Where do our clothes go?

Fruit of doctoral and post-doctoral field work in anthropology, this small work-by the format and the number of pages-allows us to explore what our clothes become, those we have worn, sold or given, but also those that we have not bought, surplus and other textile unsold people. By amenities and in the image of the title, we will designate these same textile categories under the term of clothes. Beyond their production, how textile clothes and objects circulate once their first life is over ? Here, the circulation is double, both geographic (from one part to another in the world, from Paris, Brussels, Hamburg to Beirut, Aleppo or Dubai and their respective districts) and symbolic (between goods and waste, between valued and devaluing work), and allow to account for various mobility, in all their semantic diversity (men and goods ; Migration, daily trips, social mobility and others).

A second life of moving clothes

By following what our clothes becomes, Emmanuelle Durand embodies her story in many portraits: Mona the Parisian influencer, Issam the Belgian entrepreneur of Syrian origin, Bassen, Syrian immigrant in Lebanon and owner of several stores in Fripes in different districts of Beirut, Jeanne Son anceule, Camara the parcel delivery man and many others. The different characters, including the author herself as a user of Vinted, a volunteer in a second-hand Parisian and researcher social boutique on the ground, give substance to an intensive description of the flows, exchanges and what is played behind the recovery of clothes considered to be used or out of the new market, Les Fripes.

In the direct extension of the new market, the clothes are exchanged and go from one part of the world to another almost in the opposite direction of that of first -hand clothes: sold online (in France by Mona and the author), deposited in recovery bins or from solidarity actors, recovered in Europe by wholesalers (France or Belgium here), the clothes will return by Germany before transit by Cargos Middle East (Lebanon and Dubai here) and its free port areas before leaving for other continents, ending their lives on beirthin merchant stalls or in open-air discharges. More than long distance goods flows, Emmanuelle Durand describes especially with finesse the circulations that are played on a more local or individual scale: Mona which goes from one shop to the other to find rare pieces, the author who sails on her resale application and improvises Logistician, Camara who delivers her packages, Bassen who delivers and visits her different stalls, the visit of Tripoli on board the car of Fadi and others. These daily trips illustrate the entire more ordinary dimension of the logistical work of the seconds as other goods.

If the descriptions of ordinary displacements tend to invisible or put in the background the globalized flows described in the work, they show all the challenges of domination and reproduction of the inequalities that are played behind the trade in the FRIP, in particular of class and breed. For example, Mona shows how the skills she mobilizes to do her little clothing business upcycled hold as much (and can be less) to its dexterity to sewing as to its ability to communicate, enhance its advertisements on social networks and with recycleries, skills or socially located provisions as shown by A. Jourdain (2023) or A. Bailly (2019) in their respective work on other online discussion platforms. Likewise, the examples of Bassen and other traders of Syrian origin illustrate how the work of the Fripe in Lebanon refers to class and race assignments, built on several generations and inherited from the migratory and colonial history of the Middle East.

From one moral category to another: the “ dirty job »FRIPES

Beyond the geographical flows or circulation, the author describes and precisely resets the historical trajectories of clothing and, through him, as it is in France or in the Middle East, two areas intimately linked to the dress globalization since the XIX^e century. Of very rare and expensive to very abundant and at low prices, new clothing and its rejuvenates no longer have the same image or social and moral value. For a part of the seconds, the logic of mass hyperconsumption tends today to be called into question in the name of the sustainable development of our societies – the care of things (Denis and Pontille, 2022) or the need to make its objects last (Ginsburger and Madon, 2023) reappear in the speeches and practices of households and actors, making the second -hand clothes or second -hand clothes Valuing, because seen as durable. As underlined by the work of E. Judge – on which E. Durand is based -, the exchanges and second -hand platforms constitute less an alternative to the mass clothing market and more one of its extensions. They would allow major brands and brands to sell their surplus and other unsold people while allowing their customers to fill their cupboards faster or more often. To put it differently, the FRIPE market allows equalization between rapid renewal of the collections, overproduction and absence of stocks. More than to make it last longer clothing objects, second-hand platforms would increase their movements on their life cycles (judge, Pomiès and Collin-Lachaud, 2022) helping to question even further the virtues and limits of e-commerce in terms of sustainability, especially in terms of logistics.

If the logistics of the last kilometer is a dynamic sector and at the forefront of political debates, the scientific consensus around its environmental effects is still far from stabilized, as accounting for many English-speaking works in geography and socio-economics of transport (see as an example H. Rai, 2021). On its social effects, a dynamic literature, in particular French -speaking, tends to show all the ambiguities and issues of the goods delivery sector (Aguilera, Dablanc and Rallet, 2018 ; Lay and Lemozy, 2022 ; Mias, 2018 ; Rème-Harnay, 2023) to which the market and the platforms of the second hand dress are irreparably linked. Emmanuelle Durand shows all the complexity of these flows and their impacts on the work of the people who implement them, their fatigue, their conditions of employment that could be qualified as degraded. Following the clothes sold by the platforms, the author confronts a form of work which is not specific to them but which has the common point of being devalued or considered as “ dirty job »In the sense of E. Hughes (1996 (1951)). Even delivery is an essential component of online market exchanges (online purchase ends at the time when the material transfer of the purchased property took place), it is most often delegated to providers and in doing so considered a task symbolizing “ something degrading or humiliating “Who could even return” to what goes against our most heroic moral conceptions To use the original text (Hughes, 1996 (1951), p. 81).

If the definition of the Fripe is wide, it always refers to the moral conceptions which accompany it, between well -validable and waste or dirt, whose limits have been able to evolve over time and space as shown by E. Durand in his work. Behind the way of categorizing and therefore distinguishing the clothes, those which will be valuable (because claimable on a market or another) from those which are not and are considered as waste and like the delivery of the last kilometer detailed above, are also many forms of invisible and more or less “ dirty Always in the sense of E. Hughes.

One of the particularly stimulating points of reading the book lies in the description of the work of sorting and categorization of the quality of the seconds that is played at different times in history or in different places: the volunteers of the Parisian solidarity store separate clean clothes and in good condition of those to be repaired and others too dirty or in poor condition, workers of the Belgian factory use the quality and nature of the textiles where the workers of Dubai separate by type of clothing, etc. In doing so, the seconds are distinguished here depending on their cleanliness or their resale potential once repaired or Upcycled, There according to their range level (from cream to category 3). Until the directions mobilized to achieve it (sight, smell, touch, etc.), sorting work and its different methods illustrates everything that is played out in the categorization of goods which are neither quite new, nor completely waste. Beyond the adage that “ The trash of some make the treasures of others », The incessant reformulation of the ways of classifying the clothes of one stage to another of their itinerary illustrates all the social complexity inherent in these classification activities (Bowker and Star, 2023 (2000)).

However, as underlined by the author, the more the sorting work takes place far from the origin of the clothes, the more its cost is diminished and is depreciated by those who organize it in the image of Issam which relocates its activity of sorting of Brussels from Brussels to Dubai where the cost of the workforce is lower. To put it differently, the more sorting moves away from the origin of the clothes, the more it becomes dirty work. At the same time, the cost of the goods continues to increase with the distance it travels. Thus, the more the dirty job necessary for the treatment and the constitution of a shot ball increases, the more its value increases.

Mobilizing a multidisciplinary literature (from sociology to geography, including management sciences), Emmanuelle Durand plunges into the underside of a market that maintains, continues and reproduces at the economic, social and symbolic levels what is already played in the market of clothing called new or out of factory. If the author could have followed the shot balls longer or further, especially in Africa or Asia or even on the Internet, and if the assumed use – and sometimes intensive – textile metaphors enamel the work, the latter constitutes an interesting and enlightening entry door to deconstruct myths and stories around reuse, recycling and other so -called alternative practices. Among other things, it allows to re -situate through our fallen objects how much the dirty work and its delegation constitute operating principles to understand how the flows and other goods movements, from the most global to be socially played.