Early this year there was a catastrophic fire at the world’s biggest market for selling and upcycling second-hand clothes. Kantamanto market, in Ghana’s capital Accra, was accidently set alight, and most of the small stalls in the retail part of the huge market burnt to the ground. Two people died, many were injured, and the livelihoods of thousands of people were destroyed, driving many of them into debt and desperation. But the impact of the fire spread much further than that.

You may not have heard of Kantamanto market, but it plays a vital role in dealing with our textile excess. This is where many of the clothes we donate to charity shops, goodwill centres, or put in textile bins end up. The West African market takes bales of clothing from all over the world and does its best to recycle them. But what can’t be used is dumped at informal waste sites or burned, causing mounting environmental problems in Accra’s streets and on Ghana’s beautiful beaches.

This episode of Haptic and Hue’s Tales of Textiles looks at the tragedy and the ingenuity of Kantamanto and tracks the global cost of fast fashion and textile excess. Will the demand for cheap textiles and clothing stop increasing year on year and can they ever be properly recycled? And what can we as consumers do about it?

For more information about this episode and pictures of the people and places mentioned in this episode please go to https://hapticandhue.com/tales-of-textiles-series-7/.

To join Friends of Haptic & Hue with an extra podcast every month hosted by Jo Andrews and Bill Taylor – here’s the link: https://hapticandhue.com/join/

Creativity and invention aren’t words often associated with hardship and suffering, but in the Second World War women in America and Britain faced with clothes rationing rose to the challenge in many different ways.

Those days are long past, but in an era of textile super-abundance, do clothes coupons have something new to teach us about how we buy and use our clothes? Can clothes rationing help cure us of an addiction to fast fashion? In this month’s episode, we hear from a well-known winner of the Great British Sewing Bee who has adopted the wartime system of coupons as a way of limiting her consumption of fabric and clothing.

Eighty years ago, Make Do and Mend became the watch-words of the day as people eked out their garments, repairing and re-making them over and over again. But clothes rationing in both countries also changed what people wore and hastened technological revolutions. In Britain many people had access to quality, well-styled clothing for the first time, and in America with luxury fibres scarce, man-made fibres entered the market much more quickly than they might otherwise have done.

For more information about this episode and pictures of the people and places mentioned in this episode please go to https://hapticandhue.com/tales-of-textiles-series-7/.

And if you would like to find out about Friends of Haptic & Hue with an extra podcast every month hosted by Jo Andrews and Bill Taylor – here’s the link: https://hapticandhue.com/join/

There’s a fashion technique that’s been in continuous use for over five thousand years – proof, if proof is needed, that there is nothing new in fashion. We have tunics that survive from the time of the Pharaohs in Egypt that use it and you can see it still in the catwalk collections of today.

It’s incredible to think that the simple pleat has pleased the human eye for so long and in so many different ways. Pleating adds movement and life to garments and often signals wealth and abundance. Each culture has found its own way to use them, from the stitched smocks of early English farm workers to the glorious billowing dress Marilyn Munroe wore above the subway grating in the 1950s.

This episode tells the story of the pleats on the world’s oldest surviving garment, hears from an expert modern pleater in New York, and tries to unravel the mystery behind one of the world’s most famous pleated garments.

For more information about this episode and pictures of the people and places mentioned in this episode please go to https://hapticandhue.com/tales-of-textiles-series-7/. And if you would like to find out about Friends of Haptic & Hue with an extra podcast every month hosted by Jo Andrews and Bill Taylor – here’s the link: https://hapticandhue.com/join/