What Gets Left Behind:
HVSFW, El Anatsui, and the Case for Deadstock

Hudson Valley Sustainable Fashion Week enters its fourth year this September. The runway is the visible part. The record it is building may matter more.

This September, Hudson Valley Sustainable Fashion Week holds its fourth annual Organic Runway at Stone Ridge Orchard in the Rondout Valley, expanding for the first time to a full weekend format that adds a Slow Fashion Fair the following day. Nine Hudson Valley-based designers will show collections built from deadstock, reclaimed fiber, and excess studio material on a working farm, at sunset, with the Catskills as a backdrop. By any conventional measure of fashion event production, it is a modest operation. By the measure that matters to anyone paying attention to what fashion is doing to the land, it is one of the more honest conversations currently happening in this region.

El Anatsui Builds an Argument

The Ghana-born, Nigeria-based artist El Anatsui does not make recycled art. That framing undersells the work by several orders of magnitude. What he builds are undulating metal hangings, the scale of tapestries, constructed from thousands of crushed aluminum bottle caps stitched together with copper wire. The result gets shown in major museums simultaneously as sculpture and as textile. The discarded material is not incidental to the work. It is the argument the work makes: that what has already been used can carry more meaning than what comes fresh from a factory, precisely because it carries a history the factory-fresh material does not have.

HVSFW's designers are working from the same premise. The 90-percent-not-new standard the event holds its participants to is not a constraint on creativity. It is a position on what creativity is for. A garment built from deadstock fabric is making a claim about the supply chain it refuses to extend. That claim is structural, not decorative, in exactly the way Anatsui's bottle caps are structural rather than decorative.

A Record Survives
What Programs Cannot

In the 1930s, the Farm Security Administration deployed photographers including Dorothea Lange and Walker Evans across Depression-era America. The photographs they made did not fix the Dust Bowl. They did not end poverty. What they did was create a record so specific, so geographically and humanly detailed, that the suffering became undeniable in a way that statistics alone could not accomplish. Those images outlasted the administration that commissioned them. They outlasted the specific relief programs they were made to support. The record survived when the institutional apparatus around it did not.

HVSFW is now four years into building something that functions similarly, whether intentionally or not. A documentary of the 2025 Organic Runway was produced by HUDSY and premiered in April 2026. The event has a growing archive of designer names, venue histories, participating students from Marist University's Fashion Design Program, and year-over-year coverage in regional press. None of that proves the event is changing the fashion industry. What it does is make the conversation harder to dismiss, and harder to lose, than a conversation that leaves no record.

Faith Ringgold Knew
What Cloth Could Hold

Faith Ringgold did not arrive at story quilts by accident. She chose cloth because her critics would dismiss it, and because the material her critics dismissed was exactly the material her subjects had been forced to work with for generations. Her quilts combine dyed and painted fabric with embroidered text and portraiture, narrating African American history through a medium the mainstream art world had classified as domestic craft rather than fine art. The form was the argument. The cloth was the archive.

The parallel to deadstock fashion is not decorative. When HVSFW's designers work with reclaimed material, they are not simply making a sustainable choice. They are working in a tradition, traceable through Ringgold and further back, of artists who insist that material history is part of the meaning of the object. The fabric that was cut from a discontinued dye lot, or salvaged from a designer's excess, carries a story the brand-new bolt does not. Ringgold understood that cloth holds what it has been through. HVSFW's designers are betting the same thing.

El Anatsui, Again:
The Object as Evidence

Return to Anatsui for a moment, because his practice clarifies something the deadstock argument alone does not fully articulate. His bottle caps are not beautiful despite being discarded. They are beautiful in a way that is inseparable from their having been discarded, because the scale and density of the work makes the volume of discard visible. A single bottle cap is nothing. Thousands of them, stitched into a hanging that fills a museum wall, are evidence of an industrial system operating at a scale that individual choices cannot easily address.

This is where HVSFW's runway and Anatsui's hangings converge most directly. A single garment made from deadstock is a nice thing. Nine designers, in a farm field, in their fourth consecutive year, building collections from what the industry was prepared to discard, is evidence of a position being held over time. The commitment is the argument.

What Burtynsky Has Been Documenting

Edward Burtynsky's large-format photographs document manufactured landscapes: the tailings ponds of mining operations, the ship-breaking yards of Bangladesh, the densified scrap metal of industrial recycling facilities. His work transforms industrial refuse into something that paradoxically approaches abstract beauty, while making the scale of damage impossible to look away from. He has been building that record for decades. It is worth knowing what that record looks like, as context for why a runway show in the Hudson Valley made of reclaimed cloth is not a trivial response to a trivial problem.

Four Years Is Not Nothing

HVSFW did not solve the problem Burtynsky photographs. It is not trying to, at least not directly, and it would be dishonest to claim otherwise. What it has done is create a recurring, documented, place-specific event that insists the conversation is worth having, in public, with an audience, on a working farm, for the fourth consecutive September. Whether that conversation is gaining traction is genuinely an open question. Whether it will become the kind of infrastructure that changes how regional designers source material, or how Hudson Valley residents think about what their clothes cost the earth, is a longer question still.

What is not in question is that the record exists. The documentation accumulates. The Marist students who volunteer at the event and walk the runway carry the conversation forward into the next generation of designers. The archive grows.

That is what the FSA photographers understood, working in a different crisis with a different medium: you cannot build on a conversation that was never written down, photographed, filmed, or sewn into cloth. HVSFW is writing it down. Four years in, the record is the thing most worth paying attention to.

Where This Comes From

Further Reading

Articles Main Page