BBC reports on e-waste dumping in Ghana. It’s a good overview of the problem: Western countries avoid bans on exporting dead computers (and their toxic contents) by shipping them abroad off as “usable second-hand goods” — much worse as this can be a tax write-off. An expert estimates 90% of the computers shipped to Africa are “just junk.” More from Treehugger’s Simran Sethi on HuffPost.
Now online: The Afterlife of American Clothes, my article on Secondhand (Pepe) and the Haitian used clothing trade in the new issue of Reason magazine. Here’s my interview with the filmmakers discussing this incredible business. And there’s more on Jezebel.
Our Past is Haiti’s Present: An Interview with “Secondhand (Pepe)” filmmakers Hanna Rose Shell and Vanessa Bertozzi
Pepe in Haiti. Images used with permission.
In the 1960s, as part of an international aid program, the US started shipping huge loads of secondhand goods to Haiti. Many older Haitians still refer to their secondhand clothes as “wearing kennedy,” a nod to the president at the time. Another word commonly used to describe these goods is “pepe.” Preachers were said to cry Paix! Paix! (”Peace! Peace!”) to calm down the excited crowds awaiting new loads of items to sort through.
Today, anyone in the Miami, NYC, and Boston areas — cities with large Haitian immigrant populations — is likely to run into someone at a flea market or thrift store collecting goods to take home to Port-au-Prince. Secondhand (Pepe) (clip) is a short documentary showing this remarkable trade in goods, as it explains the history of secondhand clothing in our country. Filmmakers Hanna Rose Shell, a Ph.D. in the History of Science at Harvard, and Vanessa Bertozzi, a graduate of MIT’s Comparative Media Studies program, who now works at Etsy, were curious about the tradition of secondhand clothing. From 2003 - 2007 they visited ragyards in Miami, went through archives in London and Washington DC, and traveled to Haiti to see the pepe markets for themselves.
Shell says Haitians sometimes dress better than Americans because they are used to tailoring their secondhand clothes to fit. While the pepe market makes it difficult for Haitian tailors to sell their own designs or traditional fashions; the cheap cost means, as one woman in the documentary explains, they can “adopt the look that is on television without much effort.” Shell describes the country in an essay in Transition as completely absent of traditional retail, “interiors lie vacant, transformed into makeshift dwellings or pepe depots. Chain stores and standard clothing outlets dot only the poshest streets of Petionville. Whereas McDonalds, Walmart, and American banks have invaded other Caribbean and Latin American countries, Haiti operates at the level of the individual seller and transaction.”
The US has a long complicated history imposing trade embargoes on Haiti, but we never ceased shipping secondhand goods. With the benefit of cheap items, comes the cost of serving as a dumping ground. Shell describes the city of Miragoane, which receives shipments of pepe nearly every day, as “blanketed, literally, by a downy coat of secondhand clothing. It grows out of the ground and into the street, onto every surface, a sartorial network — buildings, barrows, man and machine-made structures, everywhere. Each unsold piece is full of memory and possibility, the ghosts of its previous wearers and the portents of its future ones sharing the same textile skin.”
Secondhand (Pepe) is also a creative film with innovative collage-like usage of archival images and footage. (Shell and Bertozzzi also have Flickr sites with more images.) You can purchase a copy of the documentary on Etsy. Over email I asked the filmmakers about their experience making the documentary.
How did you first find out about the secondhand (”pepe”) clothing market?
We became interested in the stories of secondhand clothing when we were college students together in the late 1990s. We went to thrift stores and began to talk about where the clothes came from – and think about the different stories they would have, depending on who bought them – and where they traveled. In 2002, an article in the New York Times Magazine, discussed the international trade in secondhand clothing and after reading it, we decided to make a film on the subject.
We were living in Boston at the time and started going to secondhand stores where we met many immigrants involved in collecting secondhand clothing for shipment to their home countries. We were particularly struck by the stories of many of the Haitian immigrants we met during our first days of interviewing and shooting, and went to the pier in East Boston where clothes were shipped to Saint Marc. We set out to follow the story of the clothing they purchased – pepe –as it made its way overseas. From there, we got increasingly interested in the history of the secondhand clothing business, and the way it has been shaped by, and shaped, the diasporic experiences of a diversity of immigrant communities in North America.
Who delivers the goods to Haiti? Is it only coming from the US?
There are all sorts of ways and means for pepe to arrive in Haiti. Sometimes individuals in Boston, Miami or New York fill containers, or old cars, with clothes and put them onto boats destined for the port cities of Port-au-Prince, Miragoane or Saint Marc. Other times, people fill up bags with old clothes that they transport on the airplane when they return home to visit friends or families. Small scale pepe business people, might buy a whole bale at a warehouse in Florida and have it shipped over, where it would be received at the port by a business associate. Our sense is that most of it is coming from the United States these days – though some from Canada and France as well.
What does pepe mean?
That’s a good question. The complexity of what pepe means is what motivated us to make the film. It can mean all sorts of things and can at different times have the sense of a noun, a metaphor, an adjective, and an identity. Some of the connotations include: old clothes; free cloth; foreign goods that have already been used.
What sort of things can you get?
Everything.
A woman in the documentary mentioned some Haitians have spiritual apprehension toward wearing someone’s old clothes. Did you meet anyone who felt this way?
Yes we did – old clothes might well carry the spirits of their previous owners and people have many ideas about how to clean, or purify clothes –lemon juice, vinegar, dry cleaning and so on.
Have most Haitians learned to sew or is there a market for tailors?
We saw and spoke with many tailors advertising their services, though perhaps not as many as in years past. The tailors that we spoke with had a difficult time selling their original designs and traditional Haitian clothing. They were working altering pepe.
What other kind of jobs has the secondhand market created?
Sorting, storing, transport, as well as multiple stages of sale, re-sale and re-re-sale. However all this has to be seen in relation to the jobs that have been lost.
Did they really use clothes as currency at one point?
In a sense. . . but we wouldn’t say “as currency” - more like “in the place of currency.” When the paper or coin currency of a nation is unstable and in short supply, it is not uncommon for a good (and often a relatively plentiful good) to take the place of currency - via a kind of generalized barter.
Film screening at Garment District in Cambridge, Ma.
Are there controls in place to keep people from sending over real junk, such as inoperable gadgets or stained items? Do they recycle unwanted things?
As far as we could tell, there was a lot of “junk” being sent over. Even pepe cars marked “no brakes” on their windshields. However, appliances or cars might be used for their parts. Stained clothing might be used as rags or upholstery stuffing. Haitians are very resourceful in ad-hoc engineering and repurposing. That said, we did see an incredible amount of trash and pollution. It was hard to tell whether this was due to the lack of sanitation services or the flood of discarded pepe.
What does the pepe market look like?
First off, we should note that you can find pepe for sale on pretty much any street in Haiti. It seemed as though pepe lined the sidewalks with small-time vendors selling a few things by hanging them up on the walls by the sidewalk. Then we also visited all types of dedicated marketplaces. Some were very concentrated with just clothing, and these were often by the ports, where the clothing would arrive. Sometimes the pepe would be sold within larger markets where you could also find food and other goods. Sometimes the clothing was sorted into different areas or by peddler’s specialty — you would have the used shoe guy over here and the lady that only sold t-shirts over there.
In one of the largest markets in Miragoane, just outside of the gates of the port, in the central town square — you had people opening up boxes and making preliminary sortings. In the Saline marketplace in Port-au-Prince, there was an incredible expanse of peddler/tailors set up with sewing machines, sitting among mounds of clothing, under tents sewn together from fabric scraps and old blankets. It gave us a very visceral sense of the flow of goods and the ways in which they were being altered.
“Retro is all about ownership, solidity and lastingness, of having some concrete possessions in an increasingly virtual world. Inured to on-screen digital images, the theory goes, we (and our teenager offspring) yearn for three-dimensional stuff you can hold in your hand rather than access by remote control, through a Wii console.” - John Walsh
Rip Mix Stitch: Free Fashion Culture
What would happen if the Gossip Girl cast were to design an ARG? It might turn out like middlebrow-luxury handbag house Coach’s college outreach campaign. It starts with a fictional girl who lost her Coach bag, complete with a fake myspace page, fake facebook, and fake blog!
Visitors to the blog (encounterheidi.blogspot. com), which drew more than 15,000 hits after the posters went up, learned that the bag was a gift from an ex-boyfriend serving in Iraq.
One day, Cee blogged that another student had returned the bag. A day later, she wrote that on closer inspection, the bag was a fake and she had been scammed for the reward.
Outraged (”EFFING COUNTERFEIT!” she wrote), Cee blogged that she was researching the world of counterfeit goods. She discovered, she wrote, that they’re linked to criminal activity, child labor and terrorism. She even posted a video to YouTube about counterfeiting, “Break the Chain,” and organized an anti-counterfeiting event on campus that drew a crowd with free food and T-shirts.
But here’s the thing about Cee: She’s fake, too. A public relations class at Hunter invented her last spring. The course was funded by a $10,000 grant from Coach and was part of a college outreach campaign by the International AntiCounterfeiting Coalition (IACC), a trade group that includes Coach and other brands like Apple, Levi Strauss & Co., Louis Vuitton and Rolex.
But it gets dirtier. This is the work of a teacher and class at Hunter College.
A well-known sculptor in the 90s painted fast food containers with the Louis Vuitton monogram. I can’t remember who it was but if I could, this right here would be an insightful paragraph comparing his art with Takashi Murakami’s Louis Vuitton store at the Brooklyn Museum, with some added remarks on how and why the times have changed.
Since then, Adbusters and street artists have expanded on the concept. Now Gallery 1988 in Los Angeles (via) has a solo show for Peter Gronquist with designer labels on everything from chainsaws to electric chairs:
A writer from Jezebel once sewed designer labels in lower-priced clothes and asked for offers from consignment shops.
The Final Tally:
- H&M dress (original price, $39.99) masquerading as Isaac Mizrahi: 2 for 3, with highest offers of $130 and $190.
- Club Monaco jacket (original price, $199) masquerading as Richard Tyler: 2 for 3, with offers of $90 and $110.
- Club Monaco skirt ($129) masquerading as Donna Karan: 2 for 3, with offers of $78 and $135.
- Club Monaco sweater ($99) masquerading as Calvin Klein: 1 for 3, with offer of $50.
Ours is the first generation that truly defines itself by brands, as Rob Walker’s new book “Buying In” explains. But reputation alone doesn’t explain it, nor does personal identification with the product marketing. When it comes to luxury goods, there has to be some added magic to the product. That’s why no matter how many counterfeits flood the market, Louis Vuitton can command a high price.
In “Deluxe: How Luxury Lost Its Luster,” Dana Thomas reports 40 percent of all Japanese own a Louis Vuitton-monogramed item. Her book is nostalgic for the days when high-end good meant quality, patiently crafted items that might last a lifetime. As LVMH changed hands, their standards declined. Meanwhile, expensive seemed attainable to those without qualms carrying credit card debt. Veronica Horwell writes in a review, “significant percentages of the global population have caught, or been taught, the mad idea that they can acquire the signifier of modernity, immunity, celebrity, identity - Thomas can’t or won’t define what the fantasy they’re after is - for the price of a Prada bag, or failing that, a Gucci wallet.”
Notice no one really pokes fun at Hermès, as they do Gucci, Prada, and LV. Although they charge twice more than Gucci and Louis Vuitton combined ($38,000,) there is no branding and no advertising to the masses. Unless you are in a select tax-bracket, a Birkin bag is understood to be impossibly out of reach. Writes Globe and mail’s Leah McLaren:
Earlier this year, I had my first-ever celebrity-bag sighting. I was eating lunch alone at an overpriced hotel when a cosmetically altered matron of indeterminate years pulled up a stool beside me, ordered a $22 glass of champagne and placed her black crocodile Birkin bag on the bar for all to see.
I couldn’t help staring and she didn’t seem to mind. No one spends $40,000 on a purse to hide it, after all. Sure, I’d clamped eyes on a few Birkins before (in the window of Hermès, on the arms of fashion editors at the shows in Milan and Paris), but this was my first sighting in the wild.
She’s reviewing Michael Tonello’s new book about getting rich off of buying and returning Birkin bags. How is that possible? you might wonder. Well, you can get some pocket change, as I have in the past, buying broken designer bags, taking them to tailors, and selling them. Ebay facilities so many new ways of commerce.
One Ebay, you can even buy a fake “vintage” bag. A few years ago, I came across the sort of deal one can only find via internet auction. Stuffed in a trunk “lot” full of some now-deceased grandmother’s treasures, was a vintage Gucci handbag, unmarked in the title by the seller, worth about $200. So I placed a bid for far less than that, planning to resell it and make a tiny profit. When the bag arrived and looked like it couldn’t be older than the age of the sweatshop workers in whichever third-world country it came from. I donated it to salvation army.
The irony is my fake is in far better condition than a real vintage would be. It has no scratches or damages; but feels dead in my hands. Why do I like vintage in the first place but for the totemism; the feeling that I am participating in the history of an object. The other irony is that Gucci’s quality has declined over the years. The material they use is easy to replicate, they have long since abandoned the sturdy canvas that made their items lovely. Yet, the prices are still the same.
For sale at the Brooklyn Museum.
Right now monogram-bag makers fight counterfeits for trademark infringement or dilution. But the Design Piracy Prohibition Act (pending in the Senate) offers stricter standards. Designers may register their clothes with the U.S. Copyright Office for about $100 each. The law would protect the patterns for three years.
“Fashion will become very boring if this legislation passes,” Omid Moradi of sometimes knockoff-er Faviana, tells Fortune, “All this will do is create a backlog of lawsuits - the only ones who will win are the lawyers.”
“[Pattern marking is] a craft, not an art. There is only so much you can do with a silhouette, a collar, a drape.” Ilse Metchek, executive director of the California Fashion Association, told the LA Times. “This act is a double-edge sword, because designers think they’re going to be able to protect themselves from knock-off artists, but they are going to have to make absolutely sure there is pure, unadulterated originality in everything they do…Wouldn’t anyone run afoul of things eventually?” says Ivan Arnold, co-owner of LA-based Tokitoki.
It is a particularly dumb move by one industry that is still doing well in this economy. Tech Dirt explains fashion thrives because of lack of IP protection.:
Fashion is a trend industry. You need a trend to make something popular and the only real way to get a trend is when designers are copying each other. Without that ability trends don’t show up, and the demand for the latest “trend” dries up. On top of that, having copycat designs on the lower end actually act as a “signal” that a high-end designer is on to something. It helps prop up the price of those name-brand designs, while making similar copycat designs more affordable to a lower end of the market that would never buy the high end designers. It’s both a way of establishing a larger market and doing price discrimination.
For another example of this read Daniel Pink’s cover story in Wired a few months back about the fan market for Manga.
Currently designers have the option of filing for patents, but there are ways of outwitting copycats without getting lawyers involved:
Meanwhile, some labels are trying to outmaneuver the pirates. Copycat designs often show up in stores within weeks of a fashion show, while the authentic clothes don’t arrive for months. Halston, which is owned by movie mogul Harvey Weinstein, is one of those pushing to make its catwalk fashions available right away, on the online retail site Net-a-Porter.com, in hopes that shoppers will choose immediate gratification over price savings.Weitzman and others are making some of their couture designs a little more haute so pirates can’t rip them off at all. For his spring collection, Weitzman created unusually shaped heels for a $299 shoe called the Bowden-Wedge. He is also experimenting with materials such as titanium and steel, which he says are too expensive for the knockoff artists. If they try something cheaper, like painted wood, the heels will snap. “I used to make whimsical and outrageous shoes for display only,” Weitzman says. “For the first time, they’re becoming part of sellable footwear.”
But why stop at fashion? Might Marianne Faithful come along and request I grow my bangs out? Maybe Nicole Kidman could protect plastic surgeons from copying her most-requested nose. For all the talk of our celebrity (and spawn)-obsessed culture, I am delighted to see Baby Jolie isn’t even first page Google result for “shiloh”. Nevertheless, her babymama (unsuccessfully) sued a perfumer for using a name that happened to be the same as her child’s.
Previously:
Related links:
- Counterfeit Chic
- The Piracy Paradox, The New Yorker
- “Bag Man,” The New Yorker
- Louis Vuitton Sues Darfur Fundraiser for Copyright Infringement, Techdirt
- “Put a Patent on that Pleat” BusinessWeek
- Louis Vuitton Malletier S.A. v. Haute Diggity Dog (Chewy Vuitton) Law.com
- Diddo Velema’s Gucci gas masks
- “Buying in” by Rob Walker
- “Deluxe” by Dana Thomas
- Bringing Home The Birkin: My Life in Pursuit of the World’s Most Coveted Handbag by Michael Tanello
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