Book Review: Overdressed: The Shockingly High Cost of Cheap Fashion – Elizabeth L. Cline
[image error] Until recently, Elizabeth Cline was a typical American consumer. She’d grown accustomed to shopping at outlet malls, discount stores like T.J. Maxx, and cheap but trendy retailers like Forever 21, Target, and H&M. She was buying a new item of clothing almost every week (the national average is sixty-four per year) but all she had to show for it was a closet and countless storage bins packed full of low-quality fads she barely wore—including the same sailor-stripe tops and fleece hoodies as a million other shoppers. When she found herself lugging home seven pairs of identical canvas flats from Kmart (a steal at $7 per pair, marked down from $15!), she realized that something was deeply wrong.
Cheap fashion has fundamentally changed the way most Americans dress. Stores ranging from discounters like Target to traditional chains like JCPenney now offer the newest trends at unprecedentedly low prices. Retailers are producing clothes at enormous volumes in order to drive prices down and profits up, and they’ve turned clothing into a disposable good. After all, we have little reason to keep wearing and repairing the clothes we already own when styles change so fast and it’s cheaper to just buy more.
But what are we doing with all these cheap clothes? And more important, what are they doing to us, our society, our environment, and our economic well-being?
In Overdressed, Cline sets out to uncover the true nature of the cheap fashion juggernaut, tracing the rise of budget clothing chains, the death of middle-market and independent retailers, and the roots of our obsession with deals and steals. She travels to cheap-chic factories in China, follows the fashion industry as it chases even lower costs into Bangladesh, and looks at the impact (both here and abroad) of America’s drastic increase in imports. She even explores how cheap fashion harms the charity thrift shops and textile recyclers where our masses of clothing castoffs end up.
Sewing, once a life skill for American women and a pathway from poverty to the middle class for workers, is now a dead-end sweatshop job. The pressures of cheap have forced retailers to drastically reduce detail and craftsmanship, making the clothes we wear more and more uniform, basic, and low quality. Creative independent designers struggle to produce good and sustainable clothes at affordable prices.
Cline shows how consumers can break the buy-and-toss cycle by supporting innovative and stylish sustainable designers and retailers, refashioning clothes throughout their lifetimes, and mending and even making clothes themselves.
Overdressed will inspire you to vote with your dollars and find a path back to being well dressed and feeling good about what you wear.
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Review: Overdressed: The Shockingly High Cost of Cheap Fashion (2012)
If you’re going to read Overdressed, be prepared for it to leave a nasty taste in your mouth and a lump in your throat when you next open your wardrobe. This really is a pretty damning expose of the ‘fast fashion’ industry, which churns out clothes faster than we can wear them out, leading to massive waste and a wardrobe full of clothes that we wear only once or twice. Why? Because at $5 an item, we still think we’re getting our money’s worth even if we only wear it a couple of times and then it goes out of fashion.
I wouldn’t say I’ve ever been excessively fashion conscious and certainly for the last 2-3 years, I tend to only buy something when I need it. I do love shoes but even so I become incredibly attached and will wear them even when they have holes in. This Autumn, I finally threw out a pair after getting my feet soaked not once, not twice but three times! But have I bought an item in the past for $10 rationalising that it doesn’t really matter if I only wear it a handful of times? I probably have.
Fast fashion is all about embracing trends but Overdressed points out that trends change so quickly that some stores are introducing hundreds of new lines each week. Therefore, clothing is becoming disposable as people strive to keep up with the new trends emerging constantly. The cost? Our clothing is gradually becoming of poorer and poorer quality. As is stated in the book, it’s now enough for something not to be lousy. We no longer strive for an ideal, we just want to avoid something awful and if we can, that’s enough.
I was born in the eighties but years ago I was given a jacket from the seventies. It had already survived for years and it lasted for many more. Eventually the lining gave and I had kind of outgrown it anyway. I never managed to replace that jacket with anything near the quality. So, what’s the answer? To buy ‘quality’ brands? Not necessarily. Overdressed points out that in an investigation a $75 polo shirt was found to be little different to a $9 one. For the ‘fast fashion’ brands, pricing drops and quality drops but for the ‘premium’ brands, pricing is staying at a premium, even if the quality isn’t.
Really, all I can say is read this book. You’ll draw your own conclusions and may or may not agree with everything that’s said. But like Jonathan Safran Foer’s ‘Eating Animals’ was a shocking eye-opener to me as a meat-eater, ‘Overdressed’ is the equivalent version for clothes buyers. So pretty much anyone who doesn’t make their own clothes. It would be naive to suggest that that’s the way forward but perhaps it’s a less frightening prospect than a world where a one-wear blouse becomes as common as a paper plate.
Verdict: 4/5
(Book source: Netgalley)
Book Review: Overdressed: The Shockingly High Cost of Cheap Fashion – Elizabeth L. Cline | Thank you for reading Tweedle Dee and Tweedle Dave
