Work Table : The Dress ... for lack of a better name for now
Over the past month I've been processing all of the sewing I did over the summer into a new piece. I'm working on a dress, but not an ordinary dress. This one is made up of sixty four pieces of clothing. These sixty four castoffs (from my and my friend's closests) represent the amount of clothing that the average American purchases every year. I learned this little fact from reading Overdressed: The Shockingly High Cost of Cheap Fashion by Elizabeth Cline. Ponder this for a moment. That's over one new article of clothing a week. Really? It's hard to visualize, no? Hopefully, this dress will help us see it for what it is.
The images show only twelve pieces of clothing at this stage, a far cry from sixty four. And yes, that will be some train coming off the back.
Most of us are guilty of buying a lot clothes these days, myself included. It took me an entire year to figure out why I wasn't wearing half the clothes in my closet. It's because after one wash, they never look as good as they did on the rack. In fact, they look terrible. Oh yeah, it's because they're cheaply made! So the clothing languishes in my closet, unworn.
This dress also won't be worn, unless I want to break my back wearing it. But, hopefully, it will make a statement about how much we're wasting with the 'fast fashion' movement. We will be able to see it with our own eyes.
And now I need to come up with a name for the dress or, perhaps the project, if it turns into one. I ponder that as I sew it together. Yes, I'm handsewing it. With a visible, bright red thread, of course.