Review by New York Times Review
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. Avis Cardella is the author of "Spent: Memoirs of a Shopping Addict."
Copyright (c) The New York Times Company [February 3, 2013]
Review by Booklist Review
The era of socially responsible clothing is upon us. Certainly, thanks to media sensationalism, most American consumers are aware by now of exposes of underpaid factory workers here and overseas and the sincere attempt by U.S. corporations to ban such treatment. Yet just as many readers would be fascinated (in the worst way) by the industry itself and the waste that our clothing habits engender. Journalist Cline chronicles the excesses from every angle, beginning with the YouTube shopping hauls, in which young consumers provide reviews of garments from the likes of H&M, Zara, and Target. She probes previously underreported segments of fashion, such as what it costs to manufacture different items and how retailers shave costs; the composition of man-made fabrics, such as polyester (oil dependent and not biodegradable); and the behind-the scenes disposition of donated articles by the Salvation Army and Goodwill. Most important is her discovery and adoption of ethical fashion, in which quality pieces triumph through the patronage of local designers, by a return to sewing and hand-embellished garments, and by the decidedly unfashionable notion of wearing clothes unique enough to not care about trendiness.--Jacobs, Barbara Copyright 2010 Booklist
From Booklist, Copyright (c) American Library Association. Used with permission.
Review by Publisher's Weekly Review
The good news for shoppers, notes Brooklyn journalist Cline in her engagingly pointed, earnestly researched study, is that cheap knockoffs of designer clothing can be found in discount stores almost instantly. The bad news is that "fast fashion" has killed America's garment industry and wreaked havoc on wages and the environment, especially in China, where most of the cheap clothes and textiles are now made. A self-described shopaholic of low-end stores H&M and Forever 21, which emerged from the first budget retailers in the 1990s like Old Navy and Target, which marketed cheap fashion as chic, Cline traces the phenomenon soup-to-nuts from the sad consolidation of the big department stores and depletion of New York's garment district, once supplying the massive labor needed for making clothes. From there, she takes her narrative to the factories overseas where workers are paid a fraction of what Americans earn. Cheap imports flooded the U.S. market, for example, shutting down textile mecca Inman Mills, in Greenville, S.C. Cline visited the root of inequity at massive, state-of-the-art factories in China where millions of "flavor-of-the-month" garments are manufactured for export, creating a new middle class for some Chinese while locking the lowest paid workers (also in Bangladesh, Cambodia, and Vietnam) in nonunion, slave-like poverty. As the fabrication of artificial fibers takes a walloping environmental toll, Cline urges, in her sharp wakeup call, a virtuous return to sewing, retooling, and buying eco-friendly "slow fashion." (June) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.
(c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
