The Secret Life of Your Clothes by Andy Wells (review)

The Secret Life of Your Clothes was produced in 2014 for the BBC’s current affairs documentary program This World and features Ade Adepitan as the presenter or narrator. Using a journalistic style, Adepitan follows the trail of how clothing donated to charity shops in the United Kingdom is purchased by wholesalers in Britain, who bundle the items in large bales and ship them overseas to countries like Ghana. After a brief interview with the owner of one of these companies, the film crew heads to Ghana. Adepitan visits the wholesale market in Accra, the used clothing sections of the market in Kumasi, a place in the countryside that produces hand-woven Kente cloth, and a Ghanaian print textile factory on the verge of bankruptcy. He then attends an Asanti funeral, where he notices that although this is a special occasion where wearing traditional clothing is prized, several people are wearing Western clothes. However, these trends do not only affect urban areas in West Africa.

The next two segments document the “secret life” of used Western clothing in rural areas of northeastern Ghana. While crossing the Volta River on a ferry going to Kete Krachi, Adepitan interviews a local male wholesaler, who prefers to wear used Western clothing because each outfit will be “the only one in town.” The wholesaler explains that in the 1960s missionaries used to bring used clothing to churches and schools and distribute it, especially to children, for free. Then the filmmakers drive down dirt roads to a rural area where Adepitan accompanies a local woman who walks over ten miles a day from village to village selling used clothing she carries on her head. While the seller is interacting with a group of villagers who are trying on the items over their own clothes and deciding what to purchase, Adepitan explains that they are mostly subsistence farmers who live on less than one pound a day and that sometimes they have to purchase clothing items that sell for one cedi (or 25 pence) by paying for half then and half later.

In the final segments, Adepitan returns to Accra where he interviews the CEO of one of the few garment factories in Ghana, which employs three hundred people and mainly produces uniforms for local companies. Such factories cannot effectively compete with the massive used clothing market. Then he heads to a recruitment company to talk with a group of middle-class professionals, mostly younger urbanites, who wear traditional clothing or “cool” and “trendy” combinations of Western and traditional clothing on Fridays instead of their Western-style suits, following the slogan promoted by the government, “Thank Ghana it’s Friday.” After that, he attends a fashion show and interviews two Ghanaian designers, Kofi Ansah and Joyce Ababio, who were trained in Europe and the United States and seek to fuse African prints with high fashion and to train other local designers. Like the CEO of the garment factory, both designers recognize the difficulties of competing with the cheap prices of the used clothing market. Adepitan hopes that more and more Ghanaians will be wearing “cool” clothes designed by Ghanaians and ends the film by observing that while the marketing of used clothing does provide jobs to many Ghanaians, it also has “decimated” local clothing industries and may be “wiping out traditions.”

The film has amazing scenes of huge bales of clothing arriving at the wholesale markets, which later are torn apart by retailers competing with each other to obtain the items with the most prestigious brands and that are in the best condition. In Accra, two male wholesalers explain that the local term for used clothing, obroni wawu, literally means “dead white man’s clothing” and that up to 100,000 cedis or 25,000 pounds a day can be made in this “lucrative” business. Adepitan also learns that when the bales are split apart, the clothes are classified as first, second, or third class, depending on the designer name...