“What Goes Around Comes Around” exhibit at Fashion for Good Museum in Amsterdam, the Netherlands. All photos by Elzo Bonam.
By Susan Messer
This past March, my husband and I had the good fortune to visit the Fashion for Good Museum in Amsterdam, the Netherlands—an interactive museum that tells “the stories behind the clothes you wear and how your choices can have a positive impact on people and our planet.”
Jacket design reusing brightly colored oven mitts by Nicole McLaughlin.
The health of the planet is top of mind for people in Amsterdam—something we learned almost as soon as we arrived, as the cab driver who took us from the airport to our hotel, driving a fully electric vehicle, mentioned the concern: Amsterdam is below sea level, likely to feel heavy impacts of climate change, and thus, a place that is working toward solutions and adaptations.
A few days later, walking through the museum, we saw weirdly beautiful clothing and other useful objects (a camping tent, backpacks, blankets) made of recycled and upcycled fabrics and other objects—lampshades, oven mitts, and so on, sewn and patched together in marvelously inventive ways.
We also watched a film that showed the devastating impact our mountains of discarded clothing have on villages in Africa and elsewhere, looked through the “take one free” racks of used (excellent condition) clothing, and tagged along with a student group touring the museum and learning for the first time about the harms of the fashion industry and the currently developing innovative responses to those harms.
The museum is heavily focused on circularity—a great thing. In a series of articles I wrote a few years ago about the circular economy, I used this definition: In a circular economy, waste from one process is re-purposed as input for another process, creating a circular, closed-loop model of material reuse. In other words, in the context of clothing, (1) honor the resources that go into your clothes, (2) reduce and, ideally, eliminate waste or even the idea that something is waste, (3) learn everything possible about what use some other person or process might have for the item you are considering discarding (and likely sending to a landfill), and (4) find that person or process.
A lampshade repurposed as a hat by Patchwork Family.
As many of you already know, especially Oak Park, Ill., designer and entrepreneur Germaine Caprio, who I wrote about previously, today’s fashion industry is based in a take-make-waste model, and this system has a growing negative impact on people and the planet. For instance, according to the Clean Clothes campaign, the garment industry is an enormous carbon polluter, and one of the greatest producers of waste on the planet, as three out of five of the 100 billion garments made each year end up in landfill—whether donated or discarded. A strategic and visionary response to this problem? Conversion from the linear waste-making model that we now have into one that is circular by design, one in which all materials are continually reused instead of discarded.
Museum display on future materials for clothing.
But back to the Fashion for Good museum. Its ultimate goal has been to help people envision a circular economy and empower them to take collective action in their homes, communities, and daily lives. Fashion for Good has always been more than a museum. At its core is its Innovation Platform, connecting (1) those who are working on innovations with (2) brands, retailers, manufacturers, and funders to make the innovators’ ideas and technologies into realities. Visit the website for the latest news on people who are working on—for example—the problem of recycling polyester or methods for using biomaterials to make leather alternatives and other fabrics.
“What Goes Around Comes Around”—the final Fashion for Good Museum exhibit—runs until June 5, 2024. After that, the lovely brick building and its light-filled rooms will evolve into an expanded co-working space and community, with the aim of fostering alliances and offering flexible spaces for new tenants. The founders and staff remain fully committed to driving sustainable change in fashion.
But!
If you can make it to Amsterdam before June 5, be sure to visit the museum. I guarantee that you will be enriched, inspired, and grateful.
For additional information, refer to previous One Earth Film Fest films on circular design and fast fashion: Closing the Loop, Going Circular, UseLess, River Blue, The True Cost, and the Young Filmmakers Contest winner Crime of Fashion.