Landis House hosted a clothing drive with the goal of providing affordable clothing to non-gender binary conforming individuals in a safe space.  All the clothing was donated by community members and made available in Landis House. 

Kitson Smyth ’17, the driving force behind the organization of the clothing drive said that “with spring-cleaning, it would make sense for people to get their old clothing out of their wardrobe and maybe bring in something new.”  They mentioned that “the goal of this event” was to provide clothing “that might actually help affirm our gender identity.” 

Smyth said of the inspiration for the drive, “we had a very successful clothing drive last year during Love Your Body Week and we decided to expand and make it its own event before the end of the semester.”  They mentioned that next year, Landis aims to take photos of the clothes available and post them to Facebook for an online clothing drive. 

Associate Professor of Spanish and Portuguese Mariana Past donated clothes to the drive, saying that she “would just love them to be in the world with someone else who can use them and this seemed like a really neat event to help people have the opportunity to get new clothes in a safe space.”  She said that during the switch from her winter to summer wardrobes, she realized “that there were a lot of things bought aspirationally years ago and are just younger than I am and they’re cute.” 

Past was not only motivated to donate by the good cause.  “I’m really committed to sustainability,” she mentioned, “and the amount of resources that go into dying clothes, distributing them.  Jeans alone take hundreds of gallons of water and if we can keep them circulating instead of buying new all the time, I think it’s incredibly important.” 

The drive received “a lot of donations, more than we expected,” according the Smyth.  They said that Landis was housing “a variety of styles, casual to formal, which is really great because for a lot of trans people, myself included, it can be really hard to find [formal] clothing that fits [and] is affordable.” 

“We’re getting more donations than people picking up clothing, so hopefully people come by a little later and pick up some of this clothing, but if not, we’ll have next year as well a photo album,” wrapped up Smyth. 

The clothing drive took place on Friday, April 28 from 2 p.m. to 4 p.m.