457. Fashion Dirties, Fashion Kills

BROWDERBOOKS

My Goodreads giveaway offering 100 free ebooks of New Yorkers ended last Sunday at midnight: 545 entrants, 100 winners.

New Yorkers has received its second review, delayed when the flu (not the coronavirus) felled the reviewer and her two kids. "This work," she says, "offers a tantalizing vision of an exciting city overflowing with diversity in all respects."  For the full Bestsellersworld review, go here.  It is also listed with Get Read Book Reviews here.  And this  is its Bestsellers banner: 

            Fashion Dirties, Fashion Kills

I’ve never been into fashion, having always been happy with reasonably priced clothes (I’m trying not to say “cheap”).  When the midtown optometrists from whom I’d always bought my glasses went into “fashion” and upped their prices horrendously, I forsook them at once and found unfashionable but satisfactory optometrists in the Village.  The sections of the Sunday Times that I never read are Real Estate, Sports, and Styles, the latter including coverage of fashion.  Fashion is big in New York and always has been, but for me it is an alien industry putting out outrageously overpriced items that I have no need of.

Admittedly ignorant of the subject, I think of it as involving shows where youthful overdressed models of both sexes strut down runways in odd-looking outfits, their eyes staring fixedly into space, their expression deadpan, while seated viewers on both sides of the runway eye them with obsessive interest: the young selling themselves — well, their outfits and accouterments — to the old, the buyers whose decisions make or break the best efforts of the designers.  It’s all about surface, trends, and Big Money.

James Santiago

But if I kept fashion at a distance, fashion came to me.  Some years ago a Mark Jacobs designer clothing shop suddenly appeared just across the street from my building, at West 11th and Bleecker, thus anointing my street — Bleecker — as the new “in” place for designer clothing.  More designer shops followed, rents soared, and charming little shops and restaurants moved out.  For just four sanctified blocks on Bleecker, designer shops then reigned supreme until, a year or two ago, signs saying  RETAIL  SPACE AVAILABLE  began appearing in the windows of abandoned shops.  The trend continues, but the designers have not yet given up.

Being an admitted history buff, I have always been aware of fashion in New York.  From the 1830s on, visitors were remarking on how well-dressed were the women of New York.  Not the ruddy-faced farmers’ wives hawking their wares in the open-air markets, to be sure, nor the ragpickers trekking the streets in quest of discarded bottles, clothing, bones, old iron, and lumps of coal.  The fashionably dressed women rode in carriages or strolled quietly when out on errands, under the dainty dome of a fringed parasol that protected their milk-white complexion from the sun.  These were ladies, untainted by toil, their children tended at home by servants, their lord and master off in his shop or office, while they gave their time to formal calls on other ladies, shopping in fashionable shops, or doing good works for the less fortunate.  And for their busy days they needed a house dress, a dress for formal calls, a dress for evening balls and entertainments, and who knows what else.  They consulted Godey’s Lady’s Book and the Journal des Demoiselles, bought their silks and satins in the best shops, and had their dressmaker or resident  seamstress transform those fabrics into the very latest styles.  (Readymades were for the lower orders only.). 

And fashion never stood still; it was changeable.  If, to hide her bad legs or her pregnancy, Eugénie, the Empress of the French, launched the fashion of the hoop skirt, ladies in Western countries, or wherever Western styles prevailed, adopted the caged monstrosity and learned to maneuver deftly when negotiating narrow doorways.  And in this country, of course, New York, led the way.  And if, a decade later, the Empress Eugénie abandoned the hoop skirt for the bustle, the ladies of New York did likewise, adorned their derrière, and negotiated doorways with greater ease.  

        So it went throughout the nineteenth century into the twentieth, with the latest “in” styles for women coming from France, and the latest “in” styles for men coming from England, where the Prince of Wales or Lord So-and-So might determine the latest in jackets, sporting outfits, headwear, and beards.  Fashion has always been, and still is, an international phenomenon, with a lot of copycatting.  

Ball gowns of the early 1860s.

And the changes can be huge and abrupt.  The pre-World War I flowery hats and abundant ground-length dresses gave way, in the Roaring Twenties, to skull-clinging cloche hats and Coco Chanel’s knee-length petite robe noire.  (Those French again!).  And those determining the latest fashion were less apt to be the titled elite of Europe, now largely supplanted by our home-grown elite: movie stars, entertainers, First Ladies, popular singers, and the like.

      And with the change in clothing styles came changes in mores and morals.  Instead of the waltz, the Charleston.  Instead of the men-only saloon, the speakeasy, often frequented by fashionable ladies out for a lark.  And in low-rent, Bohemian Greenwich Village, respectably raised poet Edna St. Vincent Millay and her sister made themselves repeat the vilest four-letter words in the English language, until they could say them routinely and be “in.”

  When I came on the scene, I was no leader in fashion.  I wore shorts in kindergarten and first grade, then, like all boys, graduated to knickers.  And when I went on to seventh grade, I followed the mob and graduated to “longies”; knickers in seventh grade were absolutely verboten.  I was casual in high school, but avoided extremes, like wearing your pants perilously low on the hips, which the far-out crowd thought “smooth” (our word then for ”cool”).  In college I got genuine Levi Strauss blue jeans, the toughest of tough fabrics, long before they were even known in the East; but I was in southern California, where they were worn by all the men, young and old.  When the Sixties hit, I was the last to wear bellbottoms, though once I did, I liked them.  But my friend Kevin, always far more into fashion, made the great leap: from stylish but arch-conservative Brooks Brothers suits (slight of build, he could patronize the boys’ department, thus sparing his budget) to clothes of every color, as well as rings on all his fingers.  “Clothes are fun,” he said.  But bellbottoms, belatedly, were as far as I would go.  L.L. Bean was more my style: reliable and reasonably priced, yes, but stylish— no way.

In all this time I had never thought much about the fashion industry itself; its products just mysteriously appeared on the runways and either did or didn’t take hold.  But now, in the New York Review of Books of February17, 2020, comes “Waste Not, Shop Not,” a review by Cintra Wilson of Dana Thomas’s  Fashionopolis: The Price of Fast Fashion — and the Future of Clothes.  And I learned a lot.  

  Thomas is of the option that, in this age of information manipulation, the fashion industry’s ads diabolically use social psychology, murky motivational levers, and Madison Avenue dirty tricks to incite your consumer libido to buy.  She cites a glossy Gucci ad showing a model walking down a runway into a clutch of older women who reek of old money and wear Gucci loafers, and are agog at the sight of the model.  The model wears a heavy gold fringe of glass beads hanging down to her chest, and her eyes are a mere smear of shadow. Topping her head is a  gold triangle made of either wheat or actual hair, it’s hard to tell which.  She wears a leopard-fur coat with fox trim, carries a red Gucci handbag, and like her stunned viewers, Gucci loafers.  This ad, says Thomas, suggests that the new chic is beyond not only your budget, but also your comprehension.  Except for the super rich, luxury fashion is mysterious and unattainable. 

A Gucci Shoe.  Stiletto heels are sexy, but
otherwise just a bit clunky. (Personal opinion.)
UggBoy, UggGirl

Or is it?  Today, for the budget-minded, getting the look of high fashion is in fact quite easy.  Readymade knockoffs of fashion unattainables can be found in stores within a few blocks of the originals.  And the queen of this industry is Zara, the world's largest fast-fashion brand.  (A new name for me; at least I had heard of Gucci.)

A Zara store in Sydney, Australia.
Mw12310

      It is this fast-fashion industry, with knockoffs usually going for less than $100, that Thomas focuses on in Fashionopolis.  The points she makes are numerous and damning.

• On average, most garments by Zara are worn seven times and then discarded.
• Vast amounts of unsold mass-produced garments are buried, shredded, burned, or carted off to landfills.
• The fashion industry consumes 25% of all the chemicals produced on earth, and is responsible for almost 20% of worldwide water pollution.
• The fashion industry has always been responsible for shocking human rights abuses, ranging from dangerous working conditions to enslavement of refugees, children, and undocumented immigrants in sweatshops.
• Over  700 gallons of water are needed to grow the cotton for one mass-produced T-shirt.
• The production of blue jeans, the most popular garment ever made, involves industrial dyes that end up as toxic runoff and wastewater that pollute the environment.  
• The North American Trade Agreement signed by the U.S., Canada, and Mexico cost the U.S. a million jobs and destroyed domestic textile and apparel industries, as manufacturers moved overseas to third-world countries where they could pay low wages and confine their workers — often girls as young as thirteen — behind locked doors.

vs.

  Fortunately, there are producers trying to counter fast fashion and globalization by making goods of inherent value with minimal environmental impact. Of course there’s a catch: their goods cost more.  Only those with a hunk of assets already can afford to play this game; the rest of the industry, prodded by profit-hungry corporate boards, are into low-coast, high-speed mass production.  And among their customers are fashion editors and journalists; since they have to look trendy and fashionable, they go for the knockoffs, too.

Chic, but is it worth 700 gallons of water?
G-Unit

I’d like to end on an up note, but can’t.  Next time you buy a cotton T-shirt or some blue jeans, try to remember how they were made.  Alas, we’ll all feel guilty, which doesn’t help at all.  So save up and pay a little more for green, sustainable goods … if you can find them.  Because fashion dirties, fashion kills.  

Source note: This post was inspired by Cintra Wilson’s review of Dana Thomas’s Fashionopolis, mentioned earlier.  Many of the facts cited come from that that article.

Coming soon:  The Five Worst Poems in the English Language.

©   2020   Clifford Browder