Oxfam meeting

Today we met with Niel James from Oxfam. He explained Oxfam as a company and their worldwide mission to provide aid. The bigger picture and worldwide scale of this company appealed to me and the idea of working with them seemed rewarding. The speech was short and sweet and the general brief was to reuse clothing which had been donated to create sale-able items. He explained the donation and filter technique of good and poor quality clothes. I asked him what happened to clothes that were not in a good enough condition to sell and he told me they were sent to other branches of Oxfam or other companies who can recycle the material. He explained there were a wide variety of goods received from the public and most of these were handed to lower branches. The branch we visited today was classed as a boutique and sold higher quality goods. Niel explained most of the staff were volunteers. He explained that he would like for us to find a use for clothing which was possibly stained or ripped. A good opportunity to show what we made or to just visit was the Oxfam fashion show event hosted by Bath Uni students.

From the meeting today I don't think there is a lot of scope to what you can do and you need to be confident in fashion and tailoring clothes. Some ideas I came up with were to reuse buttons and zips from items of a poor quality to repair or redesign damaged items of a higher quality. I thought I could create a sculpture or piece of artwork from poor materials and zips and buttons taken from old clothing. I also thought that if the clothes were to poor to reuse they could be given to the homeless.