Designing from Dumpsters: Cambodians Start at Grassroots with Fashion

Abstract

This article, based on field research carried out in Cambodia in 2008, outlines current government-backed and private channels of fashion production in the country. It also describes how fashion has been created and consumed in Cambodia in the first decade of the twenty-first century. In addition, it introduces a case study of an environmentally sound fashion design project with an impressive social agenda, the Home-based Production Project (HBPP), which was developed by Mith Samlanh (“friends” in Khmer), a local non-governmental organization to benefit marginalized segments of the Cambodian society, mostly homeless families who live and subsist in the streets of the capital, Phnom Penh. I describe the concept and operational practices of the HBPP and the social, political, economic, and cultural contexts in which it was set up. I demonstrate that despite the lack of formal education, the participant-designers’ artistic and aesthetic abilities as well as manual skills are remarkable, especially when one considers that they mostly create their designs from materials obtained directly from recycling of garbage. I suggest that the HBPP not only provides a promising alternative for existing hierarchical Western fashion design practices, but that it can be easily replicated in other developing countries as well, which makes it a significant phenomenon from a global perspective.

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