Читать книгу To Die For: Is Fashion Wearing Out the World? - Lucy Siegle - Страница 6

Introduction

Every year, around eighty billion garments are produced worldwide. Incredibly, when we buy one of them, we are able to learn very little about where it was made and assembled, and in what conditions. Consumers, retailers, designers and brands have a responsibility to the workers who make our fashion, but we’ve closed our eyes to a back story of exploitation and dangerous conditions. Every single one of our wardrobes is tainted. Seduced by the alliance of fast fashion with value prices, we’ve failed to notice that international trade rules and laws have their harshest impact on the most vulnerable in the supply chain. Where once cotton production was based on slavery, today’s fast fashion has brought the type of working conditions outlawed in the West at the turn of the twentieth century to every Developing World town with a fabric-processing or sewing facility.

I love fashion. But I want it to excite and inspire me, not to make me really, really angry. I have watched and aided and abetted as the fashion industry and consumers have sunk deeper and deeper into a cycle of exploitation of each other, the planet and the millions of workers who toil on the global assembly line in shocking conditions. But when I took a closer look at the true environmental and social impact of the seemingly innocuous and frippery-filled industry, I came to the conclusion that enough was enough.

For anyone labouring under the misapprehension that their individual decisions are too small and too insignificant to have any influence over the status quo, I want to set you straight. As the global population swells and the amount of natural capital, particularly untouched wilderness,

decreases, the planet is under unprecedented pressure. This means that it has never been more important to take wise individual decisions, as well as collective ones. It has never been more critical for us to consume with care and intelligence. It’s no secret that the present rates of consumption are unsustainable, and it will come as even less of a surprise that fashion’s are wildly out of kilter.

Why give fashion the time of day? Why not dress exclusively in old clothes and charity-shop finds? I’ve become pretty familiar with the school of thought that regards fashion as unnecessary and corrupt, the deep-green (and dare I say puritanical) doctrine that finds the very notion of fashion distasteful. But it is simply untrue to say that all fashion is superficial, needless and stupid, and to ignore the semiotics of style. The way we dress is fundamental to our self-expression.

But you can see where the distrust of fashion emanates from. We’ve recently shopped our way through a massive wardrobe upheaval, our buying patterns subverted by multinational businesses with the sole aim of making money for their shareholders. Almost overnight we have become used to consuming fashion with reckless, addicted abandon, buying more clothes than ever before, reversing centuries of fashion heritage, knowledge and understanding in the process. This is a revolution, and a largely unwelcome one. Strangely, given the extent to which we have altered our buying habits, there’s a lack of research of this consumerist phenomenon. Which is largely why over the past five years I’ve taken to carrying out my own unofficial surveys. Wherever I am, and whatever story I’m covering professionally, I usually spot a fashion story. For example, sent to Manchester to do an item on women ruining their feet by wearing high heels, I was more struck by the amount young women on limited incomes were spending on ‘it’ bags. Our fashion frenzies over the last decade tend to give away far more than just what is or isn’t on-trend.

It is a sign of the times that fashion regularly makes newspapers’ front pages or business pages, even if indirectly. Today’s stories are not just about Kate Moss or the size of Philip Green’s yacht (or both); they are about the more prosaic stuff of fashion, such as cotton. Occasionally this leads to some arresting headlines – ‘Cotton Bras are Rebounding!’ for example – but what it really confirms is that, with the exception

of the extractive industries and the food chain, few industries are as connected to the natural world as fashion. At its most simplistic, fashion is dependent on water, on crops such as cotton, and on a whole host of animal species. Yet the fashion industry has barely begun to factor in the consequences of its actions on habitat loss, shrinking biodiversity and climate change.

The good news is that there is a small window of opportunity in which to rescue fashion, the queen of all the creative industries. The rules are beginning to change. Garment workers are fighting back (because so many cannot continue to exist on the wages our wardrobes are willing to pay), and the conscientious consumer has the opportunity to fight alongside them. The huge retailers and brands need your custom, and the government wants you to keep shopping – but it is time to change the terms.

My fear is this: unless we as fashion-lovers and consumers assert ourselves, the industry will take the path of least resistance. The combination of the global recession and the inevitable price rises of majoringredients of the fashion supply chain, such as oil and cotton, will see the big players, the multinational brands and the giant retailers that control the UK high street, become even more ruthless in grabbing their margin. The victims will be the producers, the garment workers, and eventually you and me, as design and quality are sacrificed. I don’t want that to happen.

It is a battle: our weakness has become their stock in trade. Meanwhile, their enemy is the intelligent fashion consumer who asks the right questions and buys more carefully. This book is intended to guide you towards becoming that consumer. It takes you beyond the swing tickets and into the heart of contemporary garment production to reveal the truth about materials, production, and the wardrobe lives of our clothes. It also acknowledges the good as well as the bad, and aims to help you forge a fashion future that matches your aesthetic to your ethics. Ultimately, the intention is to reconnect you with the passion and excitement that turned you into a fashion-lover in the first place.

Lucy Siegle, April 2011