On my parents’ farm in the 1950s, fashion wasn’t a word we used, let alone with a lumberjack father. I don’t remember going to a store to get clothes for me. The only time I went there was to buy a piece for my brother’s wedding. My mother wanted me to have a suit for the ceremony. I was 27 at the time.
On the other hand, I remember that, for school, she dressed me with linen from Doctor Paradis’ son, for whom she worked as a housekeeper. This clothing recycling was not unique to my family. I remember that my cousins inherited their eldest brother’s linen; the girls did the same. Of course, the oldest members of the family always had the “newest” clothes. Sometimes, after two or three “recycling” of clothes in the family, it was necessary to fall back on other clothes for the youngest… Everyone in the village passed on the laundry in the family.
Some would have been annoyed to wear someone else’s linen, especially a doctor’s son. For me, it was rather luck. I was always amazed to see the laundry we were given. However, I don’t remember ever “exposing” my doctor’s son laundry to my cousins or classmates. Appearances didn’t matter to me. Maybe my cousins or my companions noticed it, but they never told me a word about it. Besides, it took me many years to learn to pay attention — a little — to what I wear. I think I wore second-hand linen well into my thirties.
Obviously, with such a mode of “self-recycling” of clothes in the family and relatives, thrift stores did not exist in the 1950s. “Sunday clean” linen was recycled into “school clean” linen for end its life cycle as “clean work” linen because it has been over-repaired by hand or has suffered damage that was no longer collateral…
Recovery elevated to art
But the recycling cycle didn’t stop there. My grandmother Florilda was a specialist in the recovery of clothes that we could no longer or did not want to wear. Much of my grandparents’ house was literally flooded with old clothes and fabrics of all kinds. Many of these garments were transformed into pieces of linen of various shapes. These bits of fabric could be used to make a quilt. She also cut louvres from old fabrics to weave catalognes. She had an old loom. His house was a veritable recycling yard for old fabrics, a sorting factory.
Isn’t it an art to make beauty out of the irrecoverable? Beauty is not just for museums. We can make everyday life more beautiful despite the poverty of means and materials.
One winter when she was living with us, she taught me “cross stitch” on a square of potato pockets. Eh yes ! She collected bits of potato pockets with holes to make cushions. Better, on his advice, I decorated it with wool recovered by my grandmother who undid woolen sweaters or other clothes to recover the wool and reuse it. Hours of work to undo and redo!
Where did my grandmother learn this embroidery technique, which dates from the Middle Ages and is of Eastern origin? Certainly not at school. It had to come from his family. From generation to generation, centuries-old techniques have been passed down in Quebec.
Today, very few people devote themselves to this art of recovery. I say an art on purpose. Isn’t it an art to make beauty out of the irrecoverable? Beauty is not just for museums. We can make everyday life more beautiful despite the poverty of means and materials.
These embroidery techniques are very uncommon now. Of course, there are still demonstrations of it on YouTube, but very few people practice this art on a daily basis to make objects that are useful to people’s lives. Apart from a few elderly people and especially organizations such as the circles of farmers, who jealously guard these artisanal techniques, our world no longer has time to make beauty with rags.
A globalized market
However, we continue to recycle fabrics. We can consider today’s thrift stores as the fruit of the surpluses of a society of overconsumption. But the cycle of resale or recycling is more complex, it does not stop at local thrift stores, it is globalized. Old clothes have become a market like any other.
In my native village, there is a thrift store. My aunt Thérèse, my mother’s sister, took care of it for years. In a room lent by the municipality, she managed the donations that the people of the village came to entrust to her to give them to others. She had to sort it out. She kept the best clothes and sold the leftovers. My aunt’s thrift shop looked like the thrift shops I’ve seen around town, which get the cream back.
Clothing is now plentiful. While at one time, we gave everything away, some thrift stores started selling. Some, like Saint-Vincent de Paul in Gatineau, for example, have thus been able to accumulate significant capital, which they have reinvested in the community. However, some private companies have seen it as a way of doing business and enriching themselves on the back of poverty.
The most popular, the one that has changed the culture of donating clothes in Quebec, is called the Village des Valeurs (VV). An American company by the name of Savers, which has 330 stores across the United States, Canada and Australia. She came to transform the gift into a competitive market. The American giant uses the donation to export 79% of the clothes and items purchased. The local community is replaced by the international market. The giant thus boasts of making charities “live”… Out of 650 million pounds of equipment purchased by Savers, 513 million pounds have been resold in around thirty poor countries around the world.
Our used clothes travel a lot around the world. In 2015, Tunisia was the largest sorting center on the planet. Many garments are now even returning to the countries that produced them, such as India and Pakistan. In 10 years, from 2005 to 2015, the value of used clothing exports increased by 207%.
My grandmother did the same in her house. She sorted according to criteria of her own which still hold today: the still fashionable, the quality, the good good, the good not good, the unrelated, the rag and the scrap. I wonder if there were as many scraps as today?
One thing is certain, we pollute more, we read on Saturday in the pages of the Duty under the pen of Caroline Montpetit. The ways in which our clothes are made and the transport we use to take them around the world contribute to polluting our planet. We should perhaps find the time to at least reflect on Florilda’s practices before suffocating for good under the weight of our accumulated textiles and the carbon produced in the wake of this industry…