The Ethical Wardrobe, Part I: It's Complicated

As my mom would say, I was being a bit of a Debbie Downer about my Britex talk last week. But now that the sting of not being perfect has worn off, I’d like to share out some of the content. There’s a lot of it – more than I was able to get through on Saturday – so I’m going to break it up into a few posts and include some extra links and resources. Without further ado, then, here’s my schpeal on crafting an ethical wardrobe.

Fashion, Emotion, and Cold Hard Facts

I began my talk by asking the audience to share some of the emotions they typically felt while shopping. Responses included “guilt,” “frustration,” “score!” “having fun,” “frivolous,” “annoyance”…and more “guilt.” If you're reading this now, take a minute to think about it. Do you love shopping? Does it fill you with anxiety? Maybe a little bit of both?

Although our ages, believes, incomes, and shopping habits may vary wildly, there are two things that we and roughly every other person on the planet do every day: eat, and get dressed. And yet for something we do every day, the choice of what to wear and what to eat can be pretty mentally and emotionally exhausting. When I asked my audience to think about some of the emotions they had towards shopping, many were negative. Why is that?

Well, clothes are complicated. They’re one of the most obvious expressions of our personality, tastes, lifestyle, even social status. We spend hours hunting for them, making them, taking care of them, talking about them, loving them, hating them. And advertisers spend billions of dollars every year trying to get us to buy them.

Clothes carry an emotional weight for all of us: that adrenaline rush you get when scoring a designer label for a third of the price; the pride you feel when designing and sewing your own clothes; the shame you may have felt when you couldn’t afford to dress like your classmates, neighbors, or colleagues.

A lot of our identity, and increasingly our sense of morality, is wrapped up in what we wear. And that’s a lot of pressure! We now have access to an overwhelming number of facts around global poverty, global warming, and the effects that fast fashion is having on people and our planet. I can go online and find some pretty sobering statistics about all of this stuff within in minutes, like the fact that:

• If each person owned only one pair of pants, one shirt, and one jacket, that would be 21 billion articles of clothing. If you were to count each of those, one per second, it would take nearly 672 years. And I, for one, own far more than three articles of clothing.
• In fact, the average American family spends about $1,700 a year on clothes.
• The average American also trashes about 65 pounds of textiles per year.
• In contrast, we know that 2.4 billion people worldwide live on less than 2.00 a day.
• The average wage of a garment worker in India is $68 – 100/ month. That would be about $200 – 300/ month in the U.S. when you adjust for cost of living differences.
• There are over 27 million modern-day slaves worldwide, many of whom support the textile or cotton industries.
• Finally, if everyone consumed at the rate of the U.S., we would need 3 to 5 planets. 

I’ve been collecting facts like this and reading up on sweatshop labor and environmental issues for a long time. And I've been obsessed with clothes and fashion design for as long as I can remember. It's been consistently difficult for me to reconcile my love of beautiful clothing with the realities of the fashion industry. And I know I'm not the only one.

The Wake Up Call

I first started learning about the effects fast fashion and the full scope of global inequality in college. The thing is, while these stats were pretty shocking, none of them ever inspired the “aha” moment – or the action – that I hoped they would. I bought my sweatshop free sneakers and fair trade coffee, and nagged my friends about how they should too (you can imagine how fun I was at parties). But I wasn’t really sure why, other than it seemed like the right thing to do.

Then in 2010, my now-husband and I took a trip to Cairo, Egypt. This was a year before the Egyptian revolution, so the political and economic tension was pretty palpable. We saw the pyramids. We took a Nile cruise. But for me, the most memorable part of the trip was a visit to a carpet factory outside the city. The owner gave us a tour of the gallery, proudly showed off the expertly woven rugs, and then asked if we’d like to meet the people who made them. So we went downstairs.

The carpet makers? All children, all under twelve. Smiling sweetly, but working. And that really was when it hit me. When all of those facts I’d been collecting over the years were ignited by a purely emotional experience. I realized that if I’d been born into different circumstances – or even born in the U.S. a century ago – that could have been me. It could have been one of my students. It could have been my child.

I have no idea what went on behind the scenes at this carpet factory, or whether the children really attended school like the owner told us. But the bottom line is that this is a reality for 215 million of the world’s children. That’s 1 in 7.  And child labor is only one of the many global injustices that take place in the name of fashion – so that I can buy that $14 linen skirt for so perfect for Cairo in the summer. 

This experience didn’t inspire me to go out and buy every piece of fair trade clothing I could get my hands on. It didn’t even inspire me take political action (mostly because I wasn’t sure where to start). But it did start me on a journey toward becoming a more conscientious shopper. And a year after Cairo, I started this blog.

Although my personal fight against fast fashion can feel small – even frivolous – at times, it’s part of a movement that is gaining more and more traction. A movement that starts with the question: Who made my clothes?