Full disclosure: this book presses all of my buttons and I err on the geek side when it comes to consumerism. If you have no fear, read on.
I heard this author give an interview on NPR and I was instantly hooked on the premise. The tagline reads: "The shockingly high cost of cheap fashion". Cline then dives into her own journey of cheap fashion by confessing to a binge in which she parts from a K-Mart with seven pairs of $7 markdown shoes. She begins by stating in her opening chapter that "When buying trendy, cheap fashion, quality has a relative meaning. It is best measured in washes. As in, how many times can you wash it before the fabric pills or stains, the garment loses it's shape, a button falls off, or a seam busts open. In the age of cheap fashion, you just need it to last until the next trend comes along."
Um, yes. I've succumbed to this thinking for the last six years or so. When shopping for maternity clothes at Target, I was (and still am) thankful to wear cute styles for very little money for what amounts to a short amount of time. As a mom outfitting a child whose shoe size can change two clicks before I realize it, I am grateful for $10 tennis shoes. But, if there was one thing I figured out while buying the bare minimum as an expectant mom, it was that I really could be content with a lot less in my closet. Pretty liberating, because I wasn't held back by anything I bought in the past, so I could just concentrate on buying the things that I absolutely needed.
Cline goes on to detail that the 1950s was when we started to have more disposable income for clothes. But, the space we had in our homes precluded the amount we could bring into it. The average house size was 983 square feet, and in the mid 2000's that number had grown to 2,349 square feet. Style ads were typical in those days versus sales ads now. Department stores of today have to turn over their inventory every ten weeks.
All of this I knew because I have a degree in Consumer Science. I learned about buying, negotiating in different cultures, and factoring markdown dollars into a store's profit. Fifteen years ago. But, now there is fast fashion. "Fast fashion is a radical method of retailing that has broken away from seasonal selling and puts out new inventory constantly throughout the year." Basically, the more often you have people coming through your stores, the more profit you make. Even at ultra cheap prices. New products arrive every two weeks, or as often as every day for the fast fashion champion stores like Zara, H&M, or Forever 21. So clearly, at price points that top out at $20, our disposable income translates into disposable clothes. At what cost? The author encourages us to punch in "minimum wage" into a google search for our clothing with made in India, China, Bangladesh tags. What kind of living are we encouraging for those that make our clothing?
Cline goes rogue as a fictional US company wanting to manufacture clothing cheaply in China. Armed with "samples" from her own closet, she visits factories in China to find out how cheaply the product can be copied. Many of these workers live in dorm style housing on site and work six days a week, twelve hour days. Some work as many as seven days a week, with only one day off a month.
"The fashion industry has gotten too large and is competing too fiercely on low price, and the only way it is able to run now is by creating new products cheaply and constantly. The quality of our clothing has been chipped away. The reason why so many of us have no kinship with or respect for anything in our closets and why fashion can seem so self-indulgent and pretentious nowadays is because fashion has become a slick, industrialized, heavily marketed industry. Loving most clothes today would be like loving a fast-food sandwich."
So Cline's final analysis is a return to investment dressing- aiming to stock her closet with clothing that is well made, alterable, and mendable. This is definitely an uptake in cost, and many of us cannot afford it. My personal take away is to be more mindful of what I bring into my house. When I opened my Fall/Winter wardrobe, I had a visceral reaction of "Blech!" to about a 1/3 of it. But there were several pieces that I was actually excited to put on again. These were the pieces that I had agonized over spending the money on, but felt beautiful in every time without fail. I have also hung onto two fantastic dresses from twenty years ago- a madras patchwork shift dress in sea blue shades, and another shift dress that my mother made for me; also in blue. As for dressing my kids, my hope is that I will make good use of the consignment outlets available to me, and perhaps really learn to sew some simple things for them. And to continue watching "I Love Lucy" reruns.
