“Hey, those are my pants,” I said to my cousin I met for the first time, on my family’s trip to Haiti.  My mom hushed me, and I was reminded later that day that we have family members less fortunate than we are. From then on, I realized why we were storing my discarded clothing in the giant white trash bags. It soon became my mission to send my unwanted clothes to Haiti. I gathered outfits that no longer fit, torn, or I just simply didn’t like them anymore, while I was confident I could always get something new in its place. I was encouraged by community groups, news stories, and commercials that would show pictures of starving naked children who were desperate for my clothing.

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This held true until my last trip to Haiti, when one afternoon, I was driving by a mile-long pile of clothing on the street. I heard stories of how corrupt our garment industry was prior to my trip.  I had learned about how garment factories oversees are exploiting their workers for cheap labor under unsafe working conditions.  I had watched a documentary on how westerners are buying and donating at such a fast rate, that the donations have been piling up into a landfill in Haiti, then turned toxic. The facts did not seem real up until that afternoon. Reality had hit.  I made my trash, someone else’s problem.   It was at that moment that I realized I wasn’t helping at all.  I started to make a direct connection between the west’s colonization of Haiti, which was something that seemed to be so embedded into history. The idea that the we proudly subject a group of people to our trash, that we historically mistreated, proved to be a form of racism.  A dark cloud appeared above the commercial from my childhood.  How could fashion be so irresponsible?

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Since, I have been trying to recreate the system.  My cycle begins,  by rescuing discarded clothing from thrift stores, donation bins, hammy downs, and textiles waste of my own.  I shred them into yarn, and unite them together by color. Then I give them new life by weaving them into new garments.  At the end of their life, they orbit back so a new cloth could be born.  I am allowing my garments to enter a cycle of reincarnation, and redefining the what gets treated like, “trash.”