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Black Friday Clothing Zombie ‘Speaks Volumes’ About Overproduction in Fashion

The demonstration is part of the Or Foundation’s Speak Volumes campaign, a global initiative calling on fashion brands to declare their production volumes to help clean up the industry's waste crisis.

Published 1 day ago | About a 3 minute read

Image: The Or Foundation

A clothing zombie made of textile waste (conceived by British performance artist Jeremy Hutchison) appeared outside of Marks & Spencer’s Oxford Street store in London on Friday as a symbol of fashion overproduction. The demonstration — the second in a week to remind London’s holiday shoppers of the mountains of waste created by both Black Friday and our convenience-focused retail culture — was organized in support of environmental justice nonprofit The Or Foundation’s Speak Volumes campaign, a global initiative calling on fashion brands to declare their production volumes to help clean up fashion’s waste crisis.

On average, The Or Foundation — which operates in both the US and Ghana — removes 20 tons of secondhand clothing from Ghana’s Jamestown Beach every week and says M&S clothing is the brand most often washed up.

This isn’t the clothing zombie’s first appearance: Hutchison has suited up and paid visits to the corporate HQs of major fashion brands including adidas, Asos, boohoo, George, New Look, Primark and Puma — all among the top 20 brands showing up on Ghana’s beaches by volume; in September, he educated shoppers in New York City's Times Square and at New York Fashion Week about textile waste from Nike. In NYC and London, the silent, living sculpture was joined by fair fashion campaigner Venetia La Manna — who engaged shoppers in conversation about how fast fashion’s overproduction is wreaking havoc on both the planet and its people.

As Or Foundation co-founder and Executive Director Liz Ricketts explained in a post earlier this year, the millions of tons of textile waste exported every year from Western countries has inundated coastlines and communities across Ghana, Kenya and Chile's Atacama Desert in the last decade. The community that runs Accra’s Kantamanto — the largest secondhand marketplace in the world — has worked tirelessly for decades to manage and resell as much of the roughly 15 million secondhand garments that arrive in Ghana from Global North countries every week. But the onus is on the brands churning out the lion’s share of this waste to do their part by being transparent about their production volumes — which is at the heart of the Speak Volumes initiative.

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“Somehow, despite society’s near-constant tracking of data, we don’t know how many garments are produced each year. Researchers think it’s somewhere between 100 and 150 billion — there really is no excuse for this massive data gap,” Ricketts asserted. “Production volume is the one data point that impacts everyone along the value chain — whether you are a garment worker, a shipping company, a designer, a retail associate, a clothing collector, a resale platform or a clothing charity. And companies know how many units they have ordered from suppliers or produced themselves.

“We would like the industry as a whole to come clean on the number of garments produced every year. This is the one data point that we feel is most essential for our community — and for the industry as a whole — to not only address the current crisis but also to develop data-driven policies and a truly effective strategy for transitioning from linear to circular production.”

Unlike the carbon footprint of products, production volume is a simple data point for brands to calculate and a figure that is easy for the average consumer to understand.

In August 2024, The Or Foundation sent a letter cosigned by 90 industry leaders to the top 20 brands showing up on Ghana’s beaches by volume — inviting them to publish their production volumes.