Alex Casey talks to Dianne Ludwig from Welcome Back Slow Fashion about how her community of clothing lovers has stepped up for Gaza.
Dianne Ludwig was about ready to quit running her 13k strong Instagram account Welcome Back Slow Fashion in 2023. Having spent nearly a decade posting about vintage fashion finds in Aotearoa, her enthusiasm for the work was beginning to wane. “I was starting to get pretty over the whole thrifting scene, the opshops being full of crap and people doing these massive vintage hauls,” she says. “In spite of lots of us wanting to have a slower way with clothes, it felt like the secondhand scene was becoming just as consumerist and depressing.”
But nearly two years later, Welcome Back has been imbued with a new and urgent sense of purpose that goes beyond slow consumption and sustainability. Ludwig now almost exclusively sells donated vintage and New Zealand made pieces as a way of fundraising for families in Gaza. Her community in Aotearoa is currently directly supporting eight families to purchase extortionately priced food every week, against a backdrop of the Israeli army committing “deadly violence” at food distribution sites in a region the UN has described as “the hungriest place on Earth”.
Ludwig wouldn’t describe herself as coming from an activist background, and admits that she didn’t know very much about Palestine before the current humanitarian crisis took hold. Fittingly, it was social media posts made by anther local sustainable jewellery brand Pads Pearls that alerted Ludwig to the escalating situation in the region – one that has since been declared a genocide by human rights experts and has seen Israel kill at least 56,000 Palestinians and injure over 131,848 more. “I was just so horrified by the scale of the retaliation,” she says. “I couldn’t look away.”
As she started to post more about what was happening in Palestine, Ludwig also started to get more and more DMs from people looking to donate pieces for fundraising. She sold a Zambesi bag here, a Deadly Ponies clutch there, and soon made her first significant contribution to charities supplying aid to the region. From those early fundraisers, pieces for Palestine kept coming in from across Aotearoa, including a pristine 1980s Mary Quant poncho and a pile of “scrubby shopping bags” dropped on her front porch that were bursting with vintage Celine and Prada.
Other donations weren’t as much about the labels as the stories behind them. “There was a woman who had all these beautiful hand knits that she had made over the years, with a lot of her wool dyed by her mother-in-law who is now in her 80s,” Ludwig says. “She got in touch and said this seemed like the perfect way for them to find a new home.” It was just one of many deeply personal donations that Ludwig says speaks volumes about people’s commitment to the cause. “You can feel that people are reaching really deep into their hearts for this.”
Ludwig also contacted many local fashion brands in the DMs for donations, and was equally moved by the response of one New Zealand label in particular. “I really thought Penny Sage would just throw throw me a few scrunchies or something, but they ended up customising one of their Maisie dresses for me with the most beautiful hand-embroidered cross stitch in homage to tatreez, the traditional Palestinian style of of cross stitch,” she says. “I was just so in awe of the fact that they would spend that much time doing it, so that was a pretty special one-off.”
The lack of response from other local brands raised another question for her: where is the fashion industry when it comes to Gaza? “We always talk about fashion being political and being the zeitgeist drawing from what’s happening in the world, but I just don’t see anything in our fashion media about what’s happening in Gaza,” she says. In one post selling a keffiyeh-inspired Cecile Copenhagen top, she called out the “radio silence” from the fashion world. “It’s disappointing, because there are many ways into Gaza – you don’t just have to be covering the suffering.”
In that spirit, Ludwig shares the story of Mohammed, who she refers to as “son”. Two years ago he was in the last year of his software engineering degree and living with his large family on a farm in Rafah. Now, he is living with next to nothing in a tent in Khan Younis, and chatting to Ludwig in Tāmaki Makaurau almost every day. “He’s 24, I’m 62, and he calls me mum,” she laughs. “We’ve become really good friends, and we chat about his girlfriend, he’ll ask me marriage advice because he wants to get engaged when the genocide ends, and we just laugh all the time.”
But due to the rolling internet blackouts, Mohammed’s communication often stops for days, sometimes weeks. “I’ve been in tears worrying, but then in the middle of the night, I’ll see that little circle around his Instagram Stories pop up and I’ve never felt more relieved in my life,” says Ludwig. Just last week, Mohammed’s aunty and her two children were killed with artillery in the tent next to him. He recently attempted to travel to buy a slightly cheaper flour, and was caught up in a shrapnel bombing. “He was lucky to survive,” says Ludwig. “The situation is terrible.”
Ludwig updates her followers regularly on how all the families are doing. “That’s one thing I really think that people have really connected with – seeing these real people who had lives just the same as our lives,” she says. “They’re just incredible people who have got a huge amount of care and empathy, in spite of everything they’re going through.” From nearly giving up Welcome Back altogether, Ludwig is now grateful she held onto her platform to “do some good” and use her eye-catching clothing as a conduit for getting other people involved.
“People say ‘thank you for doing this’ which embarrasses me, because I think what they are really saying is ‘thank you for enabling us to help’,” she says. “A lot of people are stuck doing nothing in these times which are pretty scary, but one way to overcome that fear is just to take action.” The experience has taught her that everyone has power in their networks, no matter how big or small, to make a difference. “I sell clothes, which doesn’t seem directly related to the Palestinian struggle, but now it has become a vehicle for doing something,” she says.
“No matter what your skill set is, there’s ways that we can all help.”
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