the neighbourhood thrift

by yağmur oğuz and fanny sachet

The neighbourhood thrift was a project launched by my best friend Yağmur and I for a few years that fed our souls and gave us a creative expression all while doing something we really believed in. In the midst of the first wave of covid lock down, we both set out to teach ourselves to sew after realizing that the heaps of old clothes and textiles we owned could be given a new life if only we had this one skill and a creative vision. In March of 2020, we had started a platform for our newly online 12 grade social justice class to discuss the issues of fast fashion, textile waste, and the concerning consumerist norms growing in our society. It was a topic that had resonated with both of us for many years  and one which we would often find ourselves coming back to in conversations. 

After some reinvention, lock-down and lots of sewing practice, this platform turned into a deep creative practice and community-building space. Our first call-out for unwanted fabrics was a considerable success. People in our local community dropped off curtains, tablecloths, clothes and bedsheets, trusting that we would turn them into something useful. We found making tote bags to be the best intersection between practicality and use of the fabrics, and for us it was fun—it gave us unrestricted room to experiment. I got to work on my dad’s old jeans and yağmur on an unworn skirt. Soon we were selling them on our page and each month finding a new organization to donate a portion of the revenue too. We had also been reselling some of our clothes without modifying them, if we believed they could be loved again by people close in our community. We later started accepting clothes from others after learning that 80 to 90% of donated clothing isn’t being resold in Canada due to the influx of donations to thrift stores. Most of it is sorted and shipped to the Global South, suppressing struggling textile industries and dumping our waste into their landfills. We considered it worthwhile to try and keep the cycle local. 

A year later we had a website up and running reselling clothes, our original tote bag designs, and publishing blog articles about the organizations we were donating to and things we found important to share in regard to the reason behind our initiative. We began collaborating with local artists to print their designs on our totes and participated in local Vancouver markets with other small business vendors. My move to Montreal has halted the project for the past 2 years, but if it is fully over is not a certainty. Previously we had hoped to turn the neighbourhood thrift to the neighbourhood collective and have a more holistic space to celebrate the creativity of those around us along with the retention of our social missions :~) Regardless, today we reflect on this period of time where we were able to create to sacred space and are filled with gratitude for what it was.

✴︎ Gallery–