I spent Saturday volunteering at a clothing reuse project on the Lower East Side, in a basement off Orchard Street that smells like cardboard and other people's lives.
My actual job is in fashion, styling and studio work, which means my whole week is about making things look aspirational. Sorting donated clothes is the exact opposite and I think that's why I need it.
You can tell so much from a donation bag. There's the clean-out bag, folded neatly, tags still on, someone who overshopped and felt guilty. Fine, useful, boring.
Then there's the other kind. The bag that is clearly an entire wardrobe at once. Coats, everyday shirts, a single house slipper. That's a death. That's someone's daughter clearing a closet in Queens because she couldn't bear to keep doing it.
I held a woman's wool coat for a long time on Saturday. It had a folded MetroCard in the pocket and a smell of old perfume. I don't know her. I folded it like she was watching.
This is the part of sustainability nobody puts on the Instagram infographic. Sorting donated clothes isn't cute girlies thrifting on the LES. It's the sheer volume. We make too much. We throw away too much. The mountain does not stop.
In my day job I watch samples get made and unmade, whole racks tossed after one shoot. It quietly wrecks me. Then I come to this basement on Orchard Street and see where some of it lands, and where most of it doesn't.
The woman who runs the project, Denise, has been doing this for fifteen years. She says the goal isn't to save the planet in one afternoon. It's just to make sure one good coat finds one cold person. Scale down until it's human again.
I thought about my nani in Ahmedabad, who wore the same three saris for decades and repaired everything. She'd have thought this whole American mountain of clothes was a kind of madness. She'd be right.
We filled twelve bins. Twelve. In one Saturday. In one basement.
I took the F home exhausted and grateful and a little heartbroken, which is apparently my baseline emotional state now.
Buy less. Keep it longer. Someone folded it like it mattered.
Love,