Fashion is fast moving. What yesterday was fashionable convention is today dowdy and rejected. Old clothes end up in containers, are cleaned, sorted, compacted and ultimately sold by the kilo to Eastern Europe and Africa. The first world’s cast-offs transform themselves there into desperately needed clothing, or also, with increasing frequency, into ‘fashion’ garments – only the time lag is unavoidable.

The two works, ‘Export/Female (Stela)’ and ‘Like a…’, are being shown in ‘Belleville’, a trendy boutique in the Mitte district of Berlin.

A stela made out of four bales of old clothes blends like an architectural feature into Belleville’s retail space. The bales come from the Raw Material Recycling Society’s warehouse in Berlin’s Neukölln district. Here in Belleville, where the fashions sold are all the very latest, these rejected garments, already packed up for selling on, cause a sense of irritation. Three of the bales are wrapped in white sheeting, while tightly packed old clothes spill out of the fourth. Each day, the visible garments are sprayed with perfume. In this compressed form the old clothes become an aesthetic object, drawing its appeal from the colours and cuts of the last season’s fashion and of the season before that. They thus form a contrast to the latest fashion in Belleville. Based on the global divide in incomes, it is with these cast-offs from affluent society that the raw material recycling industry makes its profit.

Intervention in Belleville
‘Export/Female (Stela)’, four compacted bales of old clothes, supporting construction 45 x 45 x 280cm, perfume.

Belleville, Rosa-Luxemburg-Straße 27, 10178 Berlin