Have you ever wondered what happens to the contents of the bags you drop off at the charity shop?
With over 80 billion pieces of clothing produced each year and with human made stuff now outweighing living biomass, this is the story of the first sorting site for the deluge of items we discard every single day.
Having spent decades exploring charity shops for bargains and treasure, Tansy Hoskins decided to dig deep into the world of charity shop volunteering. From used underwear to wolf pelts, Charity Shop World is a personal account of sorting through donations to reveal the entanglement of people and products. This book also investigates the export of clothes to overseas markets and landfill, revealing hidden shareholders behind a multi-million pound business.
Taking us to the heart of a country hit by austerity and the cost of living crisis, Charity Shop World reveals surprising places of human connectivity, where local communities struggle to find their way through economic hardship to reach a more sustainable way of living.
In a world where ‘broken’ things and ‘unwanted’ people are expelled to the margins of society, this book is a powerful call for a new way of living to rise up from the debris of overproduction and consumption.
Praise
‘Charity shops are ubiquitous and invisible. They anchor the high street, employ thousands, process millions of items. Yet far more is written about AI than this staple of 21st century Britain. Thank goodness, then, for Tansy Hoskins, who deftly shows how the charity shop is both an escape from consumerism and an essential part of global capitalism. This is a rich and surprising book, which takes you both to Accrington and Bangladesh, providing financial expose as well as character studies.’
— Aditya Chakrabortty, Senior Economics Commentator, The Guardian
‘A story of what happens to the leftovers of capitalism. Within the places of possibility, persistence and promise there is hope. Beautifully told, carefully bundled, expertly delivered. Tansy Hoskins’ Charity Shop World is a page turner.’
— Danny Dorling, author of The Next Crisis: What We Think About the Future
‘What might fashion design look like as a public resource based on community and cooperation? Charity Shop World answers that question by reconnecting us to the humanity underpinning every aspect of fashion, everything that Big Fashion, as Tansy calls it- chooses to ignore and exploit. Tansy’s sensitive and warm account of working in a charity shop offers a microcosm of what’s best and what’s worst in today’s fashion system and reveals how another fashion world is possible. Fashion designers, students and educators need to centre the end of life of garments from the very start of the design process and critically address waste colonialism in fashion – Charity Shop World should be on all fashion reading lists. Tansy asks us to reflect on, ‘What do we truly need?’; it’s time for Big Fashion to answer that same question for the future of our people, species and planet.’
—Tanveer Ahmed, Senior Lecturer in Fashion and Race, Central Saint Martins, University of the Arts London
