July 18, 2018
Secondhand Tees Become Canvas for Environmental Message
For Earth Day this year, online thrift shop thredUP was inspired to use T-shirts as a way to spark conversations about conservation and sustainability.
“We wanted to inspire people to rethink their views and use fashion as a way to express their personal opinions,” says Vivian Xie, a marketing associate with thredUP.
Dubbed Project RE:made, the company commissioned a dozen artists to respond to the charged statement, “Climate change is not real.” Then, it scoured its distribution centers for 1,000 second-hand white T-shirts and sent them along to Modern Art Solutions (asi/530839), a screen printer based in Highland Park, NJ.
The artists ranged from a New Yorker cartoonist to a millennial meme creator, according to thredUP. One shirt depicts an angry polar bear sitting on a tiny iceberg, about to swallow a tiny cartoon version of President Trump. The caption below reads: “No More Mr. Ice Guy.” Another shows an earth rendered in red and orange and a short poem: “Distressed, hot mess, quickly getting worse: some glaring similarities I have with planet earth.”
Xie says the campaign was a success, and didn’t garner much negative feedback. “Everyone was pretty happy with it,” she says. “We got really good comments about the variety of artwork.”
According to Xie, 100% of the proceeds from Project RE:made were donated to Cool Effect, a nonprofit crowdfunding platform that helps power carbon-reducing projects around the world. Cool Effect estimated that each T-shirt sold reduced 1 metric ton of carbon pollution, the equivalent of planting 95 trees that live for 10 years each.
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