Over the past couple of weeks, fashion HQs and high street shops across England have been visited by an 8ft tall zombie made from huge piles of discarded clothes. Silent and faceless, the zombie was on a mission to deliver letters to waste-making fashion brands asking them to share how many items of clothing they produce each year – a demand instigated by The Or Foundation as part of its Speak Volumes campaign, which is gaining momentum over the Black Friday period, the height of seasonal overconsumption.

The reception was varied. At Boohoo, security was called. Primark locked the doors. ASOS tried to pretend it wasn’t there at all. Hidden beneath the clothes, doing the legwork, was artist Jeremy Hutchison, embodying the “Dead White Man”. The zombie which unnerved fashion professionals up and down the country was one of a selection of wearable sculptures created as an exploration of the global trade in secondhand clothes or, as they’re called in Ghana, obroni wawu – Dead White Man’s Clothes. “I am performing myself, nobody else. I am a white male Western consumer. I have definitely inhabited and participated in this [issue],” the artist says. 

The body of work was first displayed in October at the British Textile Biennial in Blackburn where, static and carefully lit, the sculptures more closely resembled a traditional art exhibition. But when they’re knocking around Primark’s HQ or scaling the escalator at an M&S the work transforms from passive to active – you can’t walk away from something and forget about it when it comes to find you at work or follows you round the shops. And that’s the point. Playing on the fact that production volumes are fashion’s elephant in the room, the figure no one wants to release, Hutchison becomes the zombie in the room.

“I think we need a figure to attach our current feelings of helplessness to. I’m trying to trigger this sort of hysterical response, the feeling deep down that we know when we put our shit in trash bags and send it off to somewhere else, that it hasn’t disappeared,” says Hutchison. Kantamanto Market in Accra, Ghana, where The Or Foundation operates from, receives 15 million items of secondhand clothing every week. In 2021, over 900 million items of secondhand clothing were estimated to have been exported to Kenya. Senegal, the home to Colobane market where Hutchison sourced the pieces for his sculptures, receives an estimated 18,500 tonnes of used clothing imports each year. 

“I’m trying to trigger this sort of hysterical response, the feeling deep down that we know when we put our shit in trash bags and send it off to somewhere else, that it hasn’t disappeared” – Jeremy Hutchinson

The film that accompanies Dead White Man shows the zombie shuffling around Dakar, finding his way into a shipping container, then emerging in the Global North, wandering the shops, high streets and banks trying to reconnect with his roots. It’s a homecoming, for both the fictional zombie and the very real clothes it’s made from. They were exported by the Global North to become someone else’s problem, but now they’re back to confront the perpetrators. While shoppers and passersby were apparently intrigued, engaged, and keen to take photos (Hutchison quickly became a meme), the brands he visited tried their very best to act as if he simply didn’t exist, and that’s really where the problem lies.

Speak Volumes is part of a wider campaign called Stop Waste Colonialism which calls for EPR (extended producer responsibility) policies to be globally accountable and break the cycle of overproduction, overconsumption and outsourcing of social and environmental responsibility. A justice-led EPR program would, according to the Kantamanto community and The Or Foundation, be based upon three key principles: a per-garment fee for newly produced garments to fund waste management systems, the fair distribution of funds to account for the loss and damage caused by irresponsible exportation of waste to under-resourced communities, and the disclosure of production volumes along with production reduction targets of at least 40% over five years.

Hutchison’s hand-delivered letters and the wider Speak Volumes campaign deals with the latter principle. “When it comes to making informed decisions about the waste management of products and this hopeful transition to circularity, I would say the most important data point we need is how many garments exist right now. And I think it’s also really important for people to recognise that this is information that all brands have readily available,” says Liz Ricketts co-founder and Executive Director of the Or Foundation. “Reducing production volumes is the only way to effectively change our industry.”

With a particular eye on the brands whose garments turn up in the highest volumes during beach clean ups, Ricketts hoped for 100 brands to disclose their 2022 production volume figure – communicated in the number of items produced not by weight – by Black Friday. At the time of writing, 28 had responded, including Finisterre, Collina Strada, Buzigahill, and Osei Duro. No brand wants to be the first one, says Ricketts, so by encouraging a mass disclosure no one has to be. Adele Gingell, Head of Impact at Finisterre, which produced 450,643 pieces in 2022, says, “We believe in accountability and understand the importance of setting an industry standard… Disclosing our production volumes aligns with our core values, and this is our way of encouraging a broader conversation about responsible practices within the fashion industry. The fashion industry is broken and brands need to assume more responsibility by disclosing their influence in all aspects of the value chain.”

“The fashion industry is broken and brands need to assume more responsibility by disclosing their influence in all aspects of the value chain” – Adele Gingell

Alongside Hutchison’s efforts and The Or Foundation’s direct communication with brands, individuals have been enlisted to join in the efforts, either by emailing brands to ask for their disclosure or tagging them on social media. This form of individual participation is particularly important around Black Friday, Ricketts says, because people often identify more with being a consumer than a citizen. “I think it’s quite alarming to recognise that by the age of 12, the average person identifies more as a consumer than they do as a citizen. I always talk about Black Friday 2016, [when] more people in America shopped Black Friday weekend than voted in our presidential election,” she says. “But it’s not shameful… it points out how systems, over time, teach us to identify as consumers.”

In a world where this campaign succeeds, where more than 12% of brands disclose their production volumes, and that volume then reduces according to The Or Foundation’s target, some worry that will mean less profit therefore fewer jobs. Rickets disagrees. “There’s enough clothing on the planet that already will require so much labour and effort and talent to recirculate. And I would like to believe that lowering production volumes would only increase the value of sewing and the people who have that skill. You have upcyclers in Kantamanto making 100-150 items every day using a single waste stream that they have no control over. It’s incredibly inspiring and it proves that it’s possible,” she says. That’s a glimpse into a potential, hopeful future, but for now, brands need to make the first step, and The Or Foundation and its collaborators won’t be reducing the pressure once Black Friday has passed. The zombie will continue to haunt them.