For over a decade, fashion giants have encouraged customers to return used clothes under the promise of “recycling.” In reality, most of these garments are not recycled at all. Instead, they are shipped to countries like Ghana, where they flood second-hand markets, and what cannot be sold is dumped in landfills or burned. Mountains of discarded textiles clog rivers, pollute beaches, and poison the air. What is presented as a green solution in Europe often becomes an environmental catastrophe in the Global South. This project sheds light on the dark side of fast fashion — where the illusion of recycling collides with the reality of waste, exploitation, and environmental destruction.
Magnus Wennmann – The Dark Side of Fast Fashion
A glance on the world areaMAGNUS WENNMANN
The Dark Side of Fast Fashion
Magnus Wennman has worked as a photojournalist since the age of 17, when he began his career at the newspaper DalaDemokraten. Since 2001, he has been employed as a staff photographer at Aftonbladet in Stockholm.
Magnus has worked in over 80 countries, covering everything from U.S. presidential elections to conflicts, and refugee crises in Africa, the Middle East, and Europe.
In Sweden he has been named Photographer of the Year five times, Video Journalist of the Year twice, and has received over 100 awards, including seven World Press Photo prizes across different categories. In 2017, he was named Journalist of the Year by the Red Cross. In both 2018 and 2023, he was awarded Newspaper Photographer of the Year by POYI (Pictures of the Year International). Magnus has established himself as a filmmaker alongside his work as a photographer. His short film Fatima’s Drawings, in which a now-safe refugee child reflects on her escape through her drawings, received several prestigious awards, including Best Digital Storytelling at Visa d’Or in Perpignan in 2016.
He has held numerous exhibitions, the most notable being Where the Children Sleep, which
has been shown in 17 countries. He has also exhibited his work at the Capitol in Washington, D.C., and at the United Nations Headquarters in New York.
In 2018, he spent more than half a year working on a report about sleep for NationalGeographic, with his own son Wile featured on the cover. In 2023, he and journalist Staffan Lindberg were awarded the Swedish Grand Prize for Journalism in the category Scoop of the Year, as well as the Guldspaden award in the major daily newspaper category, for their investigation into the dumping of used fast fashion in poor countries.
Lodi – Palazzo della Provincia