The T-Shirt Standard

The filmmakers behind Secondhand (Pepe) discuss Haiti's trade in used clothes. An excerpt:

First off, we should note that you can find pepe for sale on pretty much any street in Haiti. It seemed as though pepe lined the sidewalks with small-time vendors selling a few things by hanging them up on the walls by the sidewalk. Then we also visited all types of dedicated marketplaces. Some were very concentrated with just clothing, and these were often by the ports, where the clothing would arrive. Sometimes the pepe would be sold within larger markets where you could also find food and other goods. Sometimes the clothing was sorted into different areas or by peddler's specialty—you would have the used shoe guy over here and the lady that only sold t-shirts over there.

In one of the largest markets in Miragoane, just outside of the gates of the port, in the central town square—you had people opening up boxes and making preliminary sortings. In the Saline marketplace in Port-au-Prince, there was an incredible expanse of peddler/tailors set up with sewing machines, sitting among mounds of clothing, under tents sewn together from fabric scraps and old blankets.

At times, we learn, Haitians have even used these clothes as an informal private currency, similar to the cigarettes described in R.A. Radford's classic "The Economic Organization of a P.O.W. Camp." The whole interview is here.

Elsewhere in Reason: Kerry Howley describes the used T-shirt trade in Tanzania.