Environmental Justice Month: Excess Dress Display

Excess Dress: A reflection on fast fashion
By USF alum Georgia Brabec (’22)

On display April 1-30, 2023
Kalmanovitz Hall Atrium
University of San Francisco

Presented by the Thacher Gallery
in conjunction with the Environmental Justice Speaker Series

About the work:
According to the Council for Textile Recycling, the average American sends seventy pounds (70  lbs)  of textile waste to the landfill each year. Inspired by Atsuko Tanaka’s Electric Dress (made of 200 light bulbs), artist Georgia Brabec wanted to visualize this statistic to confront ideas of industrialization, individualism, and our pervasive culture of overconsumption.

Artist Georgia Brabec states: When I began constructing Excess Dress, I fully intended for the final product to weigh seventy pounds and represent a year’s worth of waste. However, I vastly underestimated just how much material that would require. The dress now weighs a mere thirty-five pounds (35 lbs), or half of an average American’s annual textile waste, and is still very difficult to support and move in when worn. With the help of a friend, I took the piece to the mall —the site where so much of our textile consumption begins—and documented myself wandering through the space like a ghost. I hope that Excess Dress can provide a clear but disquieting point of reference when visualizing textile waste and that viewers will rethink their tendencies for overconsumption.