Circular fashion, wool and other fabrics take on new shapes

Rags, i.e. used wool clothes, sustainable and circular. It happens first of all in Prato, it is there in the Italian textile district that the potential of the recycling: it is an experience watched with great interest by all those who want to learn how to create new high quality fabrics using used clothes. I'm the one telling it Tommaso Santi and Silvia Gambi in Rags. He is a director, she is a journalist and creator of the podcast and the site solomodasostenibile.it.

The documentary, which will be screened at Garden of Ideas Of **Vanity Fair **(17 April, 3pm) is a choral work: there are historical and recent interviews with Italian entrepreneurs, there are voices from Ellen MacArthur Foundation and the testimony of Liz Ricketts, co-founder of The OR Foundation, a non-profit organization based in Accra, Ghana, home to Africa's largest landfill. It was also necessary to show the negative side of the enormous quantities of textile waste arriving in the country. It was also necessary to tell the other side of the coin, of a very serious environmental problem which can also become an opportunity for emerging countries.

How it was born Rags?
«The starting point is archive material, interviews from over ten years with workers in the Prato textile district, used to write a theatrical text set in a family of Prato “cenciaioli”. Stories that have become very topical today: they tell of an experience of circular economy, born decades before all this took hold or even before it was even thought of.”

The documentary was written in collaboration with the journalist Silvia Gambi. What is her contribution?
“Essential! Silvia is an expert in sustainability in the textile and fashion industries. The relevance of the documentary, both in Prato and worldwide, is her work.”

Fashion can be sustainable, from Prato to far away.
«Yes, we went all the way to Ghana, where most of the second hand of the Western world ends up in markets, but more often in landfills, polluting land, rivers and the sea. We went to Pakistan to show an experience of collecting and sorting wool and cashmere clothes and, finally, to Great Britain to gather the authoritative voice of the Ellen McArthur Foundation. However, Prato remains the heart of the story: for over a century this textile district, the most important in the world, has been recycling wool and precious fibres. This testimony, in a global context, could not be missing.”

You had already touched on the theme of rebirth with Restore the Sky, dedicated to works of art. What is the difference?
“With either Rags that with this first documentary I wanted to tell about two different worlds, but both significant. Small businesses of men and women who in a practical, very concrete way contribute to a rebirth and virtuous work.”