How many considerations do you take into account before you buy a pair of jeans? The size, price, and cut? No matter your answer, fashion journalist Dana Thomas probably thinks you should be asking more. Who made them, under what conditions, and where did the materials come from? These questions are important, says Thomas, because widespread ignorance about where our clothing comes from is enabling a system that’s dangerous to the environment and workers. Her new book, Fashionopolis: The Price of Fast Fashion and the Future of Clothes, aims to correct our course.
This is Thomas’s third book in her 30 years as a fashion writer. The first, Deluxe, traced the problematic growth of luxury fashion, while the second, Gods and Kings, presented a dual biography of Alexander McQueen and John Galliano. Now with Fashionopolis, she takes a more expansive view of the fashion industry and finds a culture of extreme waste—the average garment is worn only seven times before it’s thrown away, and the global population throws away 2.1 billion tons of clothing a year.
Still, Thomas does find some designers and manufacturers who are challenging the status quo. A steadfast local fashion movement is beginning to reverse some of the rampant offshoring of the late 20th century. Small brands are pushing the industry to use ethically sourced and reusable materials. New technology is overhauling the production process to make it safer and more sustainable.
We called Thomas to talk about the throwaway culture of fast fashion and how the industry is attempting to change it through reshoring, localization, and slow fashion.
GQ: Why did you decide to write a book on the systemic problems in the fashion industry?
Dana Thomas: I was on book tour in New York, and I had breakfast with Alex Bolen of Oscar de la Renta. He told me that he loved the book Deluxe, and it really made him think about how they do business, and that it was great that I kind of wrote this call to arms. They didn't realize how the business had changed and how they'd been part of it. It made them think, right?
He said, "One of the things we've done is we just bought the factory that produces our evening gowns in the Bronx. Because we like having the production nearby, and the family that had owned it for years was retiring and nobody wanted to take it over, and they were going to sell it. We didn't want to offshore something that's as beautiful and complicated as evening gowns. We like being able to get in the car and drive up to the docks."
About three hours later, I was in an event hosted by Brooks Brothers. I was talking to someone from [the brand] and he said, "We're opening a factory in Long Island City to make our ties. We're going to bring all [our] tie manufacturing back to the United States." And I'm like, okay, that's twice in four hours that I've heard American fashion companies are bringing back manufacturing to the United States after offshoring.
I [also] had an open invitation to go see Billy Reid and Natalie Chanin down in Florence for their Shindig event and to come see what they were doing with slow fashion. I thought that was all part of the puzzle, slow fashion and reshoring. I was thinking about The Omnivore’s Dilemma as an inspiration, how [Michael Pollan] wrote about backlash to industrial farming, the return to organic, and the farm-to-table movement. This is finally kind of happening in fashion, I think. So I wrote the proposal based on that: reshoring, craftsmanship, localization, and slow fashion, and then the first thing I did was go to see them in Florence, Alabama, three years ago this week. And I got completely inspired.
I can't remember how I got into Stella McCartney, but Stella just seemed like a natural link to all of this, with her non-fur and non-leather movement. Stella, when she heard that I was doing this, got so excited, like, "We will do whatever we can to help you, because we want this message to go global."
I was like, right, okay, now I'm on it, now I've got it, now this is all coming together.
Blue jeans are an important throughline in the book—you use them as a case study for the fashion industry at large. Was that always the plan?
Yes, because I wanted to find something that everybody has in their closets. So it was either a cotton T-shirt or blue jeans.
The more I snooped around about blue jeans, the more I realized that was it. A friend in Nashville who does fashion PR said, "You need to go see this woman at Stony Creek Colors." That was the beauty of this book, is that everybody was like, “You need to go see this person.”
When I went to see Sarah Bellos and talk to her about indigo I realized, "Oh, it's much more about blue jeans than cotton shirts." Cotton is a part of jeans, too, so I could do the whole cotton thing through jeans. I started digging into blue jeans more and learning about how many we have. Half the planet's wearing blue jeans at any given time of the day.
[Another] book that's always been an inspiration to me was Fast Food Nation. I loved how he took the fast-food meal and took it apart and said, you know, "This is how your French fries are made, this is where the meat comes from, this is all the different colors in the bun." I've always been a big writer of process pieces, but it was more than a process piece; it was about taking something that you know, that's part of your everyday life, and saying this is what's really going on with it. So I decided blue jeans were the perfect way to do that.
Your title is taken from Cottonopolis, the 19th-century nickname for Manchester, the home of the global cotton industry at the time. How is the fashion economy today the same as it was in Manchester, and how is it different?
It's a lot bigger, but it's not a lot different. When I went to the sweatshop in Bangladesh, I saw the children in the mills, looking really tired and really thin. We should be ashamed that we're okay with this.
You mention global initiatives like the Accord on Fire and Building Safety in Bangladesh that aim to combat those sorts of conditions. Are they helping?
What's the saying that Obama got in trouble for years ago, putting lipstick on a pig? I don't know if that's the right analogy, but a sweatshop's a sweatshop. People are being paid $28 a month to turn out clothes in a factory [that people] wear seven times and throw in the bin. There's something fundamentally wrong with the whole system. And I don't think that making sure that it's clean and safe, if you're still not paying a living wage, [will make a difference].
One of the biggest surprises in my research was this bit that I just fell across in reading an old New Yorker piece by Lois Long about Hattie Carnegie from like 1940. During the Depression, Hattie Carnegie's clients, the Joan Crawfords but also the Mrs. Harrison Williamses of the world, paid pretty much what we're paying today for ready-to-wear. [At first] they were paying $800, $1,000, $1,600, $3,000 dollars for a dress. And this wasn't Paris couture, this was American made.
Then when the stock market crashed in 1929, [Carnegie] lost a big core of her clientele and a lot of them weren't paying their bills, because they had no money left. They'd lost their shirts, literally.
So she came up with a line called Spectator Sports that Raymond Chandler wrote about as the secretary special in The Long Goodbye. The secretary had a Hattie Carnegie suit. And those suits were retailing for between $16.99 and $19.99 at the height of the Depression, and they were considered a bargain. That was considered a good price for a mass-manufactured suit. That's the same price that H&M and Zara are charging today. Almost a hundred years later.
The price of ground beef has gone up I don't know how many hundreds of percent, but the price of clothes, the ready-to-wear suit off the rack, is exactly the same. So that shows me that there is a systemic problem in the pricing structure but also culturally in what we think is okay to pay for clothes. If we had to pay 200 bucks for a suit, we wouldn't throw it away so easily.
Are there any brands that you see making good progress toward a sustainable model?
Levi's is getting there. Quickly. I love that they're adopting Jeanologia to their processing. They're going to be using less water and polluting less and putting workers less at risk in the finishing of their jeans. This is great. This is huge, because half the world is wearing jeans at any given moment of the day.
Jeanologia is one of many examples in your book that sound like something out of a science-fiction novel. How close are we to this kind of high-tech fashion future?
It's hard to say. Everything's happening faster. I did find that writing this book was a moving target, because I would find out and write about something in June, and by the time I was finishing the manuscript during the last draft in November, December, what I'd written about and found in June had already come and gone, and now we're way up to something way cooler and newer. This is all happening really fast. That's because there is this whole generation of young entrepreneurs, and startups are just embracing it, they're just so into it. And they're getting the money to expand into, and then they get to really turn it into something cool.
Is there anything that really excited you while you were researching this, anything that really blew your mind as the future of fashion?
I thought the regenerated cotton was really interesting. Evrnu. That they can take it back down to this molecular level and turn it back into cotton, to be woven in and turned into fabric again—I thought that was great.
You explore many layers of the fashion industry in the book—global corporations to designers to consumers. Which is going to be most important?
Consumers. They're just going to demand it. Companies are going to have to address it, and that's already happening. Millennials are demanding it, the Gen X kids are demanding it, and companies have to respond because they still badly need those customers. They're the next purchasing power group. That's why I wrote this book, so it would be a call to arms for this generation. I'm really hoping that it'll be taught in universities and not just taught in fashion schools, but taught in social studies so that they can all go, like, "Oh, I had no idea, right. Let's not perpetuate this."
What does that mean for everyday people, buying less?
Buying less, and buying better. Investing emotion as well as money into what we purchase. And I use clothes to talk about bigger things, because we all get dressed in the morning. I could be saying the same thing about consumer behavior across the board. We need to move away from the throwaway culture.
Do you think people are ready to make that change?
I do. I mean, we thought the same thing about organic foods 20 years ago, [that it’s] expensive, it's hard to find, it's precious, why would I spend four bucks for a tomato when I can get one for 30 cents? But the one for 30 cents has no taste and has the texture of a carpet, as opposed to the one for $4, which is still warm from the sun. I think we can hope for the same in clothing.
My daughter used to be a Zara and H&M addict at 17, but the last few weeks she's been wearing clothes that she found in a giveaway bin. I keep complimenting her on things she's wearing, and she's like, "Oh, one Euro in the giveaway bin.” So if 19-year-old Parisians are doing that, I have faith, I have hope.
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