Fashionopolis: the Price of Fast Fashion and the Future of Clothes
Fashionopolis
The Price of Fast Fashion - and the Hereafter of Clothes
Hardcover, 306 pages |
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My gramps, Bunny Meyer, ran a Chicago tannery called Gutmann Leather. When I was a kid, it was a source of both terror and pride.
The tannery was full of frightening, evil-smelling machines and chemicals. Information technology had also been in the family since 1885. Bunny took pride in providing high-quality leather and loftier-paying, stable employment. My begetter and his siblings were proud, too, but when he died in 2002, none of them wanted to run Gutmann. The tannery — like well-nigh in the United states of america — shut downwardly.
Reading mode announcer Dana Thomas' Fashionopolis: The Price of Fast Fashion and the Future of Clothes -- a snappy, clear-minded attack on the fashion industry'south rampant labor and environmental abuses — brought back my mixed feelings well-nigh Gutmann Leather. Tanning is a dirty business, start to finish. But, often, so is exporting manufacturing. Would it be better for Gutmann to reopen and strive to model the best possible labor and ecology practices available in the leather industry, while pushing scientists to meliorate ecological options still further — or should there be no more than leather production at all?
The answer, per Thomas, is both. Leather won't exist eco-friendly till information technology's grown in labs. Only until then, domestic, regulated production is a crucial challenge to fast fashion, which Thomas defines as "the production of trendy, inexpensive garments in vast amounts at lightning speed in subcontracted factories, to be touted in thousands of concatenation stores." Fast style is "a muddied, unscrupulous business that exploited humans and Earth akin." Information technology has decimated labor in developed countries, human being rights in developing countries, and environmental quality across the earth — and Thomas asks readers to resist it however we tin can.
Fashionopolis lays arraign squarely at the industry'south door. At no point does Thomas shame consumers. But she does ask u.s. to change our ways. As a nation, she writes, Americans sent xiv 1000000 tons of clothing to landfills in 2018, while shopping at a feverish pace. This "manner bulimia" is enabled past fast fashion companies. In turn, it encourages their social and environmental malpractice.
Manner bulimia's clearest victims are the sweatshop laborers who make the clothes nosotros wear and throw away. In Fashionopolis's near wrenching chapter, Thomas visits sweatshops in Los Angeles and People's republic of bangladesh, interviewing workers, advocates, and survivors of sweatshop disasters. Of the 2010 That'south It Sportswear garment manufacturing plant burn down near Dhaka, she writes, "The scene was familiar: locked exits; workers defenestrating themselves." That judgement should exist unthinkable, and all the same anyone who has consistently read the news over the past few years will, in fact, recognize the scene. Thomas quotes the Los Angeles garment-worker organizer Mariela Martinez on that widespread recognition: "'Listen, we all know our s--t'south made in sweatshops,' she said. 'But nosotros put it in the back of our minds. Nobody cares.'"
We also put the fashion industry'due south ecological practices in the back of our minds. Per Thomas, the Earth Bank estimates that way "is responsible for nearly 20 pct of all industrial pollution annually [and] releases 10 percent of the carbon emissions in our air." Consumers oft turn a blind centre to this damage, as we do to sweatshop labor. Fashionopolis strives to make us pay attention.
Thomas does this primarily by advocating for "slow fashion," which she defines as "a growing move of makers, designers, merchants, and manufacturers worldwide who, in response to fast fashion and globalization, accept significantly dialed back their footstep and financial ambition," choosing to "[honor] adroitness and [respect] tradition while embracing modern technology to brand production cleaner and more efficient." Rightshoring, bringing operations back home, is part of this. So are fair labor practices and clean production of everything from cotton wool thread to stonewashed jeans. So is buying slow-fashion wear, which, Thomas argues, places the consumer within that sphere of laurels and respect. More importantly, it demonstrates to the fast-fashion manufacture that there is fiscal incentive to alter.
Fashionopolis is most flawed when information technology comes to those consumers that cannot afford slow fashion. The only options Thomas offers are luxury rental, consignment, and resale, which for many remains prohibitively expensive. The only options for at present, at least. In a affiliate on "cradle-to-cradle" fashion, she describes new scientific methods for reusing fabrics, visiting companies such as Italy's ECONYL and the United kingdom's Worn Again that recycle i type of material into some other. ECONYL turns nylon into fabrics used in "clothing linings, dancewear, and carpets. Speedo swimsuits. Breitling watches. Adidas socks."
Until ECONYL, Worn Again, and their peers dominate the textile marketplace, Fashionopolis is clear on consumers' responsibilities: Buy less clothing, and buy every bit responsibly as possible. Seek sweatshop-free labor. Ready clothes that start wearing out. And when a garment'southward life ends, find it a new purpose rather than sending it to the landfill — and consider not replacing it right away. None of these changes are massive merely, according to Fashionopolis, together they'll go a long manner.
Lily Meyer is a author and translator living in Cincinnati, Ohio.
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