Book Review: "Over-Dressed: The Shockingly High Cost of Cheap Fashion" by Elizabeth Cline

When Elizabeth Cline emptied all her closets and storage bins, she found that she owned 354 pieces of clothing – not counting socks and underwear. For the last decade, she had bought most of her clothing from four budget retailers: H&M, Old Navy, Forever 21, and Target. She’s typical of shoppers who chase trends yet don’t really like anything they own or feel like they have nothing to wear. Cline explores the fast fashion industry in her book Over-Dressed: The Shockingly High Cost of Cheap Fashion.

Remember stores like Hess’s and Wanamaker’s? Shopping used to be a big deal, a seasonal excursion. As Cline’s father said, “It was like Dorothy going to Oz. The opulence was mind-boggling.

The old Manhattan Wanamaker’s now houses a Kmart. Budget retailers like Kohl’s, Walmart, H&M, Target, and Forever 21 use a “high volume, low-priced fashion formula” that has remade the entire apparel industry and squeezed the life out of the major department stores. Once styles changed about four times a year; now budget retailers change stock every two weeks on average with some stores offering new items every day.

Supplying cheap fashion requires cheap labor which means moving production to other countries. The United States lost almost 650,000 apparel jobs from 1997 to 2007. We only make about 2% of the clothing we purchase, down from about 50% in 1990. The few stores left in the New York Garment District survive because they make labor intensive garments requiring specialized skills or supply clothing lines for beginning designers who can’t afford large runs in foreign factories.

As the apparel industry moved to other countries, clothes lost detail and quality. But they’re definitely cheaper. Clothing may be the only commodity where prices have gone down. If you bought a Jonathan Logan dress back in 1963, you probably paid about $14.98 – more than $100 today. How many shoppers would spend that much on a dress today?

Attitudes toward cheap fashion have changed drastically in recent years. It’s now seen as “chic, practical, and democratic.” Who hasn’t bragged about a clothing steal? Frankly, many shoppers seem willing to accept cheap fashion because they’re amazed by how well made an item can be for the price.

Cline’s research included visiting foreign factories. In Bangladesh many buildings are old and unsafe. In 2010 two fires in two different factories (making clothes for Gap and H&M) killed 48 people. In China’s Guangdong Province, the air pollution was so thick that Cline “couldn’t photograph anything a quarter mile off the highway . . . .”

Perhaps the most compelling part of Cline’s book is the section on waste. What happens to our clothing when we no longer want it? Most gets donated to charity, but less than 20% of donations gets to the charities’ thrift stores. Most of our donated used clothing ends up with the textile recycling and rag grading industries, both here and abroad. A lot of our old clothing just gets thrown away. Every year Americans toss 12.7 tons of textiles – averaging out to 68 pounds per person. Fabrics like polyester, acrylic, nylon, and spandex are made from plastic, so it’s just like sending water bottles to the landfill. 

If the waste isn’t damaging enough to the environment, think about the changes that will occur as the taste for trendy fast fashion spreads to the rest of the world. China’s “growing clothing consumption is already putting pressure on the price of fibers, particularly cotton, as demand is outstripping supply.”  Sal Giardina, adjunct professor at the Fashion Institute of Technology states: “If every man, woman, and child in China bought two pairs of wool socks, there would be no more wool left in the world. Think about that.”   

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The Non-Fiction Book Group meets at 7:00 pm on Wednesday, October 30, at the Easton Area Public Library. This month’s selection – Elizabeth Cline’s Over-Dressed: The Shockingly High Cost of Cheap Fashion – explores how stores came to be filled with ridiculously cheap clothing that often doesn’t hold up through a season of washing. Adding to the discussion will be Susan Kolar, a custom clothing designer/tailor with a business in Easton and a seamstress who works in the apparel industry.