Disentangling the complex threads of secondhand clothing's role
The apparel industry, in both the markets for new and secondhand clothing, has been undergoing major changes in recent decades, but now there are constantly new webs to untangle in an attempt to develop an informed understanding of how the vast apparel supply chain and its stakeholders do business, why we .
Though it is only a small piece of the puzzle, our project work in 2019 focuses on the unsustainable relationship between rampant overconsumption of apparel produced in a fast-paced, monster scale industry with supply chain nodes spanning the globe; and the increasingly mammoth secondhand clothing industry.
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The direct investigation into the topic of secondhand clothing will be carried out in Addis Ababa in the summer of 2019, and will study two themes.
1. The effect of second-hand clothing on domestic Ethiopian clothing / textile
manufacturing and commerce; specifically, at what production level and price point
would local industry would have to perform in order to not only be competitive, but also
to mitigate consumer dependency on the cheaper secondhand clothing, and vendors’
dependency on it for employment.
2. The insidious self-infliction of cultural imperialism of second-hand clothing, the idea that
used foreign product is superior to domestically-made clothing.
About Addis: Addis Ababa accounts for 25% of the Ethiopia's urban population; it contained 3.6 million people in 2013, estimate now is about 8 million, and is one of Africa's fastest growing cities with a projected population of 9.8 million in 2037 (WBG, 2015, pg. 25, 28-9). The economy had a 14% annual growth rate and a 50% contribution to national GDP as of 2015 (WBG, 2015, pg. 25). It will therefore necessarily play a major role in the nation's economic future, and I will seek to determine how the benefits of this role can be maximized, challenges approached, and pitfalls of other responses to this intervention avoided.
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