Democratic Diva

02 Feb 2010 10:19 pm
Posted by: Donna

Back in October Mark and I watched HBO’s SCHMATTA: Rags to Riches to Rags, a documentary exploring the rise and fall of the US garment trade.

The Garment Center is the heart and soul of Midtown Manhattan and the backbone of the fashion industry. It was the gateway for many immigrants to the American Dream. Now, it’s in danger of disappearing. This HBO feature documentary explores the rise and fall of New York’s fabled schmatta (rag) trade as a microcosm for the economic shocks that have changed our lives.

In 1965 95% of the clothing sold in the US was made in the US. Today it’s less than 5%. That’s not just a problem for displaced US workers and their exploited counterparts overseas, it’s a tragedy for the environment. There was a point in Schmatta where they interviewed a marketer for Ralph Lauren, who talked about a line of $700 jeans. The filmmakers went on to describe how those jeans traveled to several ports, from cotton gin to textile mill to sewing to embellishing with sequin appliques. Those are some well-traveled pants. Each process required being loaded onto a cargo ship and sent thousands of miles to the next step, to the country where low wage workers would labor for hours at slave wages to complete the required step.

Advocates of unfettered “free trade” pretend we can ignore and defer the externalized costs of burning millions of gallons of fuel to manufacture and transport clothing at all price points into the country. But we can’t.

Fast fashion provides the marketplace with affordable apparel aimed mostly at young women. Fueling the demand are fashion magazines that help create the desire for new “must-haves” for each season. “Girls especially are insatiable when it comes to fashion. They have to have the latest thing, always. And since it is cheap, you buy more of it. Our closets are full,” says Mayra Diaz, mother of a 10-year-old girl and a buyer in the fashion district of New York City. Disposable couture appears in shopping mall after shopping mall in America and Europe at prices that make the purchase tempting and the disposal painless.

Yet fast fashion leaves a pollution footprint, with each step of the clothing life cycle generating potential environmental and occupational hazards. For example, polyester, the most widely used manufactured fiber, is made from petroleum. With the the rise in production in the fashion industry, demand for man-made fibers, especially polyester, has nearly doubled in the last 15 years, according to figures from the Technical Textile Markets. The manufacture of polyester and other synthetic fabrics is an energy-intensive process requiring large amounts of crude oil and releasing emissions including volatile organic compounds, particulate matter, and acid gases such as hydrogen chloride, all of which can cause or aggravate respiratory disease. Volatile monomers, solvents, and other by-products of polyester production are emitted in the wastewater from polyester manufacturing plants. The EPA, under the Resource Conservation and Recovery Act, considers many textile manufacturing facilities to be hazardous waste generators.

Issues of environmental health and safety do not apply only to the production of man-made fabrics. Cotton, one of the most popular and versatile fibers used in clothing manufacture, also has a significant environmental footprint. This crop accounts for a quarter of all the pesticides used in the United States, the largest exporter of cotton in the world, according to the USDA. The U.S. cotton crop benefits from subsidies that keep prices low and production high. The high production of cotton at subsidized low prices is one of the first spokes in the wheel that drives the globalization of fashion.

I hate the suggestion that demand for clothing by American girls and women is to blame for this since it is not they who determine global trade policy. Nor are they responsible for electing the politicians who obligingly gave away our manufacturing base, and the attendant degradation of environmental standards, at the behest of corporations. I rather doubt that very many girls and young women shopping at their local mall for $700 or $24 jeans have been made aware of the short and long term global ramifications of their purchases. I don’t think the dudes buying the latest fashions know any better either.

From the makers of Schmatta

Even Levin witnessed a dramatic shift in the industry while working on the film. Recalling his trip to a fashion show after Lehman Bros. floundered last fall, Levin said, “It was like the emperor has no clothes. Here we were told all these things — globalization, automation, deregulation — this was going to get rid of all the dirty work for us, but we were going to get all the good jobs and we were going to maintain our standard of living or get wealthier. And you could shop till you dropped, you could run up your credit card and the market was infallible, and it was better to market than manufacture, and it was better to use credit than to save. It was a whole culture for 25 to 30 years, and all of a sudden it had been stripped naked. And it was like all of a sudden it was an illusion; it was all a fantasy. Again, clothes were a methodology; they were a metaphor for that world.”

Time to stop thinking of clothing as a global free trade marketing metaphor. It’s not. It’s just stuff we need to protect us from the elements, maintain modesty, and yeah, adorn ourselves. We can make clothing here again, and we can figure out how to make it in a way that doesn’t screw over workers and the planet.

6 Comments

Comments RSS TrackBack Identifier URI

Leave a comment

Name (required)

Mail (will not be published) (required)

Website