Reclaimeed – Aimee Duchaine

Hahahaha, I'm exhausted.

Climate change literally keeps me up at night. I don’t know about you, but the concept of “water wars” in our near future scares the heck out of me. Doom-scrolling Twitter during natural disasters takes up at least a good 30 minutes of my day, every day now. The extreme pressing guilt of forgetting my reusable grocery bags when I check out at Publix leaves me reeling some days. I wish I was kidding.

I know that individual contribution isn’t the way we’re going to stop the climate crisis (though it is still important). I don’t want to get on here and act like some savior to Earth with this project. But the biggest ways that we can, as individuals, reduce our impact is through the food we eat, and the things we buy…and I’m not here to tell you what to eat.

Fast Fashion is the third largest polluting industry in the world, emitting 10% of global greenhouse gas emissions annually, with approximately 85% of the billions of textiles produced ending up in landfills each year.

It’s no surprise that it’s a successful industry. Trends change and are instantaneously communicated online every second, and obviously no one wants to be left behind. On top of that, fast fashion is sold at a steeply lower prices than ethically-produced fashion. So, at first glance, it looks harmless. Blink a couple times and you’ll start to see the ethical and environmental issues, though. With brands (i.e., Shein, I’m not scared to name and shame) churning out thousands of new trendy items DAILY and pricing them at next-to-nothing, one could almost forgive the fact that sometimes they have to be thrown away after one wash, or that the shoes LITERALLY melt off your feet if they get too hot. It’s easy to feel removed from being part of the problem when you never see how much of it ends up in the landfills, or how poorly the garment factory workers are treated.

With all this said, I want to note that this isn’t a hit-piece on participants of fast fashion. The low price-points and accessibility of fast fashion means it’s the only option for some people, and—like I said—individual contribution is not going to save the planet on its own (unless you’re a private jet owner). People who participate in Fast Fashion HAULS, however? Gross. I’m also not saying that the alternative to unethical consumption is ethical consumption (because it’s not; really, we should just consume less), but that’s a spiel for another time.

So anyways, what am I doing here?

Basically—a while ago I was absolutely at my wit’s end with an old job. I was so burnt out, doing the workload of 3 people on a continuously shrinking team, in a company that absolutely murdered my creativity. I stayed because I had just graduated into a pandemic, but I cried every day leaving work. This job literally had me thinking that I didn’t want to be a designer anymore. The final straw was after it was deemed “safe enough” to return to the office in a client-facing industry, I had to buy a metric ton of trendy clothes as part of the workplace dress code (and spoiler, I did not make enough to spend money on a whole new trendy wardrobe).

All of this culminated in me panic-buying cheap clothes that itched and tore and shrank, and deciding that I needed to do something to reclaim my creative energy. But how? I knew three things were true:

I’ve also always wanted to get into printmaking and screen-printing, and while this seems unrelated, it was the driving idea behind me shaking off my pity party and creating this project. So, Reclaimeed was born.

At the risk of over-explaining the joke, the name is a pun. Because it’s my name, Aimee D., inside the word Reclaimed. ReclAIMEED. If you’re wondering how to pronounce it, I just say it normally, “reclaimed.” The extra ‘e’ is silent in my head, idk.

I named the project after my goal of reclaiming my creativity BUT it’s also a double pun—because the whole idea of the project is that I’m going to be reclaiming secondhand or deadstock clothing items and using them to produce screen-printed artwork, while giving those thrifted clothes a new life.

So that’s the project. I know I’m probably not the first to do something like this, but reducing our environmental impact is a collaboration, not a competition. I’ve built my own screenprinting press, but I’m still working on sourcing tools/clothes, researching the best practices to make sure I’m using environmentally-safe inks and pigments, and creating the artwork in a way that will last (to produce clothing that will last). Then there’ll be the learning curve of the creative process as well, before anything is actually ready to go out into the world. But it’s okay. The fact that this project has made it this far, from how braindead I felt when I came up with it—to openly talking about it on here—is enough for me to be excited about it.

If you made it this far, I super appreciate it. Hopefully soon I’ll have something more to show, but until then….don’t forget your reusable grocery bags.