A Recent News Article (Last 30 Days) That Connects, in Some Fashion, to U.s. History.
Nonfiction
How Fast Fashion Is Destroying the Planet
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FASHIONOPOLIS
The Cost of Fast Fashion and the Future of Dress
Past Dana Thomas
In that location is that old proverb, usually attributed to Yves Saint Laurent: "Fashion fades, style is eternal."
Literally speaking, that actually may no longer exist true, especially when it comes to fast fashion. Fast-fashion brands may not design their clothing to last (and they don't), but as artifacts of a especially consumptive era, they might go an of import role of the fossil tape.
More than sixty percent of textile fibers are now synthetics, derived from fossil fuels, and so if and when our clothing ends up in a landfill (about 85 pct of textile waste material in the United states of america goes to landfills or is incinerated), it will non decay.
Nor will the synthetic microfibers that end up in the sea, freshwater and elsewhere, including the deepest parts of the oceans and the highest glacier peaks. Hereafter archaeologists may look at landfills taken over by nature and discover show of Zara.
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And it is Zara and other brands like information technology that have helped plant flags on the farthest reaches of the planet. In "Fashionopolis," Dana Thomas, a veteran fashion writer, assuredly connects our fast-fashion wardrobes to global economic and climate patterns and crises, rooting the current state of the fashion biosphere every bit a whole — production methods, labor practices and ecology impacts — in the history of the garment industry.
Her narrative is broken up into three manageable sections. The first focuses on today's global fast-fashion and regular manner industries and how they came to be so enormous, voracious, and so seemingly uncontainable. Information technology includes a fascinating account of how NAFTA fabricated possible the international success of fast fashion. The second presents alternative, fifty-fifty reverse, approaches to making article of clothing that Thomas terms "wearisome fashion": locally grown materials, often domestically manufactured or sourced on a relatively small-scale scale, like the farmer and entrepreneur Sarah Bellos'southward American-grown indigo. Lastly, she meets people who are trying to reform the system entirely, from the materials we apply to how clothes are produced and the means we store.
Throughout, Thomas reminds u.s.a. that the textile industry has always been one of the darkest corners of the world economy. The defining product of the Industrial Revolution, textiles were crucial to the development of our globalized capitalist system, and its abuses today are built on a long history. Slave labor in the American South supplied factories in both England, where they were notorious for child labor and other horrors, and the United States, where mill fires took the lives of recent immigrants at the plough of the 20th century. Thomas reports that at that place are immigrant workers in Los Angeles today who are victims of wage theft and exploitation, not to mention the Bangladeshi, Chinese, Vietnamese and other laborers who face up working weather that are at best grim and at worst inhumane. Manner is an industry that has depended on the toil of the powerless and the voiceless, and on keeping them that fashion.
In one of the nearly powerful parts of the book, Thomas recounts the tragedy of the 2013 Rana Plaza factory plummet in Bangladesh, told through the harrowing experiences of ii survivors. The explosion killed i,100 people and injured another 2,500. And this was non a one-off: "Between 2006 and 2012, more than 500 Bangladeshi garment workers died in factory fires." And, she notes, none of this news — the Rana Plaza catastrophe was widely covered — diminished Americans' appetites for cheap vesture. In fact, Thomas writes, that same year Americans "spent $340 billion on mode," and "much of it was produced in Bangladesh, some of it past Rana Plaza workers in the days leading up to the collapse."
Non all of the book is this pessimistic: There is plenty of bubbliness and glamour for fashion lovers to become excited about. Thomas displays her skills as a civilisation and style reporter as she visits the visionaries who are attempting to remake the industry, if not from whole fabric, then maybe from lab-grown or recycled fibers of some kind. She conjures a pastoral idyll, for instance, in her depiction of the designer Natalie Chanin and her concern, Alabama Chanin, a line of cotton clothing produced virtually entirely in Florence, Ala., once the "Cotton wool T-Shirt Capital of the World." In Thomas'south telling, these garments are both environmentally sustainable and humane, though with a revenue of merely over $3 million last twelvemonth, the 30-person company is no replacement for mass production when it comes to dressing seven billion people.
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Amid the book'south delights are Thomas's sketches of her private subjects. I tin't get her description of a woman as "peaches-and-foam pretty" out of my head; I know exactly what she looks like. The writer also has a souvenir for bringing luxury to life: She conjures Moda Operandi'due south London exhibit and so vividly that I felt as though I'd moved in.
In the concluding section, Thomas marvels at the ingenuity of those trying to "disrupt" fashion. She makes a strong statement for the importance of science applied to (what are frequently seen as) the frivolities of fashion, especially if we want to move away from the unartful excesses of mass product.
Stella McCartney gets a disproportionate amount of attending here, and for adept reason. McCartney has long been committed to sustainable practices, in her own business concern and others'. As the caput designer at Chloé in the late 1990s, she refused to include leather or fur in her collections, which many executives then considered a expiry wish (some still exercise). She made it piece of work, and has amplified those practices in her eponymous company, using, for example, but "reclaimed" cashmere, refusing to apply polyvinyl chloride or untraceable rayon.
Nevertheless, it is in contextualizing this single industry from a broader climate perspective that the volume falls brusque. Some statistics are exaggerated: Livestock are not responsible for "at least one-half of all global greenhouse gas emissions," but rather closer to fifteen percent of them; nor is way product lone consuming h2o at a rate that, if maintained, "will surpass the globe'southward supply past 40 percent past 2030" (non even the world'due south total water demand necessarily will). And much of the discussion of new materials and production methods raises further questions. What are the differences between organic, conventional and "Amend Cotton"? (Organic cotton wool is periodically touted as a sustainable alternative, though it currently makes up only about 0.four percent of the cotton market place, making it nearly incommunicable for any company to rely on now or in the near future.) Another: Does the landfilling of non-constructed wear matter? Thomas doesn't say, simply in fact it does, because it contributes to global emission of methyl hydride, a stiff rut-trapping gas.
A lot of faith is placed hither in the idea of "a circular — or closed-loop — system, in which products are continually recycled, reborn, reused. Nothing, ideally, should go in the trash." But the practical considerations — cost, efficiency, resource limitations — are oft left unaddressed. Ultimately, Thomas finds that renting article of clothing is the most sustainable model, and that feels like a more realistic solution than the futuristic materials she describes at length. In the finish I was left wondering: If the fashion industry is this damaging, and none of these developments alone volition fix the problem, shouldn't governments be regulating product beyond enacting stricter pollution standards?
That may exist a question for another volume; it is non the goal of "Fashionopolis" to provide all the answers. Thomas has succeeded in calling attending to the major problems in the $ii.4-trillion-a-year manufacture, in a manner that will engage not only the way set only besides those interested in economic science, human rights and climate policy. Her portraits of the figures who are transforming a field that hasn't changed all that much in the concluding century or more sound at once similar letters from the hereafter and like cornball reveries of life in a smaller, simpler globe. If we tin can combine them, this book suggests, the envisioned "fashionopolis" could transform from an urban nightmare into a shining city on a loma.
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