As a devoted, passionate reader I can highly suggest Fashionopolis. As a style blog founder, I wholeheartedly praise Fashionopolis.
This book is fascinating, striking and informative. It’s your ultimate guide to not only understanding the fast fashion industry, but also to considering its serious implications and methods of opposing it.
Let’s dive deeper into the book that made me quit fast fashion forever.
Why Fashionopolis is incredible
In Fashionopolis: The Price of Fast Fashion and the Future of Clothes, Dana Thomas writes about the waste and exploitation involved in the fast fashion industry, alternatives to this mode of fashion manufacturing and what we can do to break the cycle of unnecessary excess.
The book spans all over the world from non-regulated garment manufacturing factories in Bangladesh to Stella McCartney’s headquarters in the UK. Thomas interviews garment workers, fashion and biotech executives, farmers and innovators.
Her subjects provide many perspective on the impacts of fast fashion as well as how we can change the tide from its current bleak direction.
Fast-fashion’s devastating impacts can’t be understated. Garment waste is astronomical, but it’s the impact on working people that is truly disturbing; ”1 in 6 people in the world works in the fashion industry… Less than 2% of those people make a livable wage.”
Garment workers often in Asian countries work unbearably long hours for pennies in unsanitary, unsafe conditions. Just one of those circumstances is unacceptable, but they often face all of them.
Rana Plaza
One of the most egregious culminations of these horrible conditions was Bangaldesh’s Rana Plaza. Rana Plaza was constructed by local gangsters with no regard for proper permitting, safe conditions or sound design. The massive building housed 5 garment factories and in 2013, it collapsed.
Thomas interviews workers who survived the horrific Rana Plaza collapse that resulted in 1,132 deaths and over 2,500 injured. In the aftermath, there were reports of million-dollar claims being distributed to workers; many never saw a cent. In the world of fast fashion, the conditions that facilitated this horror are not uncommon.
Image courtesy of labourbehindthelabel.net
Rana Plaza and other factories both similar and dissimilar to it, all communicate a larger problem: the more disconnected we are from what we buy, the more de-sensitized we are to their origins and those abused in the process of their creation.
Slow Fashion
Fashionopolis follows this warning to small farms that bring organic indigo back to the mainstream and Alabama Chanin where organic-cotton clothes are sewn by local artisans and made-to-order.
The whole book provides a perfect roadmap of the state of popular fashion today, its egregious implications, people fighting the trend of fast fashion and the future of fashion in general; how it will be produced, what will be used to produce it and how we will buy or rent it.
I was particularly interested in the future-focused portions of the book: Namely companies like Evrnu and Bolt Threads. Evrnu in its essence makes fibers of recycled fibers. This process creates an infinite, waste-less life for clothing; an exceptional concept considering the current mode is to buy often and throw away often.
Similarly, Bolt Threads makes fibers from organic materials. Their most recent accomplishment, Mylo is a “leather” made from mushrooms. Brands like Stella McCartney, lululemon and Adidas have all used the innovative material.
Fashionopolis is a must read for everyone. In its beginnings it references the infamous cerulean blue sweater scene in The Devil Wears Prada for a reason: fashion impacts everyone. It’s not just the Instagram influencers and uber-wealthy that wear clothes; we all do. And we all make decisions about the kind of world we want to live in based on those purchases.
I invite everyone who wears clothes to read Fashionopolis. Maybe then we can have the discussions necessary to change fashion as we know it for the better.
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