Description
This paper explores how artistic interventions can subvert conventional notions of value within global garment supply chains, focusing on how artists and activists creatively repurpose waste to critique the dominance of fast fashion. In so doing, these practices reveal new possibilities for understanding value beyond buyer-driven commodity chains. Through examples of striking artistic interventions—such as transforming a clothing waste dump into a fashion runway—the paper demonstrates how waste can be reimagined and reclaimed, disrupting associations between fashion and the power of corporate control. These interventions not only highlight the environmental and social costs of fast fashion but also challenge the very production of waste, prompting a re-evaluation of what is considered valuable. The analysis draws upon feminist international political economy, which highlights the systemic devaluation and marginalisation of female labour and bodies, often cast aside as “waste” in the global economy. It also incorporates insights from feminist and queer studies of art and fashion, which explore how the reuse and repurposing of clothing resist conventional narratives of wasted lives and resources, and makes a wider contribution to discussions of resistance within studies of visual politics. Artistic and activist practices that repurpose discarded materials serve to reshape perceptions of value and agency, revealing value creation in fast fashion as a site of struggle - one that is marked by gendered contestations over the creation, and appropriation of value (and the power dynamics that reinforce them). Such interventions not only challenge the gendered and sexualised hierarchies embedded in global garment supply chains but also offer a vision for more sustainable and inclusive alternatives, inviting a discussion of how art as activism can disrupt capitalist logics of consumption and waste.
