Architecting My Wardrobe, My Blog, My Sanity
Here's the thing, I began 2015 with a promise to myself: I will commit to doing less. It's not that I don't love having hobbies (oh darling, I do), but between the new job, commuting three hours a day, starting Crossfit, a slew of extracurriculars, and some minor health issues... well, 2014 wore me the heck out.
I didn't realize how bad it was until I visited my mother after several months apart. She gave me that mom stare and said, "Honey, you look exhausted."
I wanted to reply, No Mom, I just turned 32 when you weren't looking. I have wrinkles now, and a tendency to get crippling hangovers after one strong cocktail. But I knew what she meant. The telltale sign of emotional exhaustion isn't dark circles or bloodshot eyes; it's the inability to fully experience life's moments of joy. And that's something a mother can spot a mile away.
Anyway, that's my roundabout way of saying that I'll be taking a hybrid approach to this year's Wardrobe Architect challenge. I do plan to sew, but I don't think I can commit to creating an entire capsule wardrobe from scratch. Which is fine; as Kristen pointed out in her post today, people around the world are taking part in this for a variety of reasons: refining their wardrobes, quitting fast fashion, becoming more mindful consumers, and so on. These are the same reasons I started this blog in the first place, so I think we're all on the same page.
What I can commit to – and what I'm quite excited about – is sharing the progress that I made during last year's Wardrobe Architect series, with a few updates and lessons learned. My goal has always been to create a thoughtful wardrobe from a mix of ready-to-wear clothing and a few handmade pieces, and this year's challenge offers a perfect opportunity to synthesize what I've learned as a beginning seamstress and an ethical consumer-in-progress.
I've also been been doing a lot of behind the scenes work to make this blog more useful for other ethically-minded shoppers. Soon, I'll be rolling out a brand spankin' new format, complete with an interactive, categorized ethical shopping guide. My hope is that these resources will help those of you who also plan to take a hybrid approach to the WA series plan, purchase, and maintain a sustainable wardrobe. Here's a sneak peak of what's to come:
An ethical shopping guide, searchable by attribute, and each with its own page detailing the company's philosophy...
This is still going to take forever to finish building out.
But then... I swear... fewer projects :)
The Ethical Wardrobe, Part II: Who Made My Clothes?
But it certainly hasn't been a cakewalk. It took me three years to compile a modest list of ethical fashion brands. I've been floored by how expensive some sustainable options are. I've been frustrated with the elitism inherent in the ethical lexicon. And I still feel like a total weirdo every time I walk into a store and proceed to turn everything inside out to see where it was made.
In fact for many people cost, confusion, time restraints, and even embarrassment can be major barriers to making more ethical choices. But the wonderful thing about the ethical fashion movement is that it allows you to start small. You don't need to overhaul your closet or become a minimalist or spend $360 on a fair trade scarf (although don't let me discourage you, darling). All you need to do is start asking questions, one of the most important of which is...
Who made my clothes?
It’s simple, but putting a face to the things we interact with everyday – whether it’s the food we eat, the clothes we wear, or the devices we're attached to – can help keep us accountable. During my talk, I brought in several pieces of clothing and accessories from my own closet, which included Shinola, Horween Leather Company, Mata Traders, Everlane, Krochet Kids, and BCBG. I then asked the audience to think for a minute about who they thought might have made them. What were their lives like? How much were they paid? Did they get to design the garments themselves, take pride and ownership of their work? After a brief discussion I shared what I knew about each piece based on the information the companies provided:
The first five companies are all ones I consider to be ethical or sustainable for a variety of reasons. There are a lot of different ways to define "ethical" (which I'll go into in more detail later), but the Ethical Fashion Forum's definition is a good place to start. EFF describes a "triple bottom line" necessary to make a business truly sustainable: social, environmental, and commercial responsibility. In other words, truly ethical fashion goes beyond simply doing no harm; it actively reduces poverty, creates sustainable economies, lessens and counteracts environmental degradation, and meets an existing market demand. You can read more about it here.
The companies profiled above satisfy these parameters to varying degrees, but to put it even more simply, they allow me to answer that most-important question, who made my clothes? Because these companies have transparent supply chains, I know who made my favorite alpaca scarf, I know that she was fairly compensated for her work, and I even know that she plans to major in a technical field and own her own home. These are purchases I can feel good about, and companies that I am happy to support.
But these companies are the exception, not the rule. A lot of items in my closet come from companies like BCBG. You know, the one with the dramatic question mark; the one that reads UNKNOWN. I wish I could tell you that whoever made my favorite wool coat in China wasn't a slave laborer or under the age of 14, but all I can really do is make assumptions about what working conditions are like in these factories based on vague corporate social responsibly statements.
In some cases, working conditions might be fair, and even enable employees to support their families, rise from poverty, and live better lives than their parents. NPR's Planet Money Makes a T-Shirt has a beautifully nuanced video that follows garment workers in India and Columbia and illustrates how wildly wages, working conditions, and and social mobility can vary from country to country.
And then of course, we have Rena Plaza. Which makes all this not-knowing or kind-of knowing not ok.
And remember, ethical fashion is more than simply not doing harm, it's about making people's lives better. So even if a company claims it doesn't condone slave or child labor, or pollute the environment all that much, it's not inherently ethical. I'd rather know that my purchases are actively making the world just a little more fair.
So, who gets my money?
As Jess of Notes From a Thoughtful Life points out, there's no wrong or right way to approach ethical shopping. Which companies you decide to support will depend on the ethical issues you feel most strongly about. If you're vegan or vegetarian, you might want to focus on cruelty-free or animal-free products. If you're keen on bringing manufacturing back to the United States, you might want to buy American-made. If you're foremost an environmentalist, you'll probably prioritize brands that have zero-waste policies or minimal environmental impact. Ideally, an ethical fashion brand will have several ethical traits, but my focus had always been on humans (how can I make sure my purchases didn't hurt anyone along the way?). So I usually prioritize fair trade or made in the USA options over something that's simply vegan or "eco-friendly."
As I mentioned in my previous post, fashion is a big part of our identity, and inherently emotional. Clothes can mean joy, pride, celebration, dignity, and self-expression. They can mean enough money to feed your family, and prosperity for your community. They can also mean shame, struggle, abuse, even death. So when we vote with our dollars, let’s vote for joy.
/ / /
I'll be following up with two more posts: one that explores the definition of "ethical" more deeply, and another that talks about how to make your sewing practice more sustainable. In the meantime, tell me about your own experiences with ethical shopping in the comments. What are the biggest hurdles you face when making more conscientious choices?
The Ethical Wardrobe, Part I: It's Complicated
As my mom would say, I was being a bit of a Debbie Downer about my Britex talk last week. But now that the sting of not being perfect has worn off, I’d like to share out some of the content. There’s a lot of it – more than I was able to get through on Saturday – so I’m going to break it up into a few posts and include some extra links and resources. Without further ado, then, here’s my schpeal on crafting an ethical wardrobe.
Fashion, Emotion, and Cold Hard Facts
I began my talk by asking the audience to share some of the emotions they typically felt while shopping. Responses included “guilt,” “frustration,” “score!” “having fun,” “frivolous,” “annoyance”…and more “guilt.” If you're reading this now, take a minute to think about it. Do you love shopping? Does it fill you with anxiety? Maybe a little bit of both?
Although our ages, believes, incomes, and shopping habits may vary wildly, there are two things that we and roughly every other person on the planet do every day: eat, and get dressed. And yet for something we do every day, the choice of what to wear and what to eat can be pretty mentally and emotionally exhausting. When I asked my audience to think about some of the emotions they had towards shopping, many were negative. Why is that?
Well, clothes are complicated. They’re one of the most obvious expressions of our personality, tastes, lifestyle, even social status. We spend hours hunting for them, making them, taking care of them, talking about them, loving them, hating them. And advertisers spend billions of dollars every year trying to get us to buy them.
Clothes carry an emotional weight for all of us: that adrenaline rush you get when scoring a designer label for a third of the price; the pride you feel when designing and sewing your own clothes; the shame you may have felt when you couldn’t afford to dress like your classmates, neighbors, or colleagues.
A lot of our identity, and increasingly our sense of morality, is wrapped up in what we wear. And that’s a lot of pressure! We now have access to an overwhelming number of facts around global poverty, global warming, and the effects that fast fashion is having on people and our planet. I can go online and find some pretty sobering statistics about all of this stuff within in minutes, like the fact that:
- If each person owned only one pair of pants, one shirt, and one jacket, that would be 21 billion articles of clothing. If you were to count each of those, one per second, it would take nearly 672 years. And I, for one, own far more than three articles of clothing.
- In fact, the average American family spends about $1,700 a year on clothes.
- The average American also trashes about 65 pounds of textiles per year.
- In contrast, we know that 2.4 billion people worldwide live on less than 2.00 a day.
- The average wage of a garment worker in India is $68 – 100/ month. That would be about $200 – 300/ month in the U.S. when you adjust for cost of living differences.
- There are over 27 million modern-day slaves worldwide, many of whom support the textile or cotton industries.
- Finally, if everyone consumed at the rate of the U.S., we would need 3 to 5 planets.
The Wake Up Call
I first started learning about the effects fast fashion and the full scope of global inequality in college. The thing is, while these stats were pretty shocking, none of them ever inspired the “aha” moment – or the action – that I hoped they would. I bought my sweatshop free sneakers and fair trade coffee, and nagged my friends about how they should too (you can imagine how fun I was at parties). But I wasn’t really sure why, other than it seemed like the right thing to do.
I first started learning about the effects fast fashion and the full scope of global inequality in college. The thing is, while these stats were pretty shocking, none of them ever inspired the “aha” moment – or the action – that I hoped they would. I bought my sweatshop free sneakers and fair trade coffee, and nagged my friends about how they should too (you can imagine how fun I was at parties). But I wasn’t really sure why, other than it seemed like the right thing to do.
Then in 2010, my now-husband and I took a trip to Cairo, Egypt. This was a year before the Egyptian revolution, so the political and economic tension was pretty palpable. We saw the pyramids. We took a Nile cruise. But for me, the most memorable part of the trip was a visit to a carpet factory outside the city. The owner gave us a tour of the gallery, proudly showed off the expertly woven rugs, and then asked if we’d like to meet the people who made them. So we went downstairs.
The carpet makers? All children, all under twelve. Smiling sweetly, but working. And that really was when it hit me. When all of those facts I’d been collecting over the years were ignited by a purely emotional experience. I realized that if I’d been born into different circumstances – or even born in the U.S. a century ago – that could have been me. It could have been one of my students. It could have been my child.
I have no idea what went on behind the scenes at this carpet factory, or whether the children really attended school like the owner told us. But the bottom line is that this is a reality for 215 million of the world’s children. That’s 1 in 7. And child labor is only one of the many global injustices that take place in the name of fashion – so that I can buy that $14 linen skirt for so perfect for Cairo in the summer.
This experience didn’t inspire me to go out and buy every piece of fair trade clothing I could get my hands on. It didn’t even inspire me take political action (mostly because I wasn’t sure where to start). But it did start me on a journey toward becoming a more conscientious shopper. And a year after Cairo, I started this blog.
Although my personal fight against fast fashion can feel small – even frivolous – at times, it’s part of a movement that is gaining more and more traction. A movement that starts with the question: Who made my clothes?