'Worn' Book Review: Material World

[question everything]

Sofi Thanhauser gets her best clothes from a place called the Dumptique. This isn’t an expensive shop on Madison Avenue but a tiny shack in a field near a municipal landfill on Martha’s Vineyard, where she grew up. Here,next to pots, pans, books and worn-out puzzles, designer clothes discarded by rich summer residents are piled in bins, free for the taking. These, of course, are better made and more durable than the ones she calls “fast fashion.” After wearing them, she notices how poorly made most new garments are.

Fashion and designer clothes, however, are not the main subject of this provocative book. Ms. Thanhauser, an artist and a teacher at the Pratt Institute in New York, examines the effect of clothes on our environment, politics and even our ethics. She bases her investigation on the history of five fabrics: linen, cotton, silk, synthetics and wool, and she travels to farms and factories in China, India, Honduras, the English Lake District and the United States. She writes: “There is scarcely a part of the human experience, historic or current, that the story of clothes does not touch.”

New clothes may be cheap in terms of dollars, but there’s another price to pay. Their production worldwide doubled between 2000 and 2014, a period when people bought 60% more garments than before but kept them, on average, only half as long. “By 2017, one garbage truck of clothes (5,787 pounds) was burned or sent to landfills every second.” The industry today produces a full fifth of global wastewater and emits one-10th of global carbon emissions. Synthetic fabrics and low-wage labor combine to make cheap clothes that, like fast food, are bad for the land and the people who make them. Women, moreover, form two-thirds of the garment industry’s labor force which, with few exceptions, is notoriously low-paying.

(snip)

The cotton industry has, to paraphrase Ms. Thanhauser, shown the land no more mercy than its workers; it has been “a central part of the stories of the colonization of India, slavery in the American South, and the modern-day eco-genocide of the Uyghur people of Xinjiang in western China.” Cotton cultivation produces vast volumes of waste water; it also accounts for almost a fifth of the global usage of pesticides. The use of toxic chemicals by the garment industry has been a cause of great concern. At a cotton farm in Texas Ms. Thanhauser learns that run-off nitrogen used for fertilizing plants flows into the Gulf of Mexico and causes an overgrowth of algae, creating zones in which most aquatic species cannot survive. Paraquat, an herbicide banned in the European Union since 2007, has been linked to Parkinson’s disease in farmworkers and leukemia in children. According to the World Bank, textile dyeing is among the most polluting industries in the world, responsible for about 20% of global wastewater.

(snip)

Although there is much to be depressed about in this book, in wool especially there is reason for optimism. Navajo women have revived traditional weaving, using wool dyed with local plants. In England’s northwest, farmers are rescuing rare breeds of sheep from extinction. And there is a renaissance underway in “fiber culture”: the establishment of small woolen mills and the return of hand spinning, knitting, embroidery and fiber art.

https://www.wsj.com/articles/worn-review-material-world-11642547965 (subscription)

[NNadir]

1. Thank you for posting this. I love books that open...

...an environmental Vista I have not contemplated before.