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Overdressed
The Shockingly High Cost
of Cheap Fashion
by Elizabeth L. Cline
Portfolio
Elizabeth Cline takes an investigative reporter’s tour of the global fashion business in “Overdressed,” and finds most of us have abandoned good-quality apparel in favor of mountains of cheap clothing that’s as disposable as a McDonald’s wrapper.
While our grandparents bought items to last and knew how to mend, skills such as sewing have been lost, while global “fast fashion,” empires have risen, forcing local department stores into oblivion.
We own many more items of clothing than even our parents, yet families in America spend only, on average, $1,700 a year on apparel. “It’s the smallest percentage of our incomes ever dedicated to clothes,” Cline writes. “Our money has never gone further.”
Cline was a fast fashion fan herself until she asked herself where all the contents of her closet come from. She admits to knowing virtually nothing about what she plucked off the shelves of H&M and Target.
What Cline finds is a domestic garment industry in decline, a burgeoning Chinese export industry and a lot of industrial waste and ecological damage associated with all our consumption. While many of us assume that our used clothing will reach a person in need, much of it becomes trash, part of a great wall of unused clothing.
The author notes that in 1929, the average middle-class man might have had six outfits, a woman nine. These days we can barely find space for anything but our clothes.
She’s shocked to catalogue the contents of her own closet include: 61 tops, 60 T-shirts, 34 tank tops, 21 skirts, 24 dresses, 20 pairs of shoes, 20 sweaters, 18 belts, 15 cardigans and hoodies, 14 pairs of shorts, 14 jackets, 13 pairs of jeans, 12 bras and on and on. All told, she owned 354 pieces of clothing.
Alan Ng, who runs a Brooklyn-based garment factory, describes our addiction: “The most general consumer would rather buy cheap stuff because they don’t want their clothes next season. They will spend $20, so they can buy 60 or 100 pieces, but they will not spend $150 and buy fewer pieces. It’s very wasteful.”
Seasonal trends that once drove department-store cash registers four times a year have been replaced by two-week product cycles. Trends barely arrive before they’re gone in favor of something else — promoting a get-it-now-or-its-gone buyer frenzy. With $3 T-shirts and $20 dresses, young women are buying and junking outfits at a rapid rate. But Cline asks what value we’re getting if the item simply falls apart after a few washes?
“The net effect,” she writes, “we’re buying so much clothing that world fiber use has risen from 10 million tons in 1950 to 82 million tons today.”
While our choice in clothes is innumerable, where we buy them is not. In 1960, there were 12,000 independent apparel companies serving a nationwide network of independent retailers and small chains. Today, chains like Wal-Mart and Old Navy dominate the trade.
Gap was the first mass chain to get us hooked on buying basics in ever-changing colors and styles. But even Gap, which had over $14 billion in revenues in 2010, is struggling to keep up being knocked off its perch by faster fashion stores.
Target opened 1,300 stores between 1991-2011 and turned buying cheap clothing into a design statement, partnering with the likes of high-fashion designers such as Missoni and Isaac Mizrahi.
Her points are underscored by news in recent weeks that JCPenney would go back to having sales even while it fought to get consumers to accept more rational pricing strategies that eschewed such promotions. Customers are just too addicted to low-cost items to accept a “quality” sale.
The pace of fashion trends is now so fast, it’s getting harder for any trend to get traction. Cline and her friends weren’t able to define a trend that would characterize the decade between 2000 and 2010. They were easily able to describe the ’80s, which were closely associated with “neon, Hammer pants, power dressing, poofy party dresses,” and the ’90s, “grunge, floral prints, combat boots and midriffs.”
They decide the biggest trend of the 2000s were the trends themselves: “Too many to count, changing ever-faster, challenging us to keep up.”
Cline describes how retailers are able to make clothing at such low prices. It’s down to cheap fabrics, high volume and designers who are left to figure out how to produce lines at less than cost.
One such designer, Eliza Starbuck, had her line picked up by Urban Outfitters in Spring 2011 and was asked to do just that in part because Starbuck insisted on using a more expensive, eco-friendly fabric, Tencel.
Starbuck was only able to fulfill the order thanks to a factory that had a gap in production and could offer her a great deal.
Another reason chains can sell clothing so cheaply is high volume.
They bulk buy and push us to buy frequently so they can keep the prices low. She writes that Forever 21 sells its products for double the cost of production plus a few dollars. That adds up to only about $15, on average.
“Fast fashion’s profitability resides in the same place as its appeal — in selling a relentless and unsustainable ocean of new clothes week after week,” she writes.
Forever 21, a chain founded in 1984 by South Korean-born couple Do Won Chang and Jin Sook Chang, is a trailblzer in this regard. Cline writes that inventive Forever 21, which picks up hot trends faster than anyone else, has been frequently sued unsuccessfully for copyright infringement. That’s because US copyright law does not protect fashion design, only fabric prints and jewelry.
Cheap fabric is another reason stores can offer cut-price clothing. Polyester is now the world’s dominant fiber. Much of the fabric from our cheap-clothing addiction is turned into rags in its afterlife because the quality is so poor.
Cline’s subject matter makes for some uncomfortable reading. While fast-fashion proponents might argue they’re democratizing fashion, the Brooklyn writer travels to China and witnesses what havoc we are wreaking.
Guandong’s Pearl River has turned red and indigo from runoff from dyeing plants. Since so many fabrics are blended, meanwhile, they’re not recyclable.
She poses as the owner of a fashion business looking for good deals and meets Lily, a low-level intermediary who offers to make Cline embroidered dresses for the impossibly low price of $9. Chanel-toting Chinese business executives are making a fortune with their deals with Western chains on the backs of millions of low-cost workers.
Those jobs — at any wage — are gone from the US. While New York “is the undisputed fashion hub,” we barely make anything anymore, Cline writes.
In Manhattan, Cline finds she can’t get anyone on the phone at the Garment Industry Development Corporation, which she expects will be a large lobby group. Instead, she finds a non-profit that employs one man trying to preserve the garment district against an impossible torrent of cheap foreign labor.
Cline threads her story with the effects of legislation on altering where clothing is made, barely any of it in the US. Trade deals made in the 1990s mean the Chinese make 90% of all house slippers sold in the US and 50% of all dresses. The American apparel industry at large lost 650,000 between 1997 and 2007.
Those jobs are not coming back. But Cline writes that there is a growing subculture of people who mend their own clothes — a better value than buying cheap apparel destined for the dump.
In true Brooklyn-style, Cline argues that consumers may even want to buy a Singer sewing machine, a pattern book, and some fabric to make clothes themselves.
The recession-inspired message is a sound one, but in a city teaming with stores it’s a tough sell. After all, H&M is just down the street.
Claire Atkinson is a business reporter for The Post.