Time to forget knock-offs and rent the real thing
Important as treatises on sustainability are, one takes them to bed with a heavy heart. They tend to be neither light (in any sense of the word) nor uplifting. However, with impeccable timing, given the ethical fashion pact President Macron has spearheaded (to which 150 brands have so far signed up), Dana Thomas, a journalist who cut her teeth writing for the Style section on The Washington Post in the Eighties, has written a book called Fashionopolis. And it’s so gripping I plan to suggest it to my book club as our next read.
Thomas, who researches meticulously and writes with simmering, even-handed anger, takes us right inside every level of the fashion industry, from Levi’s once unimpeachable business ethics (when it was the master of the denim universe and privately owned by the Haas family) to Maria Cornejo, a small-scale, muchloved designer who produces all her timeless, sinuous clothes close at hand in New York.
Thomas begins her tale (wearing a rented DVF dress) at the Cannes Film
Festival – with the Mary Katrantzou ball gown that Cate Blanchett wore on the red carpet in May 2018. Thomas then trails Katrantzou’s team as they make the six-monthly pilgrimage to the Premier Vision fabric fair in Paris and checks in regularly over the three months it takes the London-based, Greek-born Katrantzou to select and digitally print her designs on to the 40 or so fabrics she uses in each collection. We’re talking top of the mountain here. Katrantzou originals cost anything from £600 to £3,000 because they are originals and require enormous skill and artistry. The £50 knock-offs, not so much.
These knock-offs are most likely run up in Bangladesh, the world’s busiest sweatshop, where the Rana Plaza conflagration in 2013 shocked the world – finally – into asking a few questions about its clothes. Thomas visited Bangladesh, too, and although she was closely monitored by the authorities and owners there, managed to talk to employees working in factories now, as well as those who lost friends, family and sometimes their health, at Rana Plaza. So has there been any headway?
Her conclusion: “Yes and no.” Although the locked door policy that saw workers trapped inside tinder boxes with no fire safety procedures had changed in many factories, some are still filthy, with under-aged workers, soaring temperatures and inhumane hours. The squalid surroundings and hollow-eyed, stunted workers aren’t, she notes when I phone her in Paris where she now lives, “so different from what you’d have found in Manchester in the 1760s (and 1860s) when the city, which provided most of the world’s cotton cloth, was known as Cottonopolis”. Nor does she buy the feigned innocence of so many brands that claim they can’t know the conditions of all their subcontractors. No one wins from this system, argues Thomas. Not the workers, not Katrantzou, who has tried suing copyists who steal her ideas to no avail, not even us, the consumers. What we end up with is stuffocation
– a self-induced queasiness at the amount of flotsam we’ve accumulated. The average piece of fast fashion, reports Thomas, is worn seven times before being jettisoned. It’s not just the landfill. Many synthetic filaments from clothes we’re still wearing end up in our oceans each time we wash them.
What shocked her most, she says, was that clothes cost less today than ever before. “In 1929, after the New York crash, Hattie Carnegie, a New York couturier, introduced a more accessible line called Spectator Sport… Raymond Chandler dubbed her suits the Secretary Special because you could dress them up or down. Those Specials cost $19.99 – in 1930. You can get a suit for the same price at some chains today.”
Irony of ironies, some of today’s most successful cheap clothing brands – online favourites such as misguided. co.uk and prettylittlething.com – are based in Manchester. So what to do, given that after Patagonia, the outwardbound clothing brand, took out a fullpage ad in The New York Times on Black Friday last year, urging customers not to buy its zip-up fleece because its production required 135 litres of water, enough to meet the daily needs (three glasses a day) of 45 people, generated nearly 20 pounds of carbon dioxide and left behind two thirds its weight in waste, its sales went up?
Judging by the extent of our addiction – 50 billion items of clothing were produced globally by the end of the Nineties, the decade in which outsourcing of labour to developing nations became axiomatic, a figure that doubled a mere 10 years later – Thomas sounds remarkably optimistic. “There are so many good things happening, from the burgeoning rental market to companies like englishfinecottons. co.uk, which has brought cotton production back to the north of England, and is using finest quality fibres produced in small quantities.”
She applauds the passion of Extinction Rebellion, even while she acknowledges that targeting London Fashion Week (as they’ve said they intend to) is somewhat missing the point since this is the showcase for the Mary Kantrantzous of this world, making in tiny quantities and preserving craft skills, often close at home. “But at least they care.”
Thomas is all too aware that sustainable and ethical clothing is in danger of becoming the preserve of the affluent. She has a weakness for Stella Mccartney, whom she credits with instigating many of the sustainable initiatives at the Kering group (which owns Gucci, Mcqueen, Saint Laurent and Balenciaga). But Stella’s expensive.
“I get that people on low budgets want to buy clothes too, but my argument is that we stop buying, start renting. I rent everything now. It’s a great way of wearing something fabulous that you normally couldn’t afford. Don’t buy 10 things for £19.99. Buy one for £100. It will be nicer. Or shop vintage. Read labels. Look for organic dyes and cottons, wash your clothes much less and at 20 degrees.” (The CEO of Levi’s told her never to wash jeans, which she agrees might be a step too earthy for most.)
But is any of this enough? “Fast fashion isn’t going away any time soon. But it’s like the food industry – we still have Mcdonald’s but farm to table is more mainstream and Whole Foods is owned by Amazon. There’s hope.”