Over the past two weekends, my friend Kristen has been spending afternoons plumbing the depths of my psyche as we clean out my closet. And by closet, I mean two closets, two dressers and a wardrobe–not to mention those giant tupperware bins by my bed. Saturday, I pulled out a little black dress, not the first we had come across by any stretch of the imagination, but this one was special.
“But do you wear it?” Kristen asked, sitting patiently on my bed, trying to help me rid my life of excess clothing.
I had to keep it, I said, showing Kristen the little message on its twill tape strap.
“We carry the story,” read the tiny white letters, “of the people who make our clothes around with us.” It’s a sample from the years I spent with Edun, the clothing label Ali Hewson founded five years ago with her husband, Bono.
With designer Josh Amos and the staff of our favorite sweater factory
In 2006 and 2007, I managed Edun’s knitwear production, largely in Peru. During that time, when I got to work with matriarchal sweater factories in Lima and tousle the tresses of Andean alpacas in Arequipa, sewn inside every Edun garment, was piece of twill tape, printed with those words: “We carry the stories of the people who make our clothes around with us.”
A woman hand-sorts Alpaca wool in Arequipa
I loved working with our partners in Peru, and I made friends for life at Edun. I believe in the company’s mission to raise consumers’ awareness of their clothing’s origins. But the longer I worked there, and the more stories I learned about how clothing makes its way to our closets, the harder it became to carry them around. I wanted to share those stories.
That’s what I told Ali the day I resigned, to return to school for my Masters in Journalism. In the years since, she and my former colleagues from Edun have been some of my biggest champions, as I start to tell these stories with Closettour. So I couldn’t help but smile yesterday when I was reading about a recycled glass necklace on the last page of The New York Times’ Style Magazine, and saw this quote.
Photo by Jens Mortensen
“We carry the stories,” the necklace‘s owner said, “of the people who make our clothes and jewelry around with us.” It seems that twill tape’s message is stuck in someone else’s head too. It was Ali, talking about a special piece she had brought back from Uganda. The news this morning is that Bono is recovering from emergency back surgery in Munich, and if I know Ali, she’s right there by his side. Today they’re especially close to my thoughts and heart–both figuratively and literally, thanks to that little black dress.
