The blurb on the front cover says this: “Overdressed does for T-shirts and leggings what Fast Food Nation did for burgers and fries.” — Katha Pollitt, The Nation.
Well, look, Fast Food Nation didn’t trouble me all that much, though I don’t remember many of the details any longer. But Overdressed does raise multiple points of concern.
Before I talk content, I will say that if you’re looking for a tightly argued, data-dense sort of book, you won’t find it here. This is, again, the sort of book that could have been a really long article instead (we need “long journal articles” to be a type of publication that exists outside the scholarly world, as there are large numbers of books where the author has stretched the main thesis with repetition and wandering tangents in order to make the basic point book-length).
The author is also young. Now, that’s not to say that a thirty-something categorically can’t write well — and maybe I’m getting old, for her statement that she was in middle school in the 90s to seem jarringly recent. (She seems to be about 35 or so.)
And whenever she moves from the third person to first person narratives about herself, she seems to be more than a little flighty, and her personal discoveries and too-long discussions of her personal fashion taste are not as interesting as she thinks they are. She says as a teen and a college student, she was heavily into thrift store shopping, but then discovered H&M; and other cheap brands and didn’t look back, until an epiphany a couple years ago. She also reportedly had no idea how to do even the most basic sewing task until a recent class, and enthuses about her discovery that she could remake a find that wasn’t quite right and her future plans to take an “intermediate sewing class.”
But her main point is that, as recently as the past two decades, fashion has changed dramatically in the US and, really, the world. In very short order, China came to dominate clothing production; then, more recently, China began to specialize in relatively more value-added production, and more basics (undies, t-shirts, and other very simple designs) began to be produced in even lower-cost countries such as Bangladesh. Clothing retailing is ever more dominated by a few large chains, giving them ever-more power to demand lower prices from producers. And “fast fashion” retailers such as Forever 21 and Zara emphasize constant inflow of new styles.
The bottom line is that prices for clothing have declined dramatically, but so too has quality. Clothing has become disposable, with purchasers thinking of their purchases as good for wearing a couple times, then sitting in a closet or being donated to Goodwill. (This is where she gets too anecdotal — she describes her former tendency to purchase clothes constantly and get excited by 50% off “deals”, and profiles several young women with a youtube following, and concludes that this is the norm, rather than a minority.) Even the thrift stores are overwhelmed with the quantity of poor-quality clothing donated — much of it gets shipped to Africa or gets recycled into rags or reprocessed into such items as insulation or carpet padding — and the environmental cost of producing fundamentally useless clothing (manmade fibers coming from oil, others requiring toxic chemicals to process, and, in any case, requiring energy to manufacture) are substantial.
Now, to be sure, I’ve bought plenty of cheap clothing — it’s hard to avoid it — and I think she goes too far when she says that these clothes fall apart after two or three washes (unless there’s a whole world of clothing that’s even cheaper than what they sell at Kohls and Meijers). And there are plenty of families who buy cheap clothing not in endless quantities to follow fashion trends, but to clothe their families. And a lot of what makes clothing cheaper now than it was is not durability but simplicity of design, which could be beneficial to struggling families.
But it is absolutely true that clothes have gotten flimsier. The fabric for many cheap blouses is so thin that it becomes necessary to layer. “Denim” pants at H&M; (I stopped in while running an errand today) are not anything I would recognize as denim, but more a thin denim-colored twill. And I likewise stepped into Forever 21, and was shocked at their clothing — very thin fabric, dresses that consisted of two long shapeless knit panels sewn together. In my own shopping, I find that it’s hit-or-miss as to whether a top or sweater I buy will hold up in the wash, or shrink or lose its shape. (I keep telling myself that, if I can just get back down a size, I’ll stop shopping so cheaply. But, on the other hand, I worry that if I don’t, I’ll just pay twice as much for a sweater that loses its shape quickly.)
(Forever 21 was a store that I was quite unfamiliar with until reading this book. Founded by a Korean immigrant in the 80s in LA, it’s now worldwide, and some of its clothing definitely has a Japanese/Korean look to it. I was also surprised to see a disproportionate number of older Koreans while running my lunchtime errand (maybe shopping for daughters?), though the store was mostly empty, given the time of day. But much of the stock looked like something I’d find languishing at the thrift store, rejected by customers. Or just looked bizarre, as if their clothing designs were generated by a computer program set to randomly combine cut, fabric, and pattern.)
She also profiles a woman who’s trying to revive sewing one’s own clothes. She claims that no one under the age of 30 knows how to sew, or even sew a button or hem a pair of pants, so they discard clothing, or wear it unmended, or leave it at the back of the closet abandoned — if that’s true, it is appalling, though I don’t know if she has more than anecdotal evidence. (My sister can’t sew – or won’t sew, at least, having gotten my mom to do this for her, for most of her adult life.) But, even if seamstresses at clothing factories were paid more generously than now, the economies of scale mean it’s unlikely that sewing clothes will ever return to being a way of saving money, though it’s a handy skill for things you can’t find at the store (just the right costume for your kid, or for the school play or Christmas pageant, or a unique outfit for a fashionista) and basic mending is certainly a life skill.
The second theme in her book is the race to the bottom in terms of wages, with retailers such as Wal-Mart pushing their suppliers to keep prices low or even reduce them. Part of the low-prices demand is met by skimping on fit, construction, and fabric quality, but part is due to the global search for low-price factories, and it seems that only when retailers have exhausted the global supply of cheap labor will supply-and-demand increase wages. She doesn’t really have much of an answer here, though, except to say that everyone should buy American (without really recognizing the fact that the gulf between the 99.9% of clothing produced abroad and American-made clothing is great enough that it’s a tall order to ask this of her readers).
You know what would really change the equation? Robotics. My clothing + robot + production google search had as its top hit this article from livescience.com from 2012 describing plans to develop robot-sewing technology, to bring jobs back to the U.S. This set of articles was the only substantial hit, though — nothing more recent. (Or would the Chinese just buy the robots for use in their own factories?) Of course, that brings up all the unsolved issues of what happens when the jobs disappear due to mechanization, but it still feels overdue.
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