Some months ago, I got out my camcorder and set it up in the office in my
loft. I put on an expensive shirt I’d bought when I worked in a proper
office. It was from Thomas Pink, and it didn’t fit me as well as it should.
I knew that because I’d subsequently treated myself to a fitted shirt. I set
the light, sound and focus, then pressed record.
“Hi, my name’s John-Paul. I need some help with my shirts. They’ve got big
necks – you can see why – and that makes them really baggy and I want to
take them in.”
I stopped recording, put on the fitted shirt, and started again. “I had this
shirt made for me. It’s the only one I’ve ever had made for me. It fits
beautifully, but cost a fortune. How can I get another one? Can I make it
myself?”
I plugged the camera into my computer and e-mailed the clip to ThreadBanger, a
weekly programme broadcast on the internet by Rob Czar, a music nerd and
writer, and Corinne Leigh, an environmentalist. The show is fast-paced,
low-budget, and has half a million viewers. Two weeks later I got an e-mail:
my clip was going into the next show. So I downloaded the episode and
started watching.
“Hey, what’s up!” Rob began. “Welcome to ThreadBanger.”
“Recently, we received this video from John-Paul,” added Corinne. And there I
was, twirling in my office.
Then Corinne came back onscreen. “All right, John-Paul. Altering your clothes
can be hard if you’re not an experienced tailor. The easiest method is pinch
and pin. Take your baggy shirt, turn it inside out and put it on. Take out
your pins and pinch… and pin. Once you’re pinned up you’re going to sew a
seam up the armpit and down the sides. Try it on, see if it fits. If you’re
happy, trim off the excess.”
At first, Threadbanger appealed to me as an opportunity to muck about instead
of work. But the geek appeal diminished and soon I was obsessed with fixing
my shirt. At my comprehensive school I was obliged to submit to sewing
lessons for three years. My wife, educated at grammar and private schools
which focused on higher things, is hopelessly impractical, so all the minor
repairs in our house are done by me. But it seems I lack the confidence to
tackle bigger jobs. In my world, it’s easier to make a film than to clothe
oneself.
But soon we’ll all have to become more self-sufficient – to undergo what Rob
Hopkins of the fast-growing Transition network calls the Great Reskilling.
We must learn to grow and cook food, build and restore buildings and
infrastructure, process sewage, create a healthcare system that does not
rely on petrochemical-based pills, and puzzle together a no-growth economic
system. And, I modestly submit, we must learn to make and repair our
clothes.
Worldwide, we spend over $1 trillion a year on clothes. And in the UK we
dispose of 900,000 tons of clothing rubbish a year. Only a tiny portion is
retrieved, including 3,500 tons collected by Traid – a charity that resells
second-hand clothes through its shops in the southeast. I recently visited
Traid’s warehouse in Wembley and watched workers sort incoming donations by
type (trousers, shirts) and by season (winter clothes or summer). “Fine
sorters” looked for problems such as tearing or stains, then divided
garments into two types: upmarket or less elevated. (Traid’s branches tend
to specialise.) Anything unsatisfactory is thrown into another pool, to be
resold to rag traders. Some goes to Eastern Europe or Africa. And a small
number of items are repaired or entirely reconfigured, for sale under
Traid’s own label, Traid Remade.
Traid’s education co-ordinator, Lyla Patel, visits schools to talk about
landfill, wasted resources such as water used for growing cotton, pesticides
and other consequences of “fast fashion”, such as sweatshops. This does not
immediately reconcile all school children to the idea of wearing second-hand
clothes, she says. “Some say second-hand clothes are smelly. I say, ‘Don’t
you have a washing machine?’, and say even new clothes may have been tried
on many times in changing rooms. Others say, ‘I’m not poor, I don’t need
second-hand.’ I point out that second-hand clothes can be more expensive
than new ones at Primark.”
At the end of each event, children do customising workshops, then model their
clothes on improvised catwalks. That includes boys. “Boys often use a lot of
trimmings,” reveals Madeleine Bates, Traid’s communications manager. To
further raise awareness beyond the charity-shop crowd, Traid held a clothes
swap at a boutique in Knightsbridge, in partnership with Visa. It was open
for four weeks: people donated clothes and got credits according to what
they donated. “There was a huge swap, with queues outside from 3am,” says
Bates. “People were rushing to buy things like Peaches Geldof’s trilby and
Mischa Barton’s bag.”
The actress Helena Bonham Carter, who has always given friends handmade
presents for birthdays and Christmas (“whether they like it or not”) has
teamed up with her friend, the swimwear designer Samantha Sage, to produce
clothes under the label Pantaloonies, available from Harrods. Bonham Carter
has frequently been derided for her eccentric fashion sense. After a 1985
Oscars appearance she explained that at the last minute she had pulled a
Miss Selfridge dress from the cupboard, worn it over a skirt of her
mother’s, and tied a bow in the front. But that same spirit of inventive fun
is what draws customers to Pantaloonies, in particular its bespoke jeans
refurbishing service. A significant part of the fee goes to Unicef.
“The backlash against rampant consumerism has started,” a spokesman for
Liberty, the London department store, explains. “Concern about the
environment has caused many young designers to explore a ‘make do and mend’
approach.”
Could this explain why high-street fashion chains have done so badly recently?
This year analysts blamed “interest rates starting to bite”, but Rupert
Eastell, head of retail at BDO Stoy Hayward, writing in Retail Week,
recently acknowledged that this doesn’t explain the “strong sales increases
in non-fashion sectors”.
Could it be that the City has overlooked the DIY clothing revolution? It would
hardly be surprising. Clothing is regarded as too homely and bloodless to be
world-changing. But a textile-based revolution has happened before. Gandhi
gave up wearing western-style clothes, preferring to weave his own from
thread he’d spun himself. He believed that if Indians made their own
clothes, it would deal an economic blow to the British establishment in
India – and he was right. The spinning wheel was later incorporated into the
Indian national flag. Gandhian self-sufficiency motivates
several of the people already mentioned.
It perhaps explains my own obsession with those Thomas Pink shirts.
Alexis Rowell is a former BBC journalist who abandoned his career to train as
an energy efficiency inspector and stand successfully as a Liberal Democrat
councillor in Camden, north London. “I had an epiphany and decided to change
my world, then change everyone else’s lives too.” As Camden’s official
eco-champion, he helped to organise the Camden Green Fair in Regent’s Park
this year, and took care of the fashion workshop tent. One of his best ideas
came from his mother. “She’d grown up with a treadle machine. She found one
on eBay and bought it for me. The tent was open from midday till 7pm. The
machine was in use constantly. We had a lot of kids and adults, including a
surprising number of men. There was one guy who came in with his girlfriend,
very sceptical at first, but he came out wearing a T-shirt with fur trim.
How cool is that!”
Someone else has done even more than Rowell to push forward the DIY clothes
revolution. Wendy Tremayne is the US founder of Swap-O-Rama-Rama, a clothing
swap with DIY workshops that has spread in two years to 50 cities in the US
and five other countries.Every swap begins with a huge pile of unwanted
clothing contributed by the attenders – tragic shopping mistakes, well-worn
and loved items that have exceeded their stay in the cupboard. It’s all
free: all you have to do is modify it and, if you’re brave, take a spin down
the catwalk.
“Swap-O-Rama-Rama helps people break down the barrier between consumer and
creator,” Tremayne says. “We’re told that making things deprives us of
leisure time. But what does one do with all that leisure time? We shop!”
Making your own clothes is not only about improving the world “out there”.
It’s also about changing ourselves, and not only as popularised by Trinny
and Susannah. Again, there’s a historical model. As a young woman, Elizabeth
Fry – the Quaker philanthropist who features on the £5 note – enjoyed fine
clothes, including scandalously purple boots with scarlet laces. But as she
became aware of the world, she decided to change the way she dressed. As a
“Plain Quaker”, Fry helped found the Association for the Improvement of
Female Prisoners in Newgate, which provided materials for prisoners to sew
and knit. Additionally, women transported to the colonies were given tools
and materials to make quilts, sold on arrival to provide an income to
protect them from becoming prostitutes.
If I hadn’t thought of Fry already, I would certainly have done so when Lyla
Patel invited me to a fashion show in Brighton, where young offenders were
modelling outfits they’d made out of second-hand clothes provided by Traid.
The audience comprised about 150 well-dressed customers of Brighton’s
smartest boutiques. The young offenders – two male, two female – modelled
their clothes after the interval. They took the name Young Pretenders – a
pun on their legal status – but didn’t seem to know that their criminal
record would be mentioned.
Standing behind the curtain, they heard the MC reveal this to the audience, to
emphasise how much they have achieved in just six weeks. “That is so snide!”
said one. Another’s mortification was interestingly different: she was upset
he told the audience their clothes are second-hand. But the show went well:
the audience clapped and whooped throughout.
If four troubled teenagers could do this, what was stopping me? Why had I yet
to join the DIY fashion revolution and fix my baggy shirts?
Following Rowell’s example, I found a treadle-powered machine on eBay and
bought it (for £8). Back home, I set it up in my sitting room, read the
ancient handbook, and applied oil to squeaking parts. Now what?
The person who finally set me to work on my shirts was not Rob or Corinne on
Threadbanger, or Bonham Carter, or Patel, or the Young Pretenders – nor even
Gandhi or
Fry. It was a bloke who happened to come to dinner two days after I collected
the machine.
I’d never met Adam before, a friend of a friend. All I knew was that he
teaches art at a local comprehensive. But it turned out that he also teaches
textiles, and when he saw my machine he offered to thread it. We were still
mucking about when the others finished their soup. Adam revealed that he
gets virtually all his clothes from second-hand shops, and customises
anything: shirts, trousers, suits. He recently made a hat for himself, and
when a man stopped him on the street to ask where he got it, he made another
for him, too. I admitted I felt intimidated by the job of taking in my
shirts. “You’ve got to just do it,” Adam advised. “Take it apart. Have a go.
If it doesn’t work, try again. But just do it.
Well oiled
John-Paul Flintoff realised he and his family were consuming far too much. So
he took action
Three years ago, before I first read the International Energy Agency warning
that cheap oil was running out and there would be a ‘supply crunch’ by 2012,
the Flintoff family consumed average amounts of oil, probably more.
It’s difficult to say exactly how much that is, but the average person in the
UK emits around 10 tonnes of CO2 — equivalent to burning 25 to 30 barrels of
oil. If your income is above average and you spend most of it – as we do –
you probably burn substantially more. So that’s at least 90 barrels burnt by
just three of us.
Most of us have little concept of how much we use. Why should we? Our towns,
cities and transport systems were not built with a view to oil running out.
To reduce our oil use, I’ve switched to wind power for our electricity
supply, bought an electric car, largely stopped flying, travelled by coach
and bus instead of car when possible, stopped shopping in supermarkets and
had local organic food delivered to my door in a reusable cardboard box.
Roughly half the oil we account for individually is burnt up on our behalf by
the industries that feed consumerism or provide public services — in the
form of household goods (carpets, curtains, loo seats, paint), medical
products (heart valves, artificial limbs, anaesthetics, medicines),
toiletries (toothpaste and brushes, deodorant, soap) — and clothes.
If we’re not to deprive our children and grandchildren of similar goods, we
must learn to reduce our consumption and reuse what we have. The era of
hydrocarbon man is coming to a close.
If you're unsure about altering a good piece of clothing, then practise on something that you were never going to wear anyway, first. Then, when you're feeling confident with your expertise, you can get to work on your good clothes.
Janette, Warwickshire,
I grew up in Sri lanka, where we made our own clothes, cooked our own food (grew quite a bit in the backgarden). Fish and vegetables were delivered by local street vendors on bike or foot or cart. Entertainment was mainly from books or the occasional film. Or each other.
By 16 I had learnt to cut patterns from a book and was making my own clothes and my sister's. At university I made clothes for friends. I learnt cooking from books, from my mother in law and friends' mothers who were good cooks.
As a postgrad student in Sydney, I was a customer of Vinnie's Boutique - the St Vincents De Paul charity shop. Loved it for the variety and the time travel. If you loved it and it didnt fit, adjust it and wear it.
I remember a graffiti on a wall in Sydney, long gone now - "Consume, be silent, and die". It has stuck in my mind for some 30 years.
NR, Bristol, UK
YES-- the day of us good ole country boys has come, living in a house with enough garden to provide us with a lot of our food. We can keep chickens for fresh eggs, catch the odd trout in our local stream, shoot the odd phesant, and best still have Grammar Schools for our children to attend. You can keep your London converted loft flats! And we get wonderful views of the stars at night.
DAVID VINTER, Louth, Lincs., UK.
So you think teak for garden furniture do you?
For three or four decades there has been some disquiet because it is a slow-growing tropical hardwood which is being felled at an increasing, non-sustainable rate, along with other trees which constitute our rainforests. The planet is losing its lungs and we should be very worried
Now, another fact is here to terrify us, based on the concept of “carbon footprintâ€. This phrase is shorthand for the total amount of CO2 released into the atmosphere by any activity, for instance, felling trees, moving timber to sawmills, making furniture
Everybody knows about oak; tough, resistant to rot and you can rub it down annually, oil or varnish it, and maintain its rich colour. Or you can simply let it weather to a gorgeous, soft, silver sheen.
Does this sound familiar? And the carbon footprint for English oak garden furniture can be 7% that of teak. I’ll say that again slightly differently: the carbon footprint for teak garden furniture is fourteen times greater than that of English oak garden furniture.
www.sittingspiritually.co.uk
Martin Young, Lyme Regis , UK
This is a wonderful article!
Beth, Marquette, Michigan