The Wall of Clothes Labels

On Friday 24th April 2015 we cut over 500 labels from London, in memory of those who died two years ago at the largest industrial disaster in history, at the Rana Plaza garment factory in Bangladesh. It was inspiring to lead such a project which demonstrated how much impact each one of us can make in this challenge to cut out fashion’s unethical practices.

On the morning of the 24th we started asking students from around London to cut their clothes labels. At Central Saint Martins they managed to get over 300 students to cut their labels, and even took the campaign to the Tube!

In the afternoon I headed over to The Cube to start constructing our wall. The Cube kindly let us use their space for our wall in the name of Fashion Revolution Day! We had these huge chalk boards to work with, so I started drawing grid style lines which we could use to ‘box’ in the labels.

As I was sticking the labels on, it was amazing to see just how many displayed ‘Made in Bangladesh’. In fact, this was quite hard to imagine. I always find it hard to place yourself in Bangladesh when you have no idea where Bangladesh is or what it looks like. To me these labels saying ‘Made in Bangladesh’ mean seemingly nothing. So we decided to draw up a map on the other board, and let people stick their label on depending where it said their clothing was made.

We found it a really effective way to make us think just how far our clothes had travelled on their journey to our wardrobes. Not surprisingly there was an over-crowding of labels in China. Then a film crew arrived, wanting to get a first look at the wall coming together, they’re making a very cool documentary on sustainable fashion.

Many more people started arriving who had heard about the event through the FRD website.

A special shout-out must go to these two girls, who collected an incredible amount of labels, and without their help and enthusiasm preparing for the big day none of this would have been possible! (Chiara and Margherita)

Basically the whole project ended up being a whole lot of fun! To think that a little idea I came up with 3 weeks beforehand turned out to impact so many people….was truly inspiring. We were able to collect over 500 labels….just one seemingly irrelevant label when combined with many others created something quite beautiful. This goes to demonstrate the seemingly small impact each one of us can have!

To think that each of those labels we collected represented just 500 of the lives that were sacrificed at the largest industrial disaster in history. 1133 people died at Rana Plaza, so next time (with a little bit more time to prepare!), lets get closer to that target 1133 labels. NEXT YEAR LETS MAKE THIS EVEN BIGGER AND BETTER.

A HUGE Thank You to everyone who cut their labels, supported the cause and came along on the evening!!

More photos of people cutting out their labels can be seen here on the Facebook event page….including a cheeky Jack Whitehall!