Recycling Indian Clothing: Global Contexts of Reuse and Value

In today's globally connected marketplace, a wedding sari in rural north
India may become a woman's blouse or cushion cover in a Western boutique. Lucy
Norris's anthropological study of the recycling of clothes in Delhi follows garments
as they are gifted, worn, handed on, discarded, recycled, and sold once more. Gifts
of clothing are used to make and break relationships within middle-class households,
but a growing surplus of unwanted clothing now contributes to a global glut of
textile waste. When old clothing is, for instance, bartered for new kitchen
utensils, it enters a vast waste commodity system in which it may be resold to the
poor or remade into new textiles and exported. Norris traces these local and
transnational flows through homes and markets as she tells the stories of the people
who work in the largely hidden world of fabric recycling.