I don't buy the rant about fast fashion. For once, the market worked as expected, competition driven the prices down, and now people can buy months worth of wardrobe for a price of a single LVMH item. Clothing is now cheap beyond commodity, and suddenly a crop of journalists start to lament how it is unacceptable. Should be looking for my tinfoil hat probably.
Speaking as someone whose fiancee buys most of her clothes from Shein, here's what actually happens: She spends $200 on a huge load of clothing, then returns 70% of it because it either fits poorly (Shein's sizing is, as far as I can tell, completely random), looks nothing like the images on the website, or the garment is made of such awful materials that it looks terrible.
So, what you have is enormous quantities of clothing, most of which nobody wants, manufactured using slave labor and coal power, getting shipped back and forth across continents twice as many times as they would have if you had just bought from a better store.
Don't get me wrong, she's found some gems on Shein at remarkably low prices, but the majority of what she gets from Shein was destined for a landfill the moment it left the factory.
I remember when I first heard the term "pink tax." It seems particularly relevant on clothing. There are a lot of basic essentials (see pockets) that equivalent women's garments simply do not have. And it seems to be more related to the manufacturers than consumers, because it is literally a meme for a girl to be excited about having pockets. And most of the women I know do share info abut which brands have pockets, etc. It seems that women will buy good quality stuff, but I agree that mountains of clothes are being made that don't seem like they were made with any humans in mind that might wear them?
That said, I am incredibly grateful to live in a century where clothes are not a very large portion of my budget, yet I still am warm and covered.
Pockets are one of those niches where expressed and revealed preferences collide in ways that defy memeification.
The popular imagination holds the idea that basically any garment can have good, functional, high-quality pockets added to it without consequence. Unfortunately, that's not true. For a common example, you can't just slap good pockets on close-fitting women's jeans. Good pockets need lining and room in the cut to expand. These in turn mean extra cloth. a looser fit, and lots of extra stitching, likely coupled with a higher price. Some of this can be mitigated by using more elastic-heavy material, which comes with a major drop in durability.
How many women are looking to pay a higher price for a baggy butt in exchange for pockets? For those that are, the products exist today. Carhartt happily offers such items for $50-$70. Meanwhile, Shein sells their pieces for $10-$15. Bear in mind the Carhartts will almost certainly last longer than four or five Shein pieces.
I can think of several very high quality denim brands that do work more fashionable than Carhartt. Of course, they charge more than $50 a pair.
In its simplest DIY expression, you can sew a patch pocket on a dress. If you're not very careful in both dress cut and pocket location, the first time you put your phone in your new pocket you will completely wreck the lines of the dress.
Of course, when you're paying $15 a piece you don't expect it to last long. So you buy several. This, I suspect, is where a lot of the pink tax in clothing lies.
> I remember when I first heard the term "pink tax."
It's not that.
> There are a lot of basic essentials (see pockets) that equivalent women's garments simply do not have. And it seems to be more related to the manufacturers than consumers, because it is literally a meme for a girl to be excited about having pockets. And most of the women I know do share info abut which brands have pockets, etc. It seems that women will buy good quality stuff, but I agree that mountains of clothes are being made that don't seem like they were made with any humans in mind that might wear them?
No, the market works. You are just misunderstanding it, so you might be surprised by my lifehack: when I need pants with pockets, I buy them either from a sport store (most outdoor wear has pockets) or from the men's section (who would've thought about that one lolol)
It's just a lifehack, because they are rarely needed for me. And it's not just for me: it's reflected at the market level, so there are fewer options that provide pockets
Maybe you like some specific kind of neckties (or something else men wear), or have specific preferences (a man purse to carry your electronics?) so you share info with your friends who have similar preference, but it's not male/female specific.
The problem isn't the cost to customers, it's about externalities. Those cheap clothes are subsidized by slave labor and pollution. If you turn a blind eye to that you're complicit.
Most of clothes are subsidized by slave labour or pollution [1] [2]. The question is, who gets the margins. Somehow when it's Shein or Teemu it's "fast fashion bad", and when it's Adidas or Levi's it's "let's close our eyes and pretend that not happened".
Why do you think we don’t care about US brands? H&M, Nike, Adidas are all built on slave labor and pollution. I didn’t know that Levi’s was as well until reading your comment.
I do think the scale and the race to the bottom in terms of price and disposability is slightly worse with these newer companies, though.
It’s not clear that people get more for less in practice so there’s also a question of cost to the consumers.
If you buy 10 pieces of clothing for the price of 1, but those cheaper ones last for 1/100th the number of uses the more expensive one does, and the more expensive one can also be repaired to further extend the life, are those 10 pieces actually cheaper?
What’s really annoying are comments like the GPs which essentially complain about even doing research on identifying whether there is more to something beyond the surface.
It’s such an awful attitude I can’t even understand how people come up with it. Especially since many are the consumers themselves who will benefit from the information being identified. Ive started wondering whether there is a significant (if not majority) of people who are aggressively defensive of their ignorance and prefer it to knowledge.
While this is almost definitely the case, in general supply chains are completely opaque to the consumer. Anything you buy could and probably has involved exploitative labor practices in some place. As for pollution, everything uses energy. Even using if something uses green energy in its production, it will cause someone else who otherwise would have used that green energy to use some polluting energy instead. There is no standardized labeling scheme and nobody can be trusted. I mean if the person selling stuff is telling me it's "ethical" -- okay so I'm just meant to take that a face value am I? Where's the proof? What's penalty if it turns out you've lied? What are the chances someone will even be able to investigate the whole supply chain after the fact and then they'll actually do it?
You are responsible for your actions, but you act according to imperfect information, so your actions are never going to be perfectly virtuous. But then again, even with perfect information, that is rarely the case.
There's a pretty big difference between knowing full well something comes at a huge cost of human suffering and turning a blind eye to that, and inadvertently participating in something that turns out has unanticipated externalities. The two are not the same, and relying on the possibility of the latter scenario to justify the former is bad faith.
> knowing full well something comes at a huge cost of human suffering
Well over half the things I need in life fall into the category of "I know this came at the cost of human suffering". There's not a lot of options for me as a consumer.
Much of the food I buy in supermarkets are harvested and processed by people in misery. I can't afford a car and when I Uber/Lyft to the hospital, I know the drivers aren't making ends meet and the nursing assistants make paltry wages that cannot pay rent in my city. When I do eat in a restaurant, having worked in restaurants for quite a few years, I'm fully aware that many of the staff aren't making living wages. When I visit my family, I know that the rookie flight attendants on Southwest Airlines are making just $22,000/year[0]. The maintenance workers at my apartment complex aren't able to afford fixing their car to take their kids anywhere and have to eat the fast-food chicken at the gas station next door (only food within 3 miles) unless they splurge on UberEats that they can't afford. Their children are being supervised by substitute teachers making $12/hr with very limited and sporadic hours each week.
What can I do differently as someone barely treading water myself?
From the article:
> This is an era of Shopping as Entertainment—shopping not out of need, but to scratch an itch, to feel like you did something, to kill time.
Maybe this is the difference. I only have enough money to buy a tiny bit more than I need. I actually really need to make the money stretch.
When it comes to "fast fashion" that's all anyone can ask of you. The complaints are leveled at those who treat garments as literally disposable, worn just once or twice then tossed to make room for a new thing.
It's an entire ethos that fashion requires constant change. It's no longer seasonal, but weekly.
It's an interesting point. Where do my responsibilities end as a consumer? I suppose "inadvertently participating" is qualified by the degree to which you believe it is likely that buying a more expensive product also causes negative externalities. (I am assuming I am meant to use price as an indicator.) If I believe that this is also highly likely, by paying more, I am simply giving more money to the exploiter. Is it not worse to reward them more for their actions?
> Those cheap clothes are subsidized by slave labor and pollution.
Yes, if something is cheap, it must necessarily have been produced by either (1) a person who wasn't paid very much ("slave labor"), or (2) a machine (which means pollution).
Is the conclusion that it's bad for things to be cheap?
Well, no? That doesn't actually follow. This is akin to countering the claim that a dog is an animal by pointing out the absurdity that this would mean all animals are dogs, when there clearly are cats and cows and so on.
These statements are true about the fast fashion industry. The clothes are cheap because these things are true, they aren't true because they are cheap.
They are accidental properties of cheap clothes, not necessary properties; but they are still properties of the fast fashion industry.
There are many reasons production costs could be low though. I don't think it follows that the cheapest option by necessity the most inhumane and destructive. Perhaps a more effective means of production has been invented, a new more effective machine for example.
My claim is that a more effective method of production or may not pollute more than a less effective method. There is essentially no reason to assume that an increase in productivity comes at an increase in pollution. Foregoing environmental concerns may in some cases allow increased productivity, but that does not imply that all increases in productivity are increases in pollution, that would be affirming the consequent.
What does this comment have to do with your claim above that modern clothes are "subsidized by slave labor or pollution"?
To the extent that that claim is true, it is equally true of future clothes, unless those clothes are very expensive. Nothing you've said here connects to what you said above.
You appear to be arguing the position that, if this year we produce X tons of clothes at the cost of emitting Y tons of pollution, and next year we produce 2X tons of clothes at the cost of Y tons of pollution, next year's clothes are not being subsidized by pollution, even though this year's clothes are. But that position is self-evidently insane. Were you trying to say something different?
I'd word the conclusion as: it's bad for things to cheaper than what they would cost in a world without slave labor and environmental destruction.
Alternatively, a slightly different conclusion is that in some situations it is bad for the market to optimize for cheapness over quality. E.g. perhaps it would be better if we optimized for people to have fewer, higher quality garments. This conclusion gets into the boot theory of poverty.
This is not be the market success you’re thinking it is. The fast fashion industry relies on extremely dubious labor practices, massive amounts of pollution, and a culture of constant consumption and mostly disposable goods. 70lb of clothing are landfilled per person per year in the US alone (2018 numbers, today’s would certainly be higher).
The article’s comparison to gambling, and now outright use of gambling game mechanics by fast fashion co’s, is the most troubling part of the industry. It relies on getting people addicted to consumption, on ‘whale’ customers who buy constantly, on a lifestyle of single-use, disposable clothing (with massive negative externalities). Society, unfortunately, pays the cost.
I keep seeing videos and articles about how fast fashion is the second worst polluting industry in the world behind the oil industry. That's concerning to me but I don't know if it is true.
I think, as a thought exercise, one can make the same argument about plastic. Even though it is cheap and there is demand it does not mean that it does not have also bad consequences (non biodegradable in that case).
In the fast fashion case the bad consequences would be slave labour and pollution (from materials and from transport) for garments that do not last (usually fast fashion refers to mediocre quality items), or that are returned immediately.
Not sure why the link doesn't show it, but this link came up on a Google Image search for clothing vs. everything else in CPI. Here's a link to the image itself:
My only point is, clothing has been cheap for a long time, and hasn't risen with inflation. I can't tell if your comment is saying that fast fashion is responsible for clothing being cheap, or what time "now" specifically refers to, so I'm not going to assume anything about that. Maybe I'm just adding to what you're saying in pointing out that clothing has been cheap for quite a while, and fast fashion has little to do with it (if anything, fast fashion is probably just a product of how affordable clothing is).
Of course, it's affordable because clothes can be manufactured cheaply in quite a few countries. Seems a lot of it is made in Vietnam, Cambodia, Bangladesh, etc. I doubt the workers there are paid 'well' by our standards here in the US.
I recently got into sewing recently, and I gained a new appreciation for my clothes (generally relatively cheap basics, made overseas).
Somewhere in China/Vietname/Malaysia there's a person, probably a woman, who can sew like 1000x times better than me, churning out perfect garment after perfect garment for like 12 hours a day and getting paid pennies for her mindblowingly good work.
I do like to think I have some talents, that I occasionally make good decisions. But man, 90% of my financial success is luck: right parents, right country, and it just so happens the only thing I'm not awful at (I tried working a mimimum wage retail job at H&M, and while I was barely competent, I feel like I was one of the worst performers there) just happens to be a skillset with lots of well paying employment.
I don't think poor people benefit from clothes that last only a few washes are impossible to repair due to the materials used as much as you think.
I grew up in a lower middle class immigrant family and we bought many clothes second hand. A lot of the stuff coming out of Shein won't last long enough to make it to a second hand store.
