What Happened to Our Clothes? Part I
The short answer: Capitalism. "Fossil fuels scaled fast fashion. If we didn’t have synthetics, we would not have fast fashion."
When it comes to sustainability, the irony of what I do is not lost on me. As a commerce editor, my job was to comb through tens of pages and curate market edits that drove shopping clicks. We weren’t promoting secondhand products and these weren’t things people needed, but we had a job and my team did it well (beating our revenue goals almost every month). While I felt conflicted about contributing to the overconsumption marketing machine, I did enjoy the job. I loved looking at clothes all day and helping people discover cool brands. I still do.
As a content creator, I practically do the same although on a much smaller scale. In addition to advertising new brand launches, my sister Chris and I also curate products on our blog and monetize them via affiliate links. I’m thoroughly aware that this contributes to the system, but I also think these two things (my growing interest in sustainability and passion for fashion) are true at once. Sophia Li said it best during my panel, “We can’t talk about sustainability without talking about the systems we all live in. Unless we go live in the woods, it’s impossible not to participate in these systems.”
What are these systems? Carefully designed webs of images, slogans, signs and incentives created to influence what we see, how we think, how we live and earn a living, and what we consume. To talk about sustainability is to know that while capitalism is the elephant in the room, we can tackle some issues as individuals and collectives.
Before I share the best takeaways from our conversation, I had to put out this disclaimer. The goal here isn’t to point fingers (unless you’re like Shein or Brandy Melville), but to learn and hopefully start closing the gap between our resolutions and day-to-day actions. But it’s not all on us the consumers. Regulatory policy is crucial.
Last week, at the newly launched membership club Seven24 Collective, I hosted the third installment of Market Appointment Live with journalist Sophia Li, editor Jazmine Rogers and SuperCircle’s marketing director Vishal Duvvuru. Having dedicated a combined 20 years of research to sustainability, they spoke knowledgeably about the history of synthetic fibers, supply chain legislation, the systems that are causing the decline in clothing quality, and the challenges of circularity among other things.
Sophia encountered sustainability when she worked at Vogue, where she helped launch Vogue.com and published a story around 2016 about an important piece of legislation that would stop global leaders from emitting carbon emissions by 2030. When that story didn’t perform as well as her colleague’s article that detailed one of Kim Kardashian’s date-night looks, she began to wonder “if this was the kind of clickbait content society was telling us they wanted to consume, or should they be telling society what they should be moving towards.” This opened her eyes to “our age or content pollution, overconsumption and overproduction.”
Meanwhile, Jazmine grew up in South Los Angeles and learned to be thrifty from not having a lot of money. While studying fashion merchandising, she learned about how harmful fast fashion is to people and the planet, so she resolved to become part of the solution. This is how Sustainable Baddie, which evolved from an early style blog was born. Similarly, Vishal stumbled upon Thousand Fell and learned about textile recycling once he began working there. His work focuses primarily on circularity and helping brands become more sustainable over time.
It was an honor to learn from such brilliant leaders, and I think you’ll find these notes (edited for clarity) informative and thought-provoking. There is a lot to unpack so I will be sharing them in two parts. If you’d like to receive the too-big-to-fit-here panel recording video, please email me for the link.
Capitalism has co-opted the word. It separated us from the notion of sustainability as a birthright, telling us we need a vacation to feel joy or a holiday to celebrate love when these things are already inside us.