Dumpster Values
Photo Series & Essay
By Robin Stein
The adage of one person’s trash being another person’s treasure seems woefully trite when it comes to thinking about our contemporary relationship to clothing and fashion. Vintage, thrifting, upcycling, and retro references are the mainstream of what fashion is these days. Perhaps this makes the distinction between trash and treasure a line so blurry that this binary is nullified.
Let me share my train of thought:
Friends who are pickers say that we have passed “peak vintage.” Thrift stores and Goodwill bins are saturated with fast fashion. The supply of WWII bomber jackets and polyester wranglers just couldn't keep up to refill the system. What is considered vintage first shifted to incorporate Esprit and Guess of the 90’s, then Old Navy from the early 2000’s. Soon will it just be Shein, Forever 21 and Zara?
Growing up in the nineties, thrifting clothes felt a bit like a transgressive notion, even a radical act. In discarded clothes, an identity and culture developed. But what was the choice to wear vintage and thrifted clothes saying? Was it simply nostalgia, an association with a cooler past? Or was it contrarian? A signifier of being outside the mainstream by deliberately wearing clothes that are not currently fashionable.
And here we are in the 2020’s, with a few decades behind us of high-fashion houses running on the rehash, the throwback, the homage and the rearward reference reclaimed for this moment. In turn, fast fashion brands make a quick rip on what just came down the runway, pumping out garments heading to the Goodwill bins in no time. Are we just seeing an accelerating cycle of trends and clothing tightening into a quickening retro-ouroboros, where what-is-trash and what-is-fashion become no longer discernible?
Yet amidst this, there is another layer of fashion that seems missing. If we dismiss trends and style, what of the garments we have that are inscribed and embedded with experience, memory and meaning? These are the clothes we’ve worn to their threadbare limits. These are the gifts, the flea market-finds, the shirt-stolen-from-your-ex or a favorite pair of sweatpants. When these items are tattered and at the end of their functional life, the decision to designate them as items to be donated, let alone trash is by no means trivial.
I present to you on the following pages a selection of my own treasured fashions, each of which could arguably be considered another person’s trash.
My father was done with these duck boots. I adopted them initially as a quick garden clog. With the laces pulled they were easy to slip into and adept at braving the muck to snag some garden herbs for dinner. I’m swimming in them, my size 9 feet feeling eternally childlike in his size 11.
With the rubber deteriorating and the interior shearling worn through, they are surprisingly versatile, despite being questionable when it comes to their functionality. Now they are a shoe for the beach or the canoe, a quick run to take the trash out or check the mail. Both clownish and childlike they conjure a familiar (and hopelessly cliched) sensation of childhood, clomping around in your parent’s oversized shoes.
There was a period of time in Seattle during the mid-aughts when there was a wealth of items to be reclaimed from dumpsters around town. The bakery that would load a dedicated dumpster full of bagged loaves of day-old bread was a unique nexus for all types of people to cross paths: bike commuters coming from their downtown office jobs, college kids, and the unique type of Pacific-Northwest punks that embody a spirit of queer-anarcho-eco resourcefulness that has a distinctly optimistic and autonomous bent. Surprisingly, you’d often see these kids swathed in the finest Filson waxed canvas — reimagined as patches repairing the crotch of old Carhartt’s or crafted into a trim vest, backpack, or cap.
In the industrial zone overshadowed by the looming towers of downtown Seattle, there was a dumpster behind the Filson factory. This dumpster was dripping with scraps of heavy-weight flannel, perforated into geometric tangles by the die cutter, and waxed canvas discarded because of a simple tear or misapplied glob of wax.
I’ve carried these particular scraps with me for years – often used for patching a bag or jacket, with a surplus always held aside for that unrealized waxed canvas jacket I’ll make for myself one day.
This shirt accompanied me on countless days of hiking in The Sierra Nevada, The White Mountains of California, The Cascades, The Olympics of Washington State and The Wind River Range in Wyoming. Now thin and tattered; the chest and shoulders have been bleached into a biomorphic photogram by time, sweat and sun.
In 2000 I tagged along on a tour with my friend’s band that was playing shows up and down The West Coast. In Los Angeles, our crew of tattered road-weary teenage weirdos cruised into the Miu Miu boutique on Melrose where I picked up these boots.
Around that time I had recently watched Quadrophenia and started listening to The Jam, and I had been inspired by the Mod ideal that deliberate attention to style could have a counter-cultural significance. This felt particularly resonant as a teenager amongst the convenient flannel, fleece and Gore-Tex of late nineties Seattle.
The lore in my family holds that my great-grandfather, a garment worker in Chicago, could cut patterns freehand from memory. Whether this was simply from repetition or some innate sense of how a sheet of fabric can gracefully transform into three dimensions is now lost to the legend.
I’ve always been resistant to a precise approach to making garments. My process usually is a dive into the deep end with faith that a familial endowment of pattern cutting intuition will carry me through.
Admittedly, it’s often more of a guess-and-check process.
A couple years back, I had come across several yards of a nice 14oz. cotton duck at a garage sale. Feeling bold, I decided to go for my first attempt at a classic five pocket pair of shorts with a button-fly. I started by carefully examining the construction of the work pants that I wore most days. Over the course of an afternoon I cut panels for the legs and then meticulously assembled the front pockets and a reasonably neat button fly. Confident and impressed with myself, I was eager to see how they fit. I quickly sewed up the inseam and then the outseam on one side. Pulling them inside out I realized there was no reasonable expectation that I would ever squeeze a leg into the narrow unyielding tube of cotton duck I had made.
This is the family camera bag. My father and grandfather carried their SLR cameras with extra lenses on trips through Europe and Africa. In high school I picked it out from the basement and it carried my point-and-shoot, weed and cigarettes.