacket into a fashionable denim jacket for her to wear. I’ve done it for a couple people on a small scale, but, ideally, that is what I would love to do. Take things from your closet that you’re not using and make it into something that you might need.
How have you been active in educating consumers about the labor it takes to make clothing?
I moved to Charlotte, North Carolina to teach high school students how to sew. When I took on this opportunity, I thought it was great to be able to build a little army of people who can make their own clothes and are educated. Our parent’s generation all had home ec class, they understand what it takes to make a garment and how long it takes to make it. Unlike me growing up, I never thought about who made my clothes and how my clothes came together.
The children that I’m teaching are in poor communities. I talk to them about how these brands are feeding off of the mindset that “I need this to be popular” or “I need this to be cool”. It’s really crazy how fashion has an effect on these kids and how kids will literally start selling drugs so they can afford the next pair of Jordans.
How did you get started working with the at-risk youth?
I was in Los Angeles working for Jeremy Scott, and somebody from my high school messaged me. He was working for a non-profit in Charlotte that reaches out to the refugee and inner-city communities. They give free English classes, sewing classes, cooking classes, to adults. He was hired to reach out to the youth. As he was reaching out to them he was starting to see how much of an affect fashion had on the community.
They already had the sewing machines from when they teach women how to sew during the week. He thought, why not use those sewing machines to teach the youth to sew in the afternoons. He knew the basics of sewing but not how to pattern and construct a garment, so he asked me to come. I did that for a month, and it went really well. Eventually, they got a grant and then it became a program, and they asked me to come back.
How has it been to work with the kids? Has anything been surprising or challenging to explain this mind shift to them?
It has definitely been challenging to get them to believe me, or even get them to take action. I’ll have them watch The True Cost, and they’ll be so angry, but they still buy fast fashion. The stuff they buy their clothes off of nowadays is crazy. They have these apps on their phone where they can find t-shirts for five dollars and other really cheap stuff. They’re always looking at it.
I think it’s affecting their choices somewhat, they definitely think about it now, but I don’t think it’s changing their choice completely. I had a girl my class who kept buying fake Gucci and Givenchy bags and she finally stopped doing that. I kept telling her, you need to save this money and buy a car so that you can drive yourself to a job. The programs were twelve weeks at a time but now it’s changing, so I’ll be with students for a longer period of time. I think that will have a more lasting effect.
What do you think is necessary to have a more circular economy?
I feel like it’s both education and better technology for textile recycling. It really blows my mind, I don’t know how companies like H&M do it if they’re really recycling the clothing, then that’s more work, so the prices should go up. That’s the hardest part with my work, is educating people on what goes into making the garment. People see something of mine and ask, why is it so expensive? It’s hard to convince people that they should be paying more for their clothes.
Before the seventies, people wouldn’t have more than twelve pieces of clothing in their closet. They would have to save up money to buy a new pair of pants, it’s not like they could just go out and buy a new pair of pants. In my ideal world, I wish we could go back to that. But now that this fast-paced life has been introduced, I don’t know how to get people out of that cycle. I definitely think that education is a big part of it. Even with me sharing my work, the friends who have followed me along my journey are started to change the way that they shop.
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Visit Margaret’s website to view her work, https://www.margaret-burton.com/