Fashionopolis

I read an Advance Reader Copy (ARC) of Fashionopolis: The Price of Fast Fashion and the Future of Clothes by Dana Thomas. If I were a better advance reader, I would time this to come out the week of publication, around September 3, 2019.  But, I wrote it in July, when I read the book, and then set it aside due to anger.  In November, I decided to finish it up and post my thoughts.

This is not an expose about huge Fast Fashion chains that serve the mass market.  Lucy Siegle of the Guardian does an excellent job covering that beat.

Ms Thomas covers the business of fashion and she has fantastic industry access.  I read and blogged about her earlier book, Deluxe, which covers the luxury end of the market. This time, she writes about the Price of Furious Fashion.  Her publisher categorizes the book under: Business, Design, Technology.

It's a good survey of the history of fashion production and the current toll that it takes.  However, the book shines when Thomas takes deep dives with makers that show how to make clothing with smaller environmental footprints.

For instance, I have made my skepticism about organic cotton known.  But, I learned that naturally-colored Foxfibre is also naturally insect-resistant.  The Tannins that give the cotton color, are bitter; insects don't like to eat them.

I don't like the reductive way that Thomas segments the market into organic and "all the rest."  She covers the business of fashion, but she's not a scientist nor was there any evidence in the book that she spent time interviewing scientists.

For instance, Stella McCartney's Environmental Profit and Loss (EP&L) showed that virgin cashmere had roughly one hundred times the environmental impact of virgin wool (page 167).  Therefore, Stella McCartney does not use virgin cashmere in her collections.

How do you put a number on the destruction of an irreplaceable ecosystem I wrote about in The planetary cost of cashmere? Of the extinction of snow leopards in More bad news about cashmere.

McCartney hired a sustainability and ethical trade chief, Claire Bergkamp.  Bergkamp, in turn, hired the accounting firm, PriceWaterhouseCoopers, to audit her business (EP&L.) Accountants do what they do-- place numerical values on stuff.  At the end of the day, the numbers contain the biases of the makers of the model.

The numbers are maddeningly opaque and McCartney, Bergkamp and Thomas felt no need to look under the hood to find how those numbers are derived.  To a scientist, that's very disappointing.

On page 169, we learn that McCartney's EP&L determines that regenerated or 'reclaimed' cashmere is 92% less damaging to the environment than virgin cashmere.  She calls it postmanufacturing waste.  (I call it preconsumer waste and use it for more than half my sewing.)

This allows Bergkamp to throw around numbers like "though cashmere only made up 0.13% of [Stella McCartney's] overall raw material usage in 2015, it accounted for 25% of the company's total environmental impact; after adopting the use of regenerated cashmere in 2016, the impact dropped to 2 percent."

"Luxury fashion should use organic cotton--I don't think there is any excuse not to," said Bergkamp.

You get the idea.  Thomas takes so many claims at face value, particularly regarding natural vs. synthetic dyes and vegan vs. animal materials.

The book is a good survey on what people are trying, particularly at the luxury end of the market. Don't believe any of the scientific claims.  There is no guarantee that nonfiction books were fact-checked.  How do you fact-check a closely-held proprietary EP&L system anyway?

• Fact or friction: the problem with factchecking in the book world
• Checking Facts In Nonfiction

Sustainable Organic Pesticides

Neem tree picture from Wikipedia

Organic cotton relies on plant-derived insecticides such as Neem oil.  The veggies from my CSA box also rely on Neem oil.  Farmer Glenn Tanaka of Tanaka Farms told subscribers that Neem oil needs to be applied before insects get a toe hold because it's really a pest repellent rather than a pest killer.  That means he spends a lot of money and time buying and spraying Neem oil.

Neem oil is relatively safe and breaks down quickly according to fact sheets from both the Missouri Botanic Garden and Oregon State University. (STEAM is a family business.  ;-)  One of my uncles got his PhD in Botany at MBG/Washington U.)

According to Neem Oil and Crop Protection: From Now to the Future, Neem oil has over 100 different biologically-active compounds, but one ingredient, azadirachtin, is responsible for ~90% of the action. Synthetic azadirachtin, made in a lab, is just as effective asazadirachtin from Neem tree oil.  But, if farmers use synthetic azadirachtin, they lose the organic designation and the higher prices that their cotton would obtain at market.

Additionally, Neem trees are being harvested unsustainably in the wild to meet the exploding demand.  This is so alarming that scientists at Kew gardens are trying to help organic cotton farmers in Mali learn to use Neem oil more optimally and to switch to farmed Neem trees rather than make them extinct in the wild.

It also takes water and land to grow Neem trees to obtain their oil.  Perhaps farmers have more pressing uses for their land, water and time, e.g. growing food.    This is so wrong and deeply troubling to me.

Another thing that troubles me is the extra labor required to grow organic products.  As I've written before in Embedded water: cotton, growing cotton organically requires more labor.  How do you increase labor without cutting into profits?  By using slave labor.  Children were sold into slavery to meet the west's appetite for organic cotton at prices we are willing to pay.

Much of the child labor is to haul water.  What if farmers had access to GMO cotton seeds that require half the water at a price they could afford?  Would you pay extra for that?  I would.  How would we label and certify products that are grown sustainably and equitably, but not organically?

This is just about stuff happening in west Africa.  India and west Africa are the two major sources of organic cotton.  I knew about the problems with organic cotton in California and west Texas, but, the more I researched what was happening in other parts of the world, the more alarmed I became.  It has definitely made me rethink my assumptions and consumption habits.

This is a complex issue and cognitive shortcuts like organic=good isn't the best way to go about it.  I'm thinking about inequality and climate change every day, sometimes several times a day.  What about you?  Do you talk about it with your friends and family?  Is it considered impolite?

Valentine

I hate sugar holidays. I feel especially inadequate when other mommy bloggers show off their home made Valentines while I dash at the last minute to Target to buy the last box of gender-neutral Sponge Bob valentines.  (Iris needed 2 boxes, necessitating a mad dash to another Target).

Mintage Home shows you how she made three four (!?!) types of valentines.  Pennamite brags on her Facebook page that she made 26 handmade valentines over the weekend.

Chez Bad Mom, we still haven't gotten around to carving the pumpkin we bought last October. 

The narcissus bloomed early this week, followed yesterday by the daffodil. It's a bit earlier than I recall in previous years.  (See Earth Day Resolution 2009)

But I did one Good Mom thing.  Pennamite alerted me to the $2 clothing sale at our neighborhood Goodwill last month.  I found this girls' skirt (in addition to the sweater shown with my Emerald City shawl).  It's a bit too short for Iris, so I let out the hem and attached a ruffle made out of sueded rayon from my stash.  I also repaired a small rip and added a pink button.  Does this count as a valentine for my sweetie?

 

There was stash enhancement in January (from SAS Fabrics) in addition to the GW shopping spree. The top four shiny things are 25" wide tie fabrics. The three geometrics are high-quality polyesters (some of the bolts say made in Germany), the silk stripe is from England. 99 cents a yard. The bottom is a soft rayon/lycra. $3/pound.  What should I make with it?

Check out the label on the African fabric. 

Dries Van Noten's Spring 2010 RTW line is very appealing. Let's see what my Spring 2010 wardrobe looks like. I am channeling peacock colors of turquoise, purple, cobalt, emerald, shots of orange/gold and graphic black and white.

African Textile Art

I wish I could go to NYC and see these two shows:

“The Essential Art of African Textiles: Design Without End,” at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, presents 19th-century fabrics alongside a few relevant contemporary artworks. Flipping the scales, “The Poetics of Cloth: African Textiles/Recent Art,” at New York University’s Grey Art Gallery, emphasizes the place of traditional textiles in works by contemporary African artists.

More info in the NYT review and the online slide show of selected pieces, including the one by El Anatsui above.

I am a big El Anatsui fan and wrote about him in
El Anatsui Gawu. I posted a Flickr slideshow of the exhibition. There is another photo in BCAM Opening.