{"id":795,"date":"2013-10-08T23:27:00","date_gmt":"2013-10-08T23:27:00","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/admin.patheos.com\/blogs\/janetheactuary\/2013\/10\/from-the-library-overdressed-the-shockingly-high-cost-of-cheap-fashion-by-elizabeth-l-cline.html"},"modified":"2013-10-08T23:27:00","modified_gmt":"2013-10-08T23:27:00","slug":"from-the-library-overdressed-the-shockingly-high-cost-of-cheap-fashion-by-elizabeth-l-cline","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/janetheactuary\/2013\/10\/from-the-library-overdressed-the-shockingly-high-cost-of-cheap-fashion-by-elizabeth-l-cline.html","title":{"rendered":"From the library: Overdressed: the Shockingly High Cost of Cheap Fashion by Elizabeth L. Cline"},"content":{"rendered":"\n<\/head>

The blurb on the front cover says this:\u00a0 \u201cOverdressed does for T-shirts and leggings what Fast Food Nation did for burgers and fries.\u201d \u2014 Katha Pollitt, The Nation.<\/p>\n

Well, look, Fast Food Nation<\/em> didn\u2019t trouble me all that much, though I don\u2019t remember many of the details any longer.\u00a0 But Overdressed<\/em> does raise multiple points of concern.<\/p>\n

Before I talk content, I will say that if you\u2019re looking for a tightly argued, data-dense sort of book, you won\u2019t find it here.\u00a0 This is, again, the sort of book that could have been a really long article instead (we need \u201clong journal articles\u201d to be a type of publication that exists\u00a0outside 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).<\/p>\n

The author is also young.\u00a0 Now, that\u2019s not to say that a thirty-something categorically can\u2019t write well \u2014 and maybe I\u2019m getting old, for her\u00a0statement that she was in middle school in the 90s to seem jarringly recent.\u00a0 (She seems to be about 35 or so.)\u00a0 <\/p>\n

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.\u00a0 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\u2019t look back, until an epiphany a couple years ago.\u00a0 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\u2019t quite right and her future plans to take an \u201cintermediate sewing class.\u201d\u00a0 <\/p>\n

But her main point is that, as recently as the past two decades, fashion has changed dramatically in the US and, really, the world.\u00a0 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.\u00a0 Clothing retailing is ever more dominated by a few large chains, giving them ever-more power to demand lower prices from producers.\u00a0 And \u201cfast fashion\u201d retailers such as Forever 21 and Zara emphasize constant inflow of new styles.<\/p>\n

The bottom line is that prices for clothing have declined dramatically, but so too has quality.\u00a0 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.\u00a0 (This is where she gets too anecdotal \u2014 she describes her former tendency to purchase clothes constantly and get excited by 50% off \u201cdeals\u201d, and profiles several young women with a youtube following, and concludes that this is the norm, rather than a minority.)\u00a0 Even the thrift stores are overwhelmed with the quantity of poor-quality clothing donated \u2014 much of it gets shipped to Africa or gets recycled into rags or reprocessed into such items as insulation or carpet padding \u2014 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.<\/p>\n

Now, to be sure, I\u2019ve bought plenty of cheap clothing \u2014 it\u2019s hard to avoid it \u2014 and I think she goes too far when she says that these clothes fall apart after two or three washes (unless there\u2019s a whole world of clothing that\u2019s even cheaper than what they sell at Kohls and Meijers).\u00a0 And there are plenty of families who buy cheap clothing not in endless quantities to follow fashion trends, but to clothe their families.\u00a0 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.<\/p>\n

But it is absolutely true that clothes have gotten flimsier.\u00a0 The fabric for many cheap blouses is so thin that it becomes necessary to layer.\u00a0 \u201cDenim\u201d 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.\u00a0 And I likewise stepped into Forever 21, and was shocked at their clothing \u2014 very thin fabric, dresses that consisted of two long shapeless\u00a0knit panels sewn together.\u00a0 In my own shopping, I find that it\u2019s hit-or-miss as to whether a top or sweater I buy will hold up in the wash, or shrink or lose its shape.\u00a0 (I keep telling myself that, if I can just get back down a size, I\u2019ll stop shopping so cheaply. But, on the other hand, I worry that if I don\u2019t, I\u2019ll just pay twice as much for a sweater that loses its shape quickly.)<\/p>\n

(Forever 21 was a store that I was quite unfamiliar with until reading this book.\u00a0 Founded by a Korean immigrant in the 80s in LA, it\u2019s now worldwide, and some of its clothing definitely has a Japanese\/Korean look to it.\u00a0\u00a0I was also surprised to see a disproportionate number of\u00a0older Koreans while running my lunchtime errand (maybe shopping for daughters?), though the store was mostly empty, given the time of day.\u00a0 But much of the stock looked like something I\u2019d find languishing at the thrift store, rejected by customers.\u00a0 Or just looked bizarre, as if their clothing designs were generated by a computer program set to randomly combine cut, fabric, and pattern.)<\/p>\n

She also profiles a woman who\u2019s trying to revive sewing one\u2019s own clothes.\u00a0 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 \u2014 if that\u2019s true, it is appalling, though I don\u2019t know if she has more than anecdotal evidence.\u00a0 (My sister can\u2019t sew \u2013 or won\u2019t sew, at least, having gotten my mom to do this for her, for most of her adult life.)\u00a0 But, even if seamstresses at clothing factories were paid more generously than now, the economies of scale mean it\u2019s unlikely that sewing clothes will ever return to being a way of saving money, though it\u2019s a handy skill for things you can\u2019t 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.<\/p>\n

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.\u00a0 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.\u00a0 She doesn\u2019t 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\u2019s a tall order to ask this of her readers).<\/p>\n

You know what would really change the equation?\u00a0 Robotics.\u00a0 My clothing + robot + production\u00a0 google search had as its top hit this article from livescience.com<\/a> from 2012 describing plans to develop robot-sewing technology, to bring jobs back to the U.S.\u00a0 This set of articles was the only substantial hit, though \u2014 nothing more recent. (Or would the Chinese just buy the robots for use in their own factories?)\u00a0 Of course, that brings up all the unsolved issues of what happens when the jobs disappear due to mechanization, but it still feels overdue.<\/p>\n<\/body><\/html>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

The blurb on the front cover says this:\u00a0 \u201cOverdressed does for T-shirts and leggings what Fast Food Nation did for burgers and fries.\u201d \u2014 Katha Pollitt, The Nation. Well, look, Fast Food Nation didn\u2019t trouble me all that much, though I don\u2019t remember many of the details any longer.\u00a0 But Overdressed does raise multiple points […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2209,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-795","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"yoast_head":"\nFrom the library: Overdressed: the Shockingly High Cost of Cheap Fashion by Elizabeth L. 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