Revisiting Slow Clothing

February 24, 2010

NOTE: Images in this archived article have been removed.

Note: If you asked my sisters, both of whom are deeply stylish, elegant and aware of fashion, who you should call before you called me to discuss issues of style, they would probably come up with about a billion names. And that’s because they love me. Anyone else could come up with 3 billion. And yet my phone has been ringing off the hook and my email box is full of interview requests because this is fashion week. Why is anyone calling me, a woman who like the late, great Molly Ivins embodies clothes that make a statement – the statement “woman who wears clothes so she won’t be nekkid?” Well, because I invented “slow fashion” and “slow clothing” (the Christian Science Monitor edited my quotes to make them seem a lot more hardassed than they actually were ;-)) which once were but a twinkle in my eye and now get a bazillion google hits. I feel a little weird taking credit for the coinage, since it seems like such an obvious construction, but hey – I can’t tell the paper of record that!

Since this fashion week, despite its sponsorship by the Mercedes Benz company, is supposed to be “green” people want to know what I think of the green fashion movement. And the answer to that is that I think it is all very interesting, and I’m delighted that people are trying to deal with the enormous impact of our clothing – and that reminds me to go hit my local Goodwill for some more second-hand t shirts to go with my sweats. Meanwhile, here’s a lightly revised version of the original article which appeared first at Groovy Green Magazine in 2006.

In conversations about social justice, energy, and our environment clothing doesn’t get a lot of attention. This is in part because individually, clothing items don’t carry that big an embodied energy cost. Another reason is that shirts aren’t as spectacular as cars, or houses or even dinner. It is also kind of a girl thing – although male clothing is just as expensive, men, on average, shop less often and buy less when they do. Women tend to buy the household’s clothing as well as their own, and to engage in recreational clothing shopping. Clothing the household has been women’s work from time immemorial. And because the clothes we wear are tied intimately into how we feel about ourselves, and how others view us, clothing as a subject is somewhat fraught.

And yet, I think there are a number of really good reasons to find and learn ways to make clothing, to prioritize homemade, or locally made clothing (including learning to find it beautiful), and perhaps to create a “Slow Clothing” or “Slow Fashion” movement rather like the “Slow Food” movement currently picking up speed. Maybe it’s as simple as creating a campaign in which each of us would have at least one daily wearable outfit that we’ve made ourselves, a kind of democratic fashion statement that acknowledges that our clothing comes with human and environmental costs.

Because while most adults may never urgently need to make clothing (there is enough clothing in the average American adult’s closet to last them their entire lives), except perhaps small items that wear out easily, like underwear, socks and gloves, breaking our dependency on the clothing industry may be at least as important – and powerful – as breaking our dependency on industrial food.

Before the invention of mass production on a large scale, the average American or European had two outfits – an everyday one, which was washed weekly and permitted to get dirty, stained, worn, etc… and a “best” outfit that was kept for Sabbaths and special occasions, and was kept clean at all costs. They might also have warm outwear, knitted stockings, or additional items, depending on their wealth and the climate. The poor often had only rags – one of the gifts of industrial clothing production has been such a large surplus that even the poor can clothe themselves reasonably well through donations, thrift shops and yard sales. But that benefit has come with a price as well.

Because each pre-industrial item of clothing was home produced, it was terribly labor intensive to keep a family clothed. The work included cleaning and carding wool, flax and cotton, spinning yarn, weaving cloth, cutting and sewing it, knitting stockings and outerwear, embellishment techniques such as embroidering, lacemaking, etc…, and the work consumed a good part of the time of all the female members of the household (with some help from young boys and elderly men). In fact, in human culture, clothing production, along with food preparation, has been the central work of women in most societies for most of human history.

Industrial cloth production liberated wealthy women (and poor first world women, most of whom are quite rich by world standards) from the labor intensive work of cloth production, made it possible for them to have more and more varied clothing, and made clothing cheap for those who were poor. But it would be a mistake to believe that all women were similarly freed.

Industrialization has never been able to fully eliminate the enormous quantity of (female, often child) labor required to produce clothing – it has never found a machine that can do all the sewing, for example in a t-shirt. It has reduced that labor somewhat, but in yet another form of Jeavons’ paradox, that reduction in labor per-outfit has come with an enormous growth the sheer quantity of clothing we wear. Thus, poor people, usually poor women and children, are being virtually (and sometimes literally) enslaved to produce what we wear. Even clothing factories that don’t employ sweatshop labor often get their cloth from places where the cloth is manufactured by slave labor running large industrial machines. We have not eliminated the work of making our clothing – we have merely moved the labor offshore, reduced our own skill levels, and impoverished other people so we could have a lot of t-shirts

It is no accident that clothing manufacture on an industrial scale has always been oppressive work, one in which people have been terribly exploited. The Triangle Shirtwaist Factory fire, or the appalling conditions of the Lowell mills of the 19th century are not aberrations, any more than the room full of 12 year old Philippine slaves is now. Every step of industrial clothing production is inhumane and unjust in most circumstances, from the growing of cotton (which was once the product of American slave labor, and is now the most toxic crop produced in the US, putting more pesticides into the ground and water than any other), to the production of silk in India, to the sewing of dresses in factories all over the world. There are exceptions, but just as industrial food production is fundamentally and essentially inhumane in ways that cannot simply be resolved by a little tinkering, there seems little contrary evidence to the claim that industrial cloth production is equally morally problematic.

Cloth production has always been tied up with colonialism, slavery, and power. Thus, it is no accident that many of the most successful revolutionary movements in history framed their revolutions in part on the rejection of the clothing of their oppressors. Around the time of the American Revolution, for example, poorer women had always worn homespun, but in refusing to buy British cloth imports, women had their own Boston tea party. Urban and upper and middle class women accustomed to buying cloth or clothing imported from Britain proudly wore only homespun, and clothed their family entirely in their own production.

During and before the Civil War, people in the North refused to wear clothing that came from the South, because it was a product of slave labor. Women spun, wove and knitted their own wool and linen clothing, in an attempt to undermine the southern slave economy.

And Mahatma Gandhi, of course, in his famous swadeshi movement called for a boycott of all British cloth, and for women and men both to work daily at the production of khadi, or homespun cotton cloth, spun on an indigenous spinning wheel called a charka.

In each of these cases, the clothing revolution was a revolution of women, of people who had historically been left out of revolutionary planning. In India, the khadi revolution was the first call for women to be full enfranchised. In America, particularly during the civil war, women took their economic power to boycott quite seriously, and it led to women take new public roles in the anti-slavery movement.

At present, clothing is a powerful, multibillion dollar industry that encourages the exploitation of poor people all over the world, the majority of them women and children. It supports industrial agriculture, toxic pesticide use and the inhumane treatment of animals (industrial wool production is extremely problematic). It absorbs millions of barrels of oil every year for things like the creation of polyester cloth, the running of industrial machinery, and the transport of clothing made in Vietnam to stores in New Jersey. And it is an industry that is the lifeblood of places like Walmart and other mega-corporations, who make an enormous part of their profits off of our insatiable desire for more and different clothing.

So I would like to propose a “Slow Clothing” movement, one that makes economic and aesthetic and personal inroads in reducing the exploitativeness of the clothing industry. It won’t solve all of the problems of industrial clothing – but a shift in our relationship to our t-shirts will make an enormous ecological difference.

Ideally, I would suggest that each household strive to create a single outfit for every man, woman and child that is entirely homemade. Now homemade might vary – ideally, of course, we would raise the sheep, spin the yarn and weave the cloth. And this can be done. But even if you buy your cloth (preferring, of course, organic cotton or sustainably produced wool or whatever), and simply sew your clothing, or repurpose old clothing, buy your yarn and knit your socks and sweater, each of us should strive to do some portion of the work of wardrobe production. This is a symbolic gesture, of course – it doesn’t resolve the problem, but it also gives people some grasp of what goes into their clothing. Just as Michael Pollan gave millions of Americans a sense of what goes into their food, now it is time to fully grasp what a truly honest outfit would take from us.

For those of us who are adults, there are only a few items of clothing that we should need to purchase, if we use what is in our existing wardrobes carefully and wisely. Work clothing will need replacing, but dressy or nice clothes not used for work should last a whole lifetime or at least a very long time. Since the average American has 9 pairs of jeans in their wardrobe, purchasing even hard-wearing leisure clothing can be reduced dramatically simply by wearing the same pairs more often and long, patching and mending, line drying (dryers remove fibers from clothing), and the use of coverups, aprons, etc… Women will need maternity items, but these can be widely shared in a community. We can reduce our consumption by trying carefully to maintain our weight, or to lose weight and keep it off, so that we need not carry multiple sizes of clothing. We will need socks and underwear, but these are among the easier items to make – doing the work of handknitting or sewing small items is both satisfying and results in clothes of greater quality.

Children do need more clothes, more often because they change sizes rapidly. But again, we can reduce our needs by making some of these clothes, by engaging in good practice (ie, having children take off school or church clothing immediately and replace it with playclothes), by making repairs (by the age of 10, most children should be able to do their own clothing repairs), and by accepting lower standards for play clothes, which need not be perfect.

When we do purchase clothing, we should send a strong message to manufacturers by buying things that are not sweatshop made, ideally made locally or within our own country, and made both sustainably (ie, organically, and of natural materials) and of high quality. If we can radically reduce our clothing purchases, there will be no reason to buy cheaply made, imported, sweatshop clothing at Walmart – those with cash to spare will be able to afford to purchase high quality, environmentally sound clothing, including maybe investing in single pieces from environmentally conscious designers who make really cool stuff.

Image Removed

(The amazing Crunchy Chicken in her dress made of recycled neckties at the premier of her new tv show)

Used clothing can offer higher quality than we can afford new, and makes sure that clothes don’t go into landfills. If we buy locally and nationally made clothing, we can reignite our national clothing manufacturing industry, whose offshoring has done so much economic harm to us.

My own family of six is kept well dressed by Goodwill and the Salvation Army, by yard sale finds and careful mending – and sometimes with a little creative sewing. It is amazing how often things can be repurposed – my kids wear mittens sewn made from old sweaters that went through a hot wash (I get these free from a thrift shop that has no other use for them), I sometimes unravel and reknit old sweaters, and I have several long work skirts that were once jeans – and I’m not seamstress.

There’s so much emphasis in our culture on the new and latest thing – shifting to an aesthetic of the homemade, the remade, the used and classic, the sustainably grown and the local is a long process – and a major psychological change. But I’m thrilled that it seems to be happening all the same!

Sharon Astyk

Sharon Astyk is a Science Writer, Farmer, Parent of Many, writing about our weird life right now. She is the author of four books: Depletion and Abundance: Life on the New Home Front, which explores the impact that energy depletion, climate change and our financial instability are likely to have on our future, and what we can do about it. Depletion and Abundance won a Bronze Medal at the Independent Publishers Awards. A Nation of Farmers: Defeating the Food Crisis on American Soil co-authored with Aaron Newton, which considers what will be necessary for viable food system on a national and world scale in the coming decades, and argues that at its root, any such system needs a greater degree of participation from all of us; Independence Days: A Guide to Sustainable Food Preservation and Storage which makes the case for food storage and preservation as integral parts of an ethical, local, healthy food system and tells readers how to begin putting food by, and the newly published Making Home: Adapting our Homes and Our Lives to Settle in Place, which "shows readers how to turn the challenge of living with less into settling for more".

Tags: Building Community, Consumption & Demand, Culture & Behavior, Media & Communications