UNCOVERING Fashion features pieces created as part of a collaborative project that considers these questions as we grapple with the challenges of the global textile waste crisis.

The work featured in the exhibition is the result of an invitation launched by Kimberly Guthrie, challenging the participating artists—all fashion designers, researchers, and educators—to work with 665 pounds of discarded garments from donations collected in depositories situated throughout Richmond. The artists were tasked with selecting an assortment of garments with which to create pieces whose discourse reflects their concerns surrounding textile waste. Each artist brought to the mix a unique perspective based on their own research interests and preferred mediums. The result is at the same time an exuberant demonstration of craft, and an exploration of materiality and meaning; a call to re-evaluate our own role and responsibility, whether as consumers or as makers.

The exhibition invites the viewer to consider how practices of consumption, waste, repair, and cultural identity shape our collective relationship to fashion. UNCOVERING Fashion is a provocation, a protest, a revelation of the hidden truths of the global fashion systems of which we are all a part. It is a reminder that there is a choice: we can either enable the paradigm, or change it.