A conversation with Liz Ricketts

Liz Ricketts in Ghana. Image courtesy of The Or Foundation.

Liz Ricketts is a fashion designer, educator and founder of The Or Foundation. Her work looks at overconsumption and overproduction within the fashion industry, and attempts to engage people in alternatives. In 2011, with her partner Branson Skinner, she founded The Or Foundation, which aims to liberate young people from their dominant consumer relationship with fashion, one they describe as riddled with excess and exploitation. “Our interest is to help people recognise that the choice is there and exists. We work with different communities to manifest alternatives to the dominant model of fashion, and specifically alternatives to the dominant way in which people relate to consumption” she told me.

They have spent almost ten years carrying out extensive research into Kantamanto Market, one of the largest second hand markets in the world, and the surrounding landfill sites in Accra, Ghana. This is where many of the global North’s unwanted clothes are sent, and since 2016 Liz and Branson have traveled to Ghana five times to collect data. They have conducted interviews with 120 “used” clothing traders, importers and market leaders, surveys with both traders and consumers, toured the landfill and informal dumping sites where excess clothing is sent, worked alongside informal waste pickers and spoken with the directors of solid waste management for the city of Accra. In addition they have interviewed authorities at the Accra Metropolitan Authority, including the City Manager and senior officials from the Departments of Planning and Urban Development. They have interviewed a former mayor of Accra, leaders of the major traders association affiliated with Kantamanto Market and spoken with senior executives of a major textile manufacturer in Ghana. Their research is extensive and in 2016 they launched the multimedia project Dead White Man’s Clothes as a space to publish it. 

We are at an intersection where the fashion industry is going to have to have to begin to stop overproducing, and address overconsumption, if we are to make serious changes to meet the demands needed to slow the climate crisis. Liz talks at length about the impact our behaviour has had. Did we think that the fashionable waste we were producing was going to evaporate into thin air? Or that once we washed, folded and placed our unwanted clothes neatly into a bag and left it at a charity shop it was going to be sold to someone with a need?

Shonagh Marshall: I want to start by asking you to explain what happens when you drop your clothes off at a charity shop?

Liz Ricketts: I can best speak to what happens in the United States, and the Global North as a whole. Typically people think that donating their clothing is a better alternative to landfill. They often think of it as a charitable donation, with the idea that someone somewhere will want the thing they no longer want. What is so fascinating about these donations is that we are so adamant they are not trash, yet we typically drop it off inside a garbage bag. Although we are treating it like waste management, we have a disconnect because clothing is so tied to our identity. When you go shopping and buy something that you think is going to make you beautiful, something you deem as special, you are not immediately going to think of it as a consumable product. To think of it that way would mean you are disposable too and that your identity is linked to this idea of disposability. However when you do stop to think about it you realise that it is waste management and it costs money. Most people are under the misconception that when you put something in the charity bin, that it is going to someone for free, to somebody that has expressed a need. However even to do that would require money, even if you drop it off directly at a charity shop, it takes money to sort those things, process them and get them to people. The second hand clothing economy has always been for profit, and it has always been born out of the need to make room for the excess that we consume in the global North. 

Shonagh: You underscore immediately what a fallacy the idea of “donating” our used clothes is. What are the statistics? What actually gets sold in the way we are hoping it does?

Liz: In the United States when you drop off your clothes directly to a charity shop or a donation bin 10 to 20 percent will be sold somewhere in the US. Another 10 to 20 percent might be down-cycled into rags or insulation. The third component is clothes are shipped overseas, which is the majority and can be anywhere from 40 to 80 percent. It doesn’t immediately get exported and a lot of my work with The Or Foundation is around applying the same critical lens we apply to the first hand clothing industry, to the second hand clothing industry. 

Typically, before your garment ends up in the foreign country it is destined for, it’s handled by at least four other entities and these entities are often in different countries. In the US a lot of the clothing we donate is exported to Canada, where it is graded and eventually exported. The UK does a lot of their own sorting, though sometimes they will send clothes to other countries for grading and export . Throughout Europe, in Germany and France for example, these drop off sites might just be collection points where most of the clothing is sent to another European country to go through this industrial sorting process. The point is that there is no one path that every garment takes once you put it in the donation bin, rather it enters a very complex system that mirrors the supply chain we think of when producing new clothes in the globalised fashion industry. 

Landfill site in Accra, Ghana. Image courtesy of The Or Foundation.

Shonagh: A lot of this clothing we donate ultimately ends up in Africa. In 2011 you and your partner Branson began working on a research project into one of the largest second hand markets in the world, Kantamanto Market in Accra, Ghana. Using the research you gathered you created the multimedia project in 2016 called Dead White Man’s Clothes. Where does this name come from?

Liz: The name Dead White Man’s Clothes comes from the term Obroni Wawu which is an Akan phrase that means “the White man has died clothes”, it can also mean “the devils clothes”. To root the name in history you have to go back to when the second hand clothing trade started, when Ghana was a part of the British Crown Gold Coast Colony. For Ghanaians to be considered powerful, or to have proximity to decision makers under colonial rule, they would have to conform to Western styles of dress, or Western notions of professionalism. The market we study, Kantamanto Market, sprung up along a railroad track where men who were traveling from the villages into the city for a meeting with someone in the colonial government would have to buy a suit, or something to wear to look “presentable”. 

In 1957, at the same time that Ghana was gaining independence from Britain, there was an explosion of ready to wear clothing being created in the United States and Europe. The 60s and 70s saw the beginning of consumer credit, credit cards became normalised and they were mailed to people unsolicited. This enabled people to buy more clothing than they could afford or needed. Retailers knew that consumers wouldn’t continue to buy clothing if their closets were full and they required an outlet for excess. This became the second hand clothing economy, which was marketed to the consumer as charity and not-for-profit. These two things were happening at the same time so right after independence in 1957 you had a deluge of clothing coming from the United States. Most of the clothing was in good condition, it was made differently then, and in my opinion was of better quality, so it didn't look very worn. Ghanaians assumed that it was coming from dead White people. Why else would someone get rid of perfectly wearable clothing?

Kantamanto Market, Accra, Ghana. Image courtesy of The Or Foundation

Shonagh: It is really interesting to hear how the market was formed and how it has evolved. Did you also pick the name to draw attention to the White Man? 

Liz: Yes. For us our work is about centering who should be held responsible, which are White men. Most often within the fashion industry it’s White men, specifically in the fast fashion industry and the billionaire families that own the mega-fashion companies, who are ultimately responsible for perpetuating this system of overproduction and overconsumption. In our work we are very interested in how to center those people in the fight for a more sustainable industry. I think too often blame falls on the consumer, when in my opinion consumers are more pawns than anything else. 

Shonagh: I agree. I am interested whether in your work dominant themes, like the emphasis on the role the consumer plays, continue to appear?

Liz: The dominant theme is that waste and greed are two sides of the same coin. Most of the time the conversation only addresses waste. It’s more convenient for people in power, and for humans too, to address a material problem rather than a social problem. Because of this we continue forward, inventing new ideas, and frameworks, and ideologies. It becomes very academic about what the future should be and what fashion could be. Meanwhile we are really not changing our behaviour at all. We are also not changing the incentives that drive any of this. That keeps coming up for me and that’s the hardest for me to confront, and to navigate psychologically, it sometimes drowns out any hope that I have. 

A lot of people look at our work and say it is related to the circular economy. Although the circular economy is an interesting framework and I don’t think it is bad, it is a framework that is industry friendly. It is a financial argument, and material based framework, for saving the planet. It focuses on replacing one input with another. However it doesn’t address any of the harm that’s been done, it doesn’t address human behaviour, it doesn’t address any of the isms, White supremacy is not addressed, colonialism is not addressed, none of the extracts of capitalism are addressed and it all continues under the guise of what we call “radical frameworks”. 

The circular economy is not radical in my opinion, it took what I consider more radical frameworks, in terms of biomimicry or cradle to cradle, and combined them to make an industry friendly financial argument for saving the planet. It really concerns me because I think it gives these companies an out, specifically in terms of Ghana. For example many waste pickers at the landfill sites in Accra, where a lot of the clothing goes, make a living recovering plastic bottles. Most of these plastic bottles are shipped to the global North to companies that are selling recycled, sustainable, PET fashion products. But there are plenty of plastic bottles in America and in Europe that we could collect, but it would be harder for us. It would require us to change behaviour and tackle the economic incentives that prevent us from being able to collect the plastic bottles from our own countries. So instead of doing that hard work we just follow the path of least resistance. We go to Ghana, we buy the plastic bottles from people who risk their lives to recover them, and are paid almost nothing, and then we call that sustainable and circular. 

It is this idea that keeps me up at night, our tendency to turn everything into a frontier and put everything into a capitalist framework. I am a big fan of having a conversation about the need for reparations. Reparations is the main thing missing from any of these conversations about sustainability, because unless we correct the wrongs of the past, and empower new groups of people, we are going to be using the same thinking, from the same people, to solve the problems that those people created in the first place. 

Shonagh: It is incredibly frustrating that the global North is not doing the work to look collectively at the behaviour that led us to this moment. You originally worked with Branson on a sustainable fashion line but decided to close the business, the main reason you said was that “we saw that there wasn’t a need for more clothing, there was a need instead for more education.” As a result you run programmes with middle schoolers. What does this teaching focus on?

Liz: From 2011-2015 we ran a peer based object exchange programme. It was like a pen pal project, but with clothing. The students would make textile based objects for one another, it was between students in five states of the US and students in Ghana and South Africa. They would make objects and tell their stories, through collecting textiles, learning the design process and making the dyes from food waste. It was all about trying to get the students to understand the value of their own time, and gain an appreciation for the skills needed within the fashion industry. Then they would exchange the objects with their peers abroad. They would be connected for a whole year on this online platform and through a curriculum we created called Collectofus. 

The curriculum was about globalisation in fashion and it was a historical curriculum. All the students, no matter where they were, had to study one garment from their closet for the entire time and had to do closet audits. These were middle school children who were growing people. When the students in the US grew out of their clothes they would donate them and they wouldn’t know where they would go. The students in Ghana everyday after school would change into their Obroni Wawu, the name for second hand clothing in Ghana and they didn’t know where these came from. So there was an automatic connection that made each student more curious about the relationship. What we found that really inspired us to launch the Dead White Man's Clothes project, was when the students in Ghana would do their closet audit we would ask them to document the information on the tags, list the colour and describe the garment. When they would come to class with their homework and describe the garment they would tell us that 50 percent of their closet was made in the United States. Branson and I would wonder how this could be, we don’t make anything in the United States anymore. It was because “Made in” represented the bale it came from, they were buying their second hand clothing from an American bale. 

That really flicked a switch for me in understanding how narrow my perspective was as an American. I did not understand, it was impossible to understand, because of what I had been trained to think of the second hand clothing trade as. At that moment I realised what we call “second hand” is the supply chain for almost half of the population on the planet. When I looked around and saw the way that the industry was talking about the second hand clothing trade, and how the sustainable fashion community was talking about the second hand economy, I found it very generalised and narrow in perspective. It was talked about as being inherently good, or inherently bad, and I think these generalisations happen when we can “other” people. If people have stereotypes of Africans, it not only allows us to perpetuate the charity myth but it means that when we actually start studying the second hand clothing trade it's much easier to think of it in binary terms and that we have a right to prescribe a value to it. So that was our turning point. 

Shonagh: You have talked to me in the past about the emphasis that you put on convenience. How do you use this as a way to highlight overconsumption habits?

Liz: Convenience is the backbone of the linear economy, in fashion especially because fashion is not a need. We need clothing but fashion itself is not a need, so there is no need for it to be convenient. It is pure desire and laziness. Convenience prays on our worst impulses. When I talk to the students about convenience we talk about it in terms of their fulfillment, asking how convenient it was for you to get you dinner is about asking them what makes them feel fulfilled, or makes them feel like they are spending their time wisely. You are often taught as a designer, and in the business world, that convenience is paramount. You can’t make things too complicated, how dare you write a long caption (laughs), you have to make things as easy and digestible for the consumer to understand and it’s assuming that the consumer doesn’t want to be engaged intellectually. It assumes that the consumer wants to be passive. However, it’s not inherent for humans to be passive, we are trained to behave that way.

That’s how we talk about it with the students, we discuss how convenience is a learned behaviour and we train them then to choose other values over convenience. Most of the students I teach are Generation Z, so they are used to using their phones for everything, whether it is ordering their dinner or getting ubers. They have grown up getting everything in a convenient way and they hate it. I think that it's the root of a lot of negativity in their life, because they don’t know what to hold on to anymore. I think about how many real human experiences these students have had if everything in their life has been acutely transactional. You press a button and something is delivered to your door, and no effort or human interaction is required of you whatsoever, it is quite dull as a human existence. We discuss this and we talk about how internalising it numbs all of the other instincts that we have to be social. This exaggerates impulses around addiction and consumption, because if you are numb to what you really want, or to what is really satisfying to you as a human being, then what is to stop you from continually hitting the button? Obviously we teach about what that means in terms of the supply chain as well, in terms of all the hands that touch the things that are so convenient, but we emphasise more the impact on the consumer, than on the supply chain, when we have those conversations.

Shonagh: You highlighted addiction and consumption. That is something I am really interested in. I think there is a lot of work around highlighting shopping addiction as a serious issue, I think it is so normalized.    

Liz: I definitely think this is an excellent point for the fashion industry to be talking more about addiction and mental health in general and that is something we saw again in teaching. When we were running the education programme we were working mostly with middle schoolers and that’s when they are starting to define who they want to be and to start to want to express that through clothing, it’s also when they might start to be bullied for their identity or how they express themselves. Gender identity is also coming together at that time. It's a very sensitive time to be talking to these students about clothing and about fashion and that’s specifically why we work with that group. 

When we started doing that work it was at the same time the sustainable fashion movement's catchphrase was vote with your dollar, by shopping better we can save the planet. This is an interesting idea because I am working with these very vulnerable young people and I would never stand at the front of the classroom and tell these students that the way that they could enact their moral code and ethics would be to shop better. I don’t even know how you would go about presenting that as a solution to a child. Firstly because they might not have their own money, but also because you are collapsing everything about their identity into one role: the consumer. We would do these surveys with our students and they already knew how to define their role as consumers better than any other that they played in their life. They understood what it meant to be a consumer, meanwhile they didn’t really have any idea how to talk about being a friend, a mentor, or a sibling, let alone what it means to be a citizen. That just shows how sick we are, these are kids and the fact that that’s the one role in their life that they really understand how to play is so disturbing to me. But we are taught from the minute that we are born that we are lacking something that we are constantly being marketed to based on our identity and aspirations, if we buy something everything will be better. If we buy it, wear it and post it on Instagram we will be accepted. It is an addiction. 

In 2016 something that was really shocking to us, especially considering the outcome, was that more Americans shopped Black Friday than voted in the presidential election. I don’t think that just happens, we are trained every single day to believe that we have more power in our shopping habits than we do in any other aspects of our lives. I do think that’s a sickness and it makes us all feel very isolated. It breeds a delusion that we have control over bigger things that we don’t have control over at all. 

Accra, Ghana. Image courtesy of The Or Foundation

Shonagh: I want to take the conversation back to Kantamanto. If the market is a product of the overconsumption habits of the global North, what are the consumption patterns in Accra? 

Liz: Consumption is changing in Ghana. Most people in Ghana grew up taking cloth to a local tailor and having things tailor made to fit their body. Therefore people in Ghana don’t really identify as consumers, they are citizens and they are co-creators. When you take the cloth to the tailor a lot of times you also take a sketch, and by telling the tailor how you want your garment to be you aren’t insulting their skills at all. I think that’s a very unique dynamic, or certainly unique from what we have in the United States. If a consumer was to tell a designer exactly what they wanted with a sketch it would be interpreted that you were infringing upon that designer's creative agency. But that’s not the relationship in Ghana, garments are very much co-created and the people who are ordering the clothing have a lot of agency. So when people go to Kantamanto market they’re not looking for things that are ready made to fit their body the way that we do. We go into a mall, we see something that might look interesting to us, we check if it’s our size and we look at the price, and if those things are satisfying, maybe we’ll get it. In Kantamanto people don’t really care about the size, they care a little bit but not so much, because there are tailors right there that you can have alter it for you there’s upcyclers and dyers in the market. It’s really not a place to shop, it's a place to create things and they look at clothing as material. With fast fashion the quality of the garments is so low, in large part because it has no shape. That’s how you make cheap things, by not having seams, or as few as possible. So for a lot of people in Ghana this model is becoming less desirable or less useful because it's harder for them to alter.

Shonagh: You have mentioned to me in the past that new malls have been built in Accra in recent years and these malls offer a completely different experience from Kantamanto.

Liz: Yes. What’s happening right now is this growing tension. Ghana is a very outward facing nation in a lot of ways. It’s often described as the gateway to Africa, it’s very peaceful and it’s celebrated for being one of the first to gain its independence from Britain. So right now there is a lot of development happening within the neoliberal philosophy of raising things to an international standard, this includes having malls. People in Accra enjoy going to the mall, meanwhile very few Ghana based companies can afford the rent and there aren’t very many Ghanian designers selling things because again they can’t afford to be in that environment. In addition to that you also have a tension of aesthetics. Kantamanto is not convenient, it is like any thrift experience you have to search and you might not find things that are in your size. Historically Ghanians have been very receptive to things that aren’t in their size that’s not a problem for them because again there’s this culture of upcycling and reworking things but there is a rising tension because now you have malls that are being presented as international, modern, or better. So this new idea of being able to go to an air conditioned space, where everything is hung up, very neatly, and you select things in your size that’s becoming aspirational, and going to a place like Kantamanto is becoming less aspirational. There is a bridge between the two where a lot of young people in Ghana go to Kantamanto and they carefully select items, then they shoot them in a very instagramable way, and resell them for quite a lot on Instagram or Facebook. Even doing that is rebranding these clothes as “vintage”. There is a growing desire for a lot of people to modernise and so the idea of clothes you can get from Kantamanto of being second hand or used is no longer very positive. It’s all definitely being driven by convenience and the aesthetics of modernisation. 

Shonagh: In this interview we have covered the negative aspects of the fashion industry, however you and I have talked in the past about the positive aspects of fashion, and the joy and fun that clothes can inspire. If you were able to start from scratch tomorrow, what fashion industry would you build? What would your fashion utopia be?

Liz: What I love about fashion is well made things that have a clear sense of articulated creativity. I value creativity. I don’t think there’s the space for small designers and for relationships to form between designer and consumer anymore. We really need policy around quantity and growth, I don’t think that we are going to improve things unless we start regulating overproduction. 

I would love to see retail environments that are more similar to Kantamanto, that would be a version of utopia to me. In this space you would have tailors, designers studios and dyers, where you can buy ready made clothes. It’s about handing back a lot of agency to the consumer and to the creative decision makers at the same time, whilst removing marketing. I think so much of what we have to do is get rid of marketing budgets. Instagram and social media make independent brands powerful and they can survive without having to have a large budget for marketing and campaigns, but they still just can’t compete with larger companies. I think regulating marketing budgets would have a big impact. I also believe large fashion brands should have to pay reparations, which will ultimately put them out of business or force them to scale down to a level that’s human scale. 

The more relationships we can have between the creator and the person who is the receiver, whether they consider themselves a consumer or not, the closer we are going to get to a utopia. I think you are already seeing that. A lot of small, independent brands are talking about growth in a really healthy way. They’re saying they’re happy at the scale that they have. They turn down investment, they don’t really want to scale up. They tell me that they are at a level where they know their consumers, many by name, and can respond to their messages directly. There is a relationship and that’s when I think fashion becomes a culture again. I think fast fashion has completely erased fashion culture. I don’t know what the culture of fashion is right now. I don’t think many people really think of fashion as part of culture anymore. 

Please consider supporting The OR Foundation by donating at https://deadwhitemansclothes.org/donate. Donations will be used to support COVID-19 food relief for kayayei (female head porters) who are day laborers and who have been greatly impacted by the pandemic, to fund a regenerative food sovereignty farming program for kayayei and to support The OR’s ongoing effort to build a textile recycling lab in Kantamanto. Thank you!