the shockingly high cost of cheap fashion

Maybe, they said, this is our wake-up call. Designers and retailers and editors convened. Predictions were made that this was finally the moment the industry would grapple with the system it had created that a reset was on the way. With so much tragedy and fear in the world, with people hunkered down in their homes, clothes were the absolute least of the matter.Īt the same time, stories leaked about garment workers in faraway countries in desperate straits as the losses were passed down the supply chain. Stores were closed, ateliers darkened, fabric mills shuttered, orders for fall clothes canceled and spring shipments turned away at department store loading bays. Over the same period, brands both high and mass have become fluent in (and florid with) the language of sustainability, each vying to be more carbon neutral than the next.Īnd that was before the pandemic, which caused the fashion world to go into free fall. For years one of the biggest pieces of online news was the data point (now largely disavowed yet somehow still being parroted by many) that fashion was the second greatest polluter on the planet.Įver since the Rana Plaza garment district disaster in 2013, there has been increased scrutiny on the exploitation of cheap labor by global fashion brands. Yet at this point, it’s not really news to anyone that fashion is a major contributor to climate change. (Indeed, if he were alive today, he might well imagine a fashionista who got swallowed by a mountain of discarded finery.)īut as we prepare for the re-emergence, and how and where we shop once again becomes a topic of conversation, is it scary enough?Īll of which illuminate the damage being done to both humans and the environment by the ever-churning cycle of cheap shirts and skirts and slip dresses the growing addiction to the promise of different and better embodied by an outfit fresh from the box and the tendency to toss the old in the trash. It’s as scary as any adult tale Roald Dahl ever wrote. The book is the latest entry in a growing genre of nonfiction: the consumption horror story. This is a hundred pages or so before she is warned not to wear makeup to a landfill in Kpone, an area in Ghana where 2.8 million items of castoff clothing are added per week, because “the chemicals in the landfill would make mascara congeal on my eyelashes.”

Early on in “Unraveled,” a new book about the dark underbelly of fashion, the author, Maxine Bédat, describes walking through a factory in Guangdong, China, that specializes in acid-washing jeans, picking her way over dark puddles of “iridescent, bubbling content” that had spilled from industrial washing machines and was sloshing around on the floor.

The shockingly high cost of cheap fashion