Overdressed: The Shockingly High Cost of Cheap Fashion by Elizabeth L. Cline
In her introduction to “Overdressed: The Shockingly High Cost of Cheap Fashion,” the journalist Elizabeth L. Cline recalls buying “seven pairs of $7 shoes” at Kmart. Regret follows, and soon afterward, a wardrobe inventory. When Cline cleans out her closet she discovers, among other things, 61 tops, 60 T-shirts, 15 cardigans and hooded sweatshirts, 21 skirts and 20 pairs of shoes, most of which she never wore.
A quote from the former Vogue editor Diana Vreeland comes to mind: “Give ’em what they never knew they wanted.” Fast-fashion retailers like H&M, Topshop and Forever 21 are great at hawking what we never knew we wanted. Not only that, they offer it at steadily reduced prices. Cline, who admits to being a “reformed fast-fashion junkie,” notes that “because of low prices, chasing trends is now a mass activity, accessible to anyone with a few bucks to spare.” Quality is no longer an issue, because you need clothes to last just “until the next trend comes along.”
The wastefulness encouraged by buying cheap and chasing the trends is obvious, but the hidden costs are even more galling. Cline contends that “disposable clothing” is damaging the environment, the economy and even our souls, and she presents a dense and sobering skein of data to support her thesis. Today, the United States makes only 2 percent of the clothing its consumers purchase, compared with roughly 50 percent in 1990; in 2010, Goodwill sold 163 million pounds of used clothes and household items. Cline travels to Guangdong Province in China, a region crowded with textile factories, and observes, “The air pollution was so thick I couldn’t photograph anything a quarter-mile off the highway — it was lost in the smog.”
One antidote to this high-speed style Armageddon is “slow fashion” — a concept, like “slow food,” that is itself garnering trend-worthy status. There is a rash of “ethical fashion” blogs and books on the subject (Lucy Siegle’s “To Die For” comes to mind), and the movement is becoming so popular that even the global clothing giants have glommed on. H&M, for example, now has a “Conscious Collection,” a line of organic cotton fashions designed to appeal to the conscientious customer.
Cline adheres to the “slow” mantra — “make, alter and mend” — and advises us to buy recycled, organic and locally produced clothing. She’s a persuasive advocate; when she writes that “sewing gives back a feeling of agency and self-sufficiency,” I’m tempted to bring the Singer up from the basement. But she could have delved even deeper: why have so many consumers (including Cline) become hooked on fast fashion in the past decade? Is our lust for cheap clothing symptomatic of a larger malaise? What role do social media, which encourage relentless image consciousness, play in our shopping choices? Do we believe that by continually acquiring and displaying what we wear, we are creating an identity, an eternal brand of the self? And what’s really going on in those disturbing “haul” videos, in which shoppers post reviews of their purchases on YouTube?
When Cline writes that “people crave connections to their stuff,” she prompts another question: Have we somehow become disconnected from ourselves? If we don’t stop to consider this, we may end up perpetually rushing out to buy more “stuff,” never realizing what we truly need, genuinely want and cannot afford to waste.
https://www.nytimes.com/2013/02/10/books/review/overdressed-by-elizabeth-l-cline.html
