Elizabeth Cline has been a leading voice in the ethical fashion community for two decades. An expert on sustainability, consumer culture and labor rights, she has written two bestselling books about fashion: Overdressed, an investigation of the fast fashion industry, and The Conscious Closet, a follow-up guide to help readers fashion their own ethical wardrobes. Cline characterizes the latter as “a manifesto and call to action to transform one of the most polluting industries on earth into a force for good.” The book’s introduction closes with the exhortation: “Let’s use the awesome power of fashion to change fashion itself and in turn we just might save the world!”, Vision.org reported.
In the wake of recent events, though, Cline shifted her focus away from the power of individual ethical consumerism. During the height of the COVID-19 pandemic, major brands canceled orders worth about US$40 billion—some of which were already in production or had been completed and shipped. More than one million garment workers were affected in Bangladesh alone. Unfortunately, these workers lost not only wages but also their jobs. “What did all of my decades of Ethical Consumerism do to protect these workers and raise their wages?” Cline asked. The answer was, “Nothing. My Ethical Consumption couldn’t protect Black and brown people from dying and getting critically ill in far higher percentages than white people during the pandemic. It hasn’t put a dent in climate change or plastic pollution.”
Cline isn’t the first to comment on the fashion industry’s negative impacts, but the work of journalists, filmmakers and researchers has had limited effect in changing the system. Corporations are very reluctant to make necessary changes that might jeopardize their profits. And the bottom line for most shoppers is having access to the newest styles at the lowest cost—regardless of the effects of mindless consumption.
THE GROWTH OF AN INDUSTRY
It hasn’t always been this way. The Industrial Revolution changed our relationship with what we wear. We stopped appreciating how we got our clothing and the time, skill and resources required to make it, because mechanized production meant garments could be produced quickly and less expensively. By the 1920s, ready-to-wear clothing for women comprised more than 75 percent of the industry. Decreasing prices and the latest Parisian designer styles—copied and mass-produced—made fashion accessible to the masses. This “democratization of fashion” meant that it was no longer only the wealthy who could enjoy frequently changing fashions.
It wasn’t just production that was transformed. Department stores, newly developed to be “for and about women,” turned shopping into an enjoyable pastime available to everyone. New publications specifically for women promoted the concept of being “in fashion.” After the deprivations of World War I and the Great Depression, people were eager to return to a consumer lifestyle, and national economic prosperity was contingent on that return. Even when World War II interrupted that development, fashion magazines conveyed the idea that citizens could serve their country and look good doing it.
Accurately foreseeing the future we now live in, economist Victor Lebow wrote in 1955, “Our enormously productive economy demands that we make consumption our way of life, that we convert the buying and use of goods into rituals, that we seek our spiritual satisfactions, our ego satisfactions, in consumption. . . . We need things consumed, burned up, worn out, replaced, and discarded at an ever-increasing pace.”
It took some time for this to come into full effect. It wasn’t until trade protections were phased out over the ten years culminating in 2005 that the fashion industry began its current trajectory. Fewer restrictions meant fashion brands could increase profits by moving operations from expensive domestic manufacturing to lower-wage countries and by importing cheaper goods. Since clothes could be made anywhere, and developing countries could now export unlimited amounts of goods to major consumer countries like the US, the fashion industry became, in Cline’s words, “one of the most globalized, if not the most globalized industry in the world.”
FROM FASHION TO TRASH
With globalization has come complexity. There is no uniform requirement for collecting or reporting exact data about the fashion industry’s full global output, but estimates show the production of clothing has more than doubled since 2000, with between 80 and 150 billion garments produced—or overproduced—each year. We can extrapolate from sales figures the number of items the average American buys (68 per year), many of which are seldom worn. And estimates show that nearly half of the 152 items in an average UK closet are rarely worn, if at all.
Although those numbers are only an educated guess, one thing is sure: We are undoubtedly buying more clothing than ever before. Fast fashion is everywhere: in our stores, in our social media feeds, in our closets. Fashion stylist, writer and consultant Aja Barber explains the appeal of fast fashion with a charge that’s been leveled against other industries: planned obsolescence. “Whiffs of planned obsolescence appear in other systems, but in fashion it’s a little different. It means making products that are far from superior in order to make a quick sale and have a customer who returns often to buy more goods (often to replace the goods they’ve just been sold).” People in lower socio-economic groups are particularly affected by this. “If you always have to go for the twenty-dollar boots because that’s all you can afford and they never last more than a season, next season you’re buying another pair of twenty-dollar boots.”
Whether because the garments have worn out more quickly than expected or we’re just tired of them and want something new, too many of our fashion purchases wind up in the discard pile.
And where do all those unwanted clothes go? Many are donated, which can be a good choice—if the clothing is in usable condition. But donation centers are often overwhelmed by the volume of clothing they receive, much of which is damaged or of poor quality and cannot be resold. A small amount of these rejects are recycled and repurposed. The rest are sent to landfills, incinerated, or shipped to poorer nations for them to deal with.
This practice of “waste colonialism” allows the Global North to offload its problems, ostensibly as a way to stimulate the economies of developing nations. However, the negative consequences of this practice on the receiving countries are undeniable. Their local garment industries are devastated, even as their secondhand clothing markets are burdened with sorting, repairing and selling or disposing of the more than 4.5 million metric tons of cast-off clothing they receive per year. Much of this ends up as waste, which is either dumped or burned, causing significant harm to sensitive eco systems and human health. The resulting environmental risks must then be managed, and these countries are forced to take on debt to cover the costs of dealing with other people’s discards.
#WHATSINMYCLOTHES
We don’t know where our clothes come from or where they go when we’re finished with them, but we want them quickly, and we want them to be cheap. For more than 60 percent of garments, we achieve this by using petrochemicals.
There are few examples of clothing from the past because natural materials like cotton, linen, silk and wool biodegraded, leaving a relatively tiny environmental footprint in the process. But in the mid-20th century, the footprint of fashion began to expand with the development of petroleum-based synthetic fabrics. Nylon, the first fully synthetic fabric, was patented in 1938 and introduced to the public in the form of women’s stockings nearly two years later. By 1958, other petroleum-based fabrics had been developed, including polyester, acrylic and spandex. /BGNES