Barcelona:
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This week’s garment-related brain food:
Label Lingo: Everything You Need to Know about Synthetic Fabrics – fiber info keeps trickling in, here’s a bit on synthetics suggesting you look for recycled synthetics.
Where many of the clothes you throw away end up (Hat tip to my friend My Lan for this one!) – describes a large scale garment downcycling operation in Panipat, India. The most curious thing about this article is that the tone suggests an appalled reporter while in the big scale of things this isn’t even that bad. While labor intensive, the “shoddy” fabric made by these textile mills is still a reasonable use of “mutilated” (i.e. unsalable in any part of the world) garments compared with slowly rotting at a landfill + it allows mixing of fibers + the end product is a demanded one.
UN Comtrade Analytics – allows you follow commodity import/export routes, quantities and fluctuations. In this case the commodities of interest are “Textile fibers”. You get to play around and explore fun graphs like the following, telling you that cotton dominates the fiber market and that “textile fibers – worn clothing” travel from North to South (and also inside Europe, my guess that this is mostly Western – EU Eastern Europe second-hand shuffle):
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Are you getting bored with your summer stuff already? Have sundresses become the uniform? Do you dream of chilly weather that would permit layers, scarves and all other cozy things?