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Category: Fashion

More on Fast Fashion

To follow up on my previous post, let’s discuss a few more things about Fast Fashion.

Who says women love to shop? It’s obviously not true that every woman everywhere loooooves to shop. Personally, I hate shopping. I think it’s boring; it’s time consuming, tedious and expensive. If I have absolutely have to, I prefer to do it online so I don’t have to interact with annoying store clerks and I can try things on in the comfort of my own home. Even women who don’t like to or, more importantly, cannot afford to shop still face societal pressure to do so.

Who defines “cheap”? If you have ever been to Forever 21 or looked at the website I shared, you’d know most of the dresses go for about $20-$30 dollars. Now whether you think a $20 dress is cheap or expensive is a matter of perspective, priority, and relative privilege, but in our current retail structure, a $20 dress is considered cheap both in terms of quality and pricing. I am reminded of German fashion designer Jil Sander, who told the New York Times earlier this summer “My mother always said that we were too poor to buy too cheap.” I also did not have a wealthy upbringing in West Africa (surprise! I’m a WOC!) and this is a philosophy my mother drilled into all her children. We rarely bought new clothes and when we did they were meant to last for years because my younger siblings and cousins would have to get mileage out of them as well. There were no Wal-Mart or Target equivalents in Africa when I was growing up, and the first “mall” in Lagos was built in the late ’90s. So unless you were wearing traditional clothes, western clothes were almost always imported. A lot of our clothing consisted of discarded items from the closets of Americans and Europeans just like you. I hated wearing someone else’s second-hand clothes because they reminded me every day I couldn’t have new clothes like the wealthier kids at my French private school. It’s ironic that, for both admittedly aesthetic and financial reasons, I now do the bulk of my shopping at thrift stores.

What about fat women? I did not address the size issue because I was planning to do so in another post. Just because I shop at vintage/thrift/consignment stores doesn’t mean I’m not aware their politics can be fucked as well. Just last week I had to scratch Mustard Seed, a well-recommended store in the DC metro area off my list because according to the woman on the phone they rarely buy clothes over a size 12. Yes, size 12 because that’s considered plus-size. I don’t have to remind you the average American woman is a size 14. I am bigger than the average American woman. (Surprise! I’m fat!)

What’s style got to do with it? Consumers at Fast Fashion stores are style-conscious. Yes, I know it sounds vain! But shopping at Wal-Mart and shopping at Forever 21 are not one and the same. Fast Fashion thrives on our desire for the latest clothes from magazines and the runway. Styling tips always tell larger women to “dress for their body type”, whatever the hell that means. Yes, I recognize that I am an able-bodied, childless woman and this allows me to take to time experiment with different lengths, patterns, and structures. And it’s still a frustrating process. Many things I try on don’t fit. I’m lucky to have a good friend who will hem my muumuus and turn tube dresses into skirts for me. Even when I go into straight size stores, I try on things that are not marked my size. (Yes, this is style advice, not feminist life advice.) More on fat fashion later…

Why don’t you just stop buying clothes? Take it from an African woman: Western women (and men DUH), in a global context, have unsurpassed buying power. Their choices affect people all over the world. This is not meant to shame anyone but rather to force us to confront our consumer choices. The reason I started this discussion is precisely because I don’t have a good solution to this problem. Actually, no one has a good answer. To those of you that say “stop shopping altogether” I’m glad that’s working out for you because you never have to buy anything ever.

This conversation about women and consumption is not a new one, and probably be culturally relevant for as long as we have to wear clothes. It is especially relevant this week as Inditex, Zara’s parent company, announced its aggressive expansion plans. The company opened more than 90 stores in 29 countries in the first quarter alone. This is American Apparel on crack. Also this week Uniqlo’s parent company, the appropriately named Fast Retailing, outlined plans to launch a non-profit initiative in Bangladesh, alongside Grameen Bank, that would create jobs for garment workers. This venture would produce high quality items that cost around $1. While they currently only have plans to sell to Bangladeshis, this and similar nonprofit approaches would go a long way in improving Western women’s cheap clothing options- allowing them to buy stylish clothes that aren’t quite as harmful to women in other parts of the world.

In the meantime, I am trying to make small, practical changes in my life. You can decide what changes work for you.

Retail: It’s Complicated

You can blame Barbie, Mall Madness, the sexualizing and gendering of kids and their toys, but there’s no denying that women love to shop. Got a date? Buy a new dress. Feeling sad? There’s a sale at the mall. Your boyfriend broke up with you? These new shoes will show him! Women are socialized from a very young age to embrace the “born to shop” and “shop ’til you drop” mantras.

My sister’s birthday is coming up soon and caught in the pandemonium of getting a last-minute gift for her, I wandered over to Forever21.com, where I found painfully on-trend dresses and a handful of accessories for around $100. $100! You’ve got to be kidding me. Over and over, I found myself thinking “WHY IS THIS DRESS SO CHEAP?”

Naomi Wolf’s latest dispatch answers that very question:

But what has been liberating for Western women is a system built literally on the backs of women in the developing world. How do Primark and its competitors in the West’s shopping malls and High Streets keep that cute frock so cheap? By starving and oppressing Bangladeshi, Chinese, Mexican, Haitian, and other women, that’s how.
We all know that cheap clothing is usually made in sweatshop conditions – and usually by women. And we know – or should know – that women in sweatshops around the world report being locked in and forbidden to use bathrooms for long periods, as well as sexual harassment, violent union-busting, and other forms of coercion.

Most of the two million people working in Bangladesh’s garment industry are women, and they are the lowest-paid garment workers in the world, earning $25 a month. But they are demanding that their monthly wage be almost tripled, to $70. Their leaders make the point that, at current pay levels, workers cannot feed themselves or their families.

Fast Fashion — much like Fast Food — is cheap, addictive, and built on an unsustainable, low-wage system. These throwaway clothes are purposefully designed to be worn a few times and discarded, which contributes the growing problem of textile waste. According to the EPA Office of Solid Waste, the average American household throws away more than 68 pounds of clothing and textiles per person per year so it’s not hard to imagine how the constant production of new clothing poses a number of environmental challenges, especially in developing countries. Don’t even get me started about H&M trashing its unsold merchandise rather than donating it to charity.

With the advent of cheap-chic stores providing both big-name designer collaborations (H&M and Target) and disposable knock-offs (Forever 21), this problem is worsening at alarming rates. Shopping for clothes has changed radically since H&M introduced the concept of high-end designer collaboration to fashion retailing in 2004 with their Karl Lagerfeld capsule collection. (I would be lying if I didn’t admit I was devastated when this collection sold out in a matter of hours and I didn’t stand a chance of owning any of it.) Consumers today are much more savvy and experimental, and far less patient. So impatient, in fact, that in 2005 Zara bragged that it “can design and distribute a garment to market in just fifteen days.” Fifteen days. I bet you it’s even faster now.

For a long time, I justified shopping at American Apparel because of their relatively good labor policies — so thanks for ruining that for me, Dov Charney. I appreciate Wolf’s candor in admitting that despite her knowledge of the horrible work/life conditions endured by the women creating these clothes, she also shops at H&M and Zara — something I am equally guilty of. It is difficult to deny the ease of Fast Fashion even as I’ve been challenged to think even more deeply and more morally about my shopping habits.

Wolf also brings up the fact that it’s largely women producing these clothes and largely women buying them. I’ve lived in developing countries enough to know that jobs in certain “sweatshops” can empower rural women and their families. But unfortunately most garment jobs do not create enough opportunity and prosperity for workers to pull themselves out of poverty. What does it mean for feminism when women are primarily responsible for creating appalling environments for other women? Fast Fashion is a perfect case study that the action—not the gender of the person committing it — is what determines whether it is feminist or not. Just because something is done primarily by women doesn’t automatically make it “more feminist.” Women have historically been at the forefront of successful consumer boycotts and there is no reason we cannot commit to pushing for larger political change — a Slow Fashion movement, if you will — to improve the conditions endured by these workers. We are, after all, the target consumers in these retail venues.

Truly committing to Slow Fashion would require us to learn more about the clothes we buy and who produced them, and using that knowledge to make socially and environmentally responsible choices. This alone won’t be enough, because we all know big systemic, change takes time. But it’s a start. One way I’ve curbed my Fast Fashion addiction is by thrifting. Yes, the clothes are secondhand and they were probably made in a sweatshop before they became second hand but it’s better than nothing.