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The afterlife of American Clothing
Topic Started: Tue Dec 10, 2013 1:11 pm (142 Views)
wissaboo
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I already knew that clothes not sold at charities were sent to 3rd world countries but still found this fascinating how a whole industry had grown around it. Wonder if that was really the same shirt the guy came accross.

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The Afterlife Of American Clothes

Jeff Steinberg had a maroon and white lacrosse jersey that he wore for years. It said "Denver Lacrosse" on the front and had his number, 5, on the back.

Then, one day, he cleaned out his closet and took the shirt to a Goodwill store in Miami. He figured that was the end of it. But some months after that, Steinberg found himself in Sierra Leone for work. He was walking down the street, and he saw a guy selling ice cream and cold drinks, wearing a Denver Lacrosse jersey.

"I thought, 'Wow, this is pretty crazy,' " Steinberg says. Then he looked at the back of the shirt — and saw the number 5. His number. Steinberg tried to talk to the guy about the shirt, but he didn't speak much English and they couldn't really communicate.


"I spent a lot of time thinking about that over the following days," Steinberg says. "It was just beyond me how it could have gotten there."

It turns out the epic voyage of Steinberg's jersey — from a used clothes bin in the U.S. to sub-Saharan Africa — is actually really common. Lots of U.S. shirts (including, it seems safe to say, lots of Planet Money T-shirts) will eventually make the trip.
A T-shirt for sale at Gikombo Market in Nairobi, Kenya. The shirt reads "Local Pro's Indoor Ball Hockey St. Catharines."

Charities like Goodwill sell or give away some of the used clothes they get. But a lot of the clothes get sold, packed in bales and sent across the ocean in a container ship. The U.S. exports over a billion pounds of used clothing every year — and much of that winds up in used clothing markets in sub-Saharan Africa.

We recently visited the giant Gikombo Market in central Nairobi. There's a whole section for denim, and another for bras. We, of course, headed for the street of T-shirts, where vendors lay out their wares on horse carts. The shirts have been washed, ironed and carefully folded. It's more like Gap than Goodwill — if Gap had a very strange product line.

Just to pick at random from one cart: There's a fundraising T-shirt for a cancer charity, a shirt from a weightlifting competition in southern Montana and a shirt marking "Jennifer's Bat Mitzvah" in November 1993.
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Margaret Wanjiku, a T-shirt vendor from western Kenya, has come to this market to restock her supply. What's written on the T-shirt is often not that important to her customers, she says. She's looking more at the condition of the shirt — the "smartness."

Like many vendors here, Wanjiku stays away from shirts that are extra-large, because those are too big for almost all of her customers. But there is at least one guy in Nairobi looking for extra-large shirts.

Francis Mungai cuts up XL shirts with scissors and, working with a seamstress, turns them into slimmer, smaller shirts.

One recent day he bought an extra-large Motorhead shirt and, in a few minutes, turned it into a slim, custom shirt with a blue collar and canary-yellow sleeves. The Motorhead shirt was imported to Kenya for 15 cents. It was resold and sold again for 45 cents. Then someone got 12 cents to cut it up, 18 cents to tailor it and 14 cents to wash and iron the shirt. Then a vendor bought it for $1.20, with plans to sell it for $2 to $3.



http://www.npr.org/blogs/money/2013/12/10/247362140/the-afterlife-of-american-clothes
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Alisium
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Interesting.

I don't know if it's a new thing or a regional phenomenon, but there are a lot of consignment stores around here. Very popular. My wife likes to go to them to buy clothes, as they are very affordable and in great condition usually. But, she won't go to a goodwill because of that universal smell.

Anyhow, I think it's cool that they get reused and people aren't too good to buy used. ('cept me, because that's who I was clothed as a youngster).
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wissaboo
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I love thrift shops.
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AWOLangel
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i can't to to goodwill any more because i'm allergic to the stuff
they spray on the clothes now. :wissa:

and in general, they're more expensive than the salvation army thrift store.
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stigmata
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Second hand clothes are all the rage around here these days. Call them 'vintage' and you can charge more as well.

I'm wearing a 'vintage' Christmas jumper at this very minute
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