If you had walked into the Bromfield cafeteria at 6 p.m. April 12, you would have seen clothes of different styles and sizes fanned out across every table. It was the night of the clothing swap, the finale of seniors Anya Bégué and Greer Jarvis’ senior project.
The senior project is a 40-hour community service project all seniors must complete in order to graduate. Bégué and Jarvis chose to focus on recycling clothing for their project. The clothing swap was a chance to share fashion as well as prolong clothing life. “Someone may not wear a certain T-shirt anymore because it doesn’t fit or they don’t like it anymore, but someone else could really like that shirt,” says Jarvis. “All the clothes we buy should have multiple lives because we can repurpose them instead of throwing them away.” By the end of the night, nearly 30 Bromfield students and Harvard community members had attended and traded clothes.
However, the swap was just the cherry on top for Bégué and Jarvis’ senior project. Market Bag is an initiative that both seniors had been working on since the beginning of the year. Sharon Correnty, the pair’s senior project adviser, inspired them with the idea of combatting “fast fashion” by recycling old T-shirts and turning them into bags.
Bégué explains that the fast fashion industry “expedites the clothing-making process in settings like sweatshops in order to get the latest trends out as quickly and cheaply as possible.” In doing so, it has significantly increased the amount of textile waste, and Bégué and Jarvis aimed to combat that with their initiative.
Anya Bégué (left) and Greer Jarvis check out clothing at the clothes swap held at Bromfield April 12.
(Photo by Lisa Aciukewicz)
The two seniors took old T-shirts that people didn’t want and transformed them into cloth bags. Jarvis says that making each bag took just 10 minutes and could be a fun process. “Anya and I just got together on school nights with Ms. Correnty and listened to music while sewing. It’s actually pretty fun and it taught both of us how to actually sew.”
To make a bag out of a T-shirt, you just “cut off the sleeves and collar, turn the bag inside out, and sew the bottom seam closed,” says Bégué.
The duo asked for T-shirt donations through Nextdoor Harvard and town flyers. Every Thursday, during Chef Paul Correnty’s soup kitchen event, Bégué and Jarvis gave out bags in the Bromfield cafeteria. They estimate that they’ve made and handed out nearly 300 bags throughout the year.
There has been a very positive response from the community, reports Jarvis: “One lady who reached out to us recently had a stroke, and she lives alone. And she told us that she uses our bags to take things from the living room, like her water bottles, her books, and her snacks, up the stairs at night and brings them back down in the morning. That was really sweet that she thanked us for that.”
Bégué adds, “There was also a 4-year-old little boy who came in and saw one of the old Bromfield basketball uniforms turned into a bag, and he said, ‘I need that!’ He took that home and his mom sent us pictures of him wearing it as a cape, and she asked if we could make him another blue uniform bag just because he loved it so much. And so we did.”
Bégué and Jarvis say they initially faced a lot of opposition from the senior project committee, as some teachers were skeptical there would be enough hours. That turned out to be a needless worry, however, as Jarvis says, “We completed 40 hours months ago, but we still held this clothes swap event just because we love it.”
Ivy Wang is a Bromfield senior.
