Wed 7th Oct / Tansy Hoskins and Alison Hastie launch Charity Shop World and Green Shoes
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About the Event
We are excited to host award-winning fashion journalist Tansy Hoskins and Devon activist and shoemaker Alison Hastie in conversation to celebrate the launch of both their new books. Each author brings her unique perspective and we'll talk about ethical consumerism, crafting, and fashion activism, promising an enlightening and engaging evening dialogue.
About the Books
Charity Shop World:
With over 80 billion pieces of clothing produced each year and with human made stuff now outweighing living biomass, this is the story of the first sorting site for the deluge of items we discard every single day. Having spent decades exploring charity shops for bargains and treasure, Tansy Hoskins decided to dig deep into the world of charity shop volunteering. From used underwear to wolf pelts, Charity Shop World is a personal account of sorting through donations to reveal the entanglement of people and products.
This book also investigates the export of clothes to overseas markets and landfill, revealing hidden shareholders behind a multi-million pound business. Taking us to the heart of a country hit by austerity and the cost of living crisis, Charity Shop World reveals surprising places of human connectivity, where local communities struggle to find their way through economic hardship to reach a more sustainable way of living. In a world where ‘broken’ things and ‘unwanted’ people are expelled to the margins of society, this book is a powerful call for a new way of living to rise up from the debris of overproduction and consumption.
Green Shoes:
Coming of age in the early 1980s, Alison Hastie always knew she was different from the conventional young people around her. One night a voice spoke to her in a dream, telling her to ‘make shoes’, and this is how she spent forty years of her working life. Living on Dartmoor, travelling between the countercultural town of Totnes and the surrounding villages, Alison made a home and a life for herself based on the principles of second-wave feminism, the idea that small is beautiful, and a deep immersive commitment to craft.
Her company, Green Shoes, was featured in the national and international press, and making shoes took her travelling as far as the north of Finland, but she remained rooted in her environment, family and the women’s collective which, like the Ship of Theseus, was consistent in its values despite many changes of personnel. Through personal tragedies, romantic relationships, motherhood, friendship, fire, flood and professional highs and lows, Alison describes her place in the long line of West Country radicals, teaches us how to hand-make a shoe, traces the history of shoemaking in politics and religion, and above all shows us the importance of being centred in place, time and community.
About the Authors
Tansy Hoskins is an award-winning author and journalist who investigates the global fashion industry. Her books also include The Anti-Capitalist Book Of Fashion which Vogue selected for the 'Best Fashion Books Of All Time’ and Foot Work – What Your Shoes Tell You About Globalisation.
Tansy won the Fashion & Beauty Writer Award at the Freelance Writing Awards and the ICA Bookshop Book of the Year Award. She was shortlisted for the Bread and Roses Award for Radical Publishing and has been nominated for a British Journalism Award. She is a trainer at the Centre for Investigative Journalism.
Tansy lectures on the politics of fashion supply chains across the UK at universities, museums, cultural events and political gatherings and regularly does the ‘heavy lifting’ for media interviews and discussions on the workings of the global garment industry.
Alison Hastie is a shoemaker who co-f
ounded Green Shoes, a women’s collective shoemaking business, in Totnes, Devon, in 1981. This unique enterprise attracted
national attention and a following of dedicated customers, interested in the ethos of the group and the comfortable, long-lasting and repairable shoes that they made by
hand.
For nearly fifty years Alison has lived on Dartmoor, where she raised her
family and was involved in radical community activities, including The Dart magazine and the multi-generational MED Theatre.
£7 entry / £5 of which is redeemable against one or both books on the night.
If you would like to come but this expense is too much, get in touch and we'll sort you out.