"There is no beauty in the finest cloth if
it makes hunger and unhappiness."
-- Gandhi

Clothing Reconstruction Workshop uses the existing surplus of clothing to create new-recycled goods, without consuming additional raw materials. By sharing materials, skills, and equipment we invite all to reclaim the creativity that has been lost to industry and help build a community united by fun and imagination.

Textile Waste
If you’re like many Americans, each year you cart a bag (or ten) of used clothing to your local thrift shop and head home glad to have made room for more. The World Trade Atlas reports that between 1990 and 2003, the United States exported nearly 7 billion pounds of used clothing and worn textile products around the world. What isn’t sent to other countries is added to landfills and incinerators. According to the EPA’s most recent Municipal Solid Waste report, in 2003, households in the United States generated 10.6 million tons of textile waste—that’s approximately 4.5% of the total municipal waste stream. In that same year, the Economic Census Bureau estimated that Americans had spent over 400 million dollars on new clothing and shoes. By behaving as if clothing is a disposable commodity, we contribute to this destructive and completely unnecessary cycle. Clothing Reconstruction Workshop (and similar workshops around the country) strives to break, or at least slow, this cycle through innovation and creativity.

Re-making vs. Buying
Through hands-on experience, Clothing Reconstruction Workshop will reveal that making things by hand is not an outdated concept that has been abandoned in order to make time for more meaningful endeavors; the process alone is a meaningful, exciting, fulfilling, and rewarding one. Making decisions about color, texture, shape, and use changes objects that are destined for a landfill into trophies of personal and communal accomplishment. This process also brings a greater awareness of the materials used to make clothing and of the value of those materials beyond a single short-term use.

The fashion industry encourages consumers to constantly update their wardrobes, because this is profitable for the fashion industry. Using magazines, television, and films, the industry promotes an ever-changing message that expresses to the consumer specific examples of what is acceptable, beautiful, and wearable. The consumer is sold on the idea that shopping is a creative and expressive endeavor; however, it is really only the designers and marketers who play an artistic role in the retail process. The consumer’s imagination is limited to selection from a narrowly interpreted, pre-produced range of items. The craft involved in creating functional/wearable art—at one time a part of nearly every American household—has been relegated to factories and has become slave to market forces. The average person is oblivious to the details of commercial clothing construction and distant from the productive process due to lack exposure and experience.

After goods are purchased, consumers become advertising billboards as they tote logos and labels on all areas of the body. Branding, in its current form, manufactures and emphasizes distinct social divisions. Labels broadcast the spending power of the individual. This separates consumers into categories that reflect the size of their wallet rather than the expanse of their personal ingenuity.

Community Connection
Clothing Reconstruction Workshop has neither permanent nor paid staff. Local volunteers share skills and ideas with members of their own community. Working together to make items of personal expression provokes discussion and invites us to have conversations about our lives and our values. The sewing, cutting, and design problem-solving create a foundation for new friendships and new perspectives on how we are connected as people, even when surface similarities are not initially evident.