Educational Media Reviews Online

This interesting, delightfully meandering, film develops an historical, if impressionistic, perspective on the used clothing industry. It uses disparate sources—a Boston radio forum on ‘pepe’, as second hand clothing is known in Haiti, a spoken memoir of a Polish tailor who emigrated to the U.S., home movie footage of the ‘rag trade’ in Eastern Europe of the 1930s, and interviews with Haitians—then puts them together, sometimes with special effects, creating a collage environment. The silent footage of huge sorting factories shows the same activities being carried out then as today for this kind of recycling: moving and bundling material, reselling, and adapting, which the film suggests to be a fashion sometimes as lively and chic as ‘new’ clothes. ‘Pepe’ (or Kennedy or Goodwill or Reagan, other names by which the bundles are known) can be cleverly made into expensive or cheap clothing, and became a lucrative business after World War II, allowing goods to be sent around the world and creating whole cultures, as in Haiti, dependent on it. The role of charities like the Salvation Army and Goodwill Industries is alluded to but not analyzed. The film is interested primarily in the overlap of used clothing with the ‘rag trade’ and ‘piece goods,’ suggesting that it’s one way people around the world can dress as they see people dress on television, and one way to add to the enjoyment of life.