Fast Fashion
Last week the New York Times covered the publication of Cambridge’s “Well Dressed?,” a report on the clothing and textiles industry in the UK. Clothing’s recent shift to disposability -- with stores like H&M and Old Navy pumping out cheap new stuff every week or so – spells trouble for landfills, the atmosphere, human rights, etc. etc. While generally I love H&M (basically everything in my wardrobe that I didn’t get for free is from there), I’ve been thinking a lot about this problem myself of late, and was happy to spend a little time on the subject.
The Times article lingered on the idea of leasing clothing -- probably because they hypothesized that readers would find this an icky and unrealistic idea -- and got some choice bits from a head honcho at Marks & Spencer, who thinks that the “green-ness” of clothing will soon influence consumer choice like it does for food (in some countries). I appreciated the additional voices, and was disappointed that the article couldn’t draw any comparisons between the US and UK industries. (Probably because most of the data doesn’t exist.) Most alarmingly, the NYT article glosses over the report’s decisive view of the US cotton industry, burying mention of “so-called organic cotton” at the end of the second page.
The primary ideas I took away from the “Well Dressed?” report were: 1. US cotton is catastrophic for the industry and the environment, and 2. a shift in consumer behavior is the most important way to alleviate the environmental impact of the clothing and textile industry. Perhaps I’m the last to know, but I had only a very vague notion of the energy, water, and pesticides required to produce cotton by conventional means; I also didn’t understand the extent to which US subsidies impact cotton production in other countries. [Admittedly, the report is written from a decidedly EU point of view -- I’m very curious to see what kind of conclusions an American think tank would come up with.] Of course I’d like to think greater awareness of the issue combined with better choices could enable me to make a difference. A quick inquiry revealed that American Apparel has 6 or 7 organic t-shirt and underwear options (out of hundreds of conventional options); additional organic choices come from companies that appear to make mostly yoga clothes. By the end of the Cambridge report, my choices as a consumer, to buy the right things – durable, organic – and to do the right things with them – repair them, wash them in cooler water, and hang them dry – are the “simplest action that would reduce the environmental impact of the sector.”
Which leads me to a big question: how can consumers successfully transit between the current way of thinking about clothes to an opposite one (and then possibly back again)? With the utopian ideology espoused by folks like those in Cradle to Cradle, the “fast fashion” impulse could be supported by the right design – if clothes were at once fashionable, produced with little impact on the environment, and easily disposable, we could buy as much as we want and throw away without worry. In the interim, as “Well Dressed?” suggests, we have to resist fast fashion, make do, and mend. Is this shift possible to achieve on a massive scale? Unlike the authors of the report, I think changing attitudes about clothes requires a wholesale rethinking of what we view as prosperous, safe, clean, and beautiful. In the meantime, we just feel bad and do little.
New York Times: "Can Polyester Change the World?"
University of Cambridge Institute for Manufacturing: "Well Dressed?"
Marketplace Money Report's story about the "fashion" part of eco-fashion
Megan Metcalf
3 Comments
Reader Comments (3)
This is a fascinating subject--trying to figure out the right foundation to make the gears of the world turn in an efficient and positive way. Although I can't say I understand "fast fashion" (I guess I'm just a beatnik at heart), thinking back on my economics training there are at least three basic ways to influence outcomes, three basic levers to turn the ship of state:
1. Regulate behavior of producers, manufacturers, and/or consumers. In other words, require folks to do stuff or not do stuff. For instance, you can cap imports from Uruguay. You can make it illegal to buy purple blouses. You can require that a certain amount of production be organic or outlaw certain pesticides.
2. Tax or subsidize activities, people, assets, or transactions (in other words, influence the market by increasing or decreasing prices). For instance, you can tax purchases of clothing and use the funds to subsidize the development of cleaner technologies. The higher price of clothes will mean people buy less of them and the subsidies to technology development will spur investment in that area. This is a "softer" form of influence than simply outlawing something. At its best, it can be used to correct for externalities that the producer is not necessarily pricing in (for example, the impact of production on the environment). In the end, we must give back as much as we take from the world just to maintain our stock of global potential and preserve the possibilities of our lives.
3. Influence culture, through moral persuasion, fashion, and/or other means. For example, convince people to buy more durable clothes, either because durable clothes are "in" or because people become more environmentally aware. Fashion is inherently capricious and unpredictable, but moral suasion may be effective in certain environments.
Realistically, the solution is a combination of regulation (including international agreements), tax policy, education/culture, and (not directly controllable but subject to influence) technology. There is also an interaction here that has to be acknowledged--regulation, taxation, government (indeed, all of our institutions) ultimately rest on a cultural foundation.
I've always been fascinated by this crossroads for a number of reasons. Just to pick on one aspect, when trying to predict outcomes (trying to predict the future), the role of "fashion", broadly speaking (i.e. culture), is often the most difficult to factor in. In a way, fashion becomes the element of chance, the catch-all for that which is dark in the human soul, the quantum unquantifiable element, the demon of the mathematician...
So I agree with you that ultimately this requires a phase-shift, a state-change, a tipping point. And navigating that solution will require intelligence, wisdom, and passion, an open rethinking of our goals and beliefs. If politics is the art of the possible, the problems of this world will require us to push the envelope of those possibilities...
this is not the appropriate place to post
but did you learn to make hummus?
we will make it this weekend.
I think the clothing swap is a great idea. I always remind myself that the stuff I think is junk at a thrift is anothers treasure while I hunt for mine. One of the best things about my Gap khakis I no longer like is that I paid $3 for them a year ago so back into the donation pile they go. It's almost like renting the clothing and someone benefits from the habit.