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Un-fashioning the FutureTansy Hoskins

Tansy Hoskins
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Tansy E. Hoskins is an award-winning journalist and author who investigates the global fashion industry. This work has taken her to Bangladesh, Kenya, Macedonia, and to the Topshop warehouses in Solihull. She is the author of three books including The Anti-Capitalist Book Of Fashion (now available for pre-order) and Foot Work – What Your Shoes Tell You About Globalisation.

Website: https://tansyhoskins.org/

Twitter: @TansyHoskins

Facebook: Tansy Hoskins Author Page

Photo credit: Sarah Van Looy

 

The fashion industry has a disjointed relationship with the future. It is an industry that is simultaneously obsessed with constructing what comes next, but at the same time refuses to look ahead and realise that business as usual offers nothing but a full scale rush into disaster.

Research by the McKinsey consultancy firm found that fashion as a sector was responsible for approximately 2.1 billion metric tons of greenhouse-gas emissions in 2018. This is roughly 4 percent of the global total – the equivalent of the entire economies of France, Germany, and the United Kingdom combined. This seems extreme until you consider the quantities of stuff involved. In 2019, for example, 66.6 million pairs of shoes were manufactured every single day. This adds up to 24.2 billion pairs a year – 90% of which experts believe are not recycled.

The UN has declared an “ocean emergency,” and is urging governments to restore ocean health. This is a crisis inextricably linked to the fashion industry: every wash-load of polyester puts 700,000 microplastic fibres into the environment, the Aral Sea has been dried up by cotton production, and Bangladesh is draining its precious groundwater to feed thousands of fashion factories.

At the same time, conditions in factories remain exploitative and dangerous for the millions of garment workers who stitch the world’s clothes. Factories and homeworkers in Asia account for 55% of clothing exports, and poverty wages coincide with gender pay gaps and gender-based violence and harassment in factories. The Covid-19 pandemic saw workers fall sick in cramped factories, and harsh repression where workers protested to protect their health and livelihoods.  

Never let anyone tell you there is not enough money to increase wages or ensure environmental standards, because the pandemic was not bad news for everyone. The top 20 fashion corporations including Nike, H&M, Zara’s parent company Inditex, Lululemon, Adidas, Burberry, Kering (which owns Gucci), and Hermes all saw their share prices increasing and profits soaring. Meanwhile the ten richest billionaires, including online shopping baron Jeff Bezos, saw their fortunes rise by $540 billion during the pandemic.

To add insult to all this injury, despite the huge cost of clothing production to both people and planet, clothes are not expected to last or be treated with respect – in fact quite the opposite: disposable commodities designed to make maximum profits for corporations and then be ditched.

This ditching is causing its own social and ecological crisis. Shocking photographs have appeared of mountains of used clothes in Chile’s Atacama Desert where experts believe 39,000 tonnes of non-biodegradable, highly polluting textiles are dumped each year. In Ghana, a reported 15 million used garments arrive every week at the Kantamanto market where traders struggle to sort and sell the unending tidal wave. Clogging the sewers, tonnes of this clothing is now being expelled into Ghana’s coastal habitats.

This cycle of destruction – exploitation during production, consumption and disposal – warps our relationship with nature. Capitalism has taught us to be alienated from our surroundings, with the land and seas something that should be conquered and exploited rather than cherished.

As Terry Eagleton has written: ‘It is because being oppressed sometimes brings with it some slim bonuses that we are occasionally prepared to put up with it. The most efficient oppressor is the one who persuades his underlings to love, desire and identify with his power…’ This is what has happened with fashion, an industry that warps our desire for beauty and identity, providing a slim benefit – in return we let it get away with murder.

It is with this understanding that we find the path to changing the fashion industry and even tackling the climate crisis. We can see that the fashion industry’s purpose is not creativity but making billions for a small cabal of people while keeping in place systems of colonial subjugation, and distracting from inequality and crisis. Fashion has been broken by capitalism and exists as an excuse for the rich to exploit the poor and the planet.

This knowledge is freedom because we know we can do better than this. Through this knowledge we can end the cycle of identifying with brands, celebrities and corporations and instead reclaim the creativity and joy of clothing, as we unlearn the lesson that we should value objects more than the people who made them. It is an opportunity to recognise that ‘slim bonuses’ are not enough, to say no to further exploitation and to build bridges with garment and textile workers around the world.

Raise funds, screen documentaries, organise or go on demonstrations and protests, link your trade union to a garment workers union in the Global South, work collectively by connecting with organised campaigns like Labour Behind the Label, TRAID, War On Want, Fashion Act Now etc, read books, share petitions, do social media posts about supply chains and environmental standards, criticise brands and ask them for data, write articles, have conversations with friends and family, pass motions at your university, lobby your MP, make art…

The climate crisis requires us to go beyond just thinking about our own shopping choices, but what about the next time you need to buy clothes or shoes? Research small brands that offer alternatives to leather, environmental destruction and sweatshop labour. Commit to getting your clothes and shoes repaired, or dive into the world of mending and upcycling. Buy second hand and organise swap-shops, free-shops and loans amongst your social circles.

It is now more important than ever to recognise the interconnected nature of our world and to ensure that everyone is treated fairly, whatever their role.

 

CALL TO ACTION:

Tell brands like Levi’s, Asda, Vans, IKEA, Patagonia, and GAP to sign the International Accord for Health and Safety in the Garment and Textile Industry, a ground-breaking factory inspection programme established in Bangladesh after the Rana Plaza factory collapse.

 

Tansy E. Hoskins is an award-winning journalist and author who investigates the global fashion industry. This work has taken her to Bangladesh, Kenya, Macedonia, and to the Topshop warehouses in Solihull. She is the author of three books including The Anti-Capitalist Book Of Fashion (now available for pre-order) and Foot Work – What Your Shoes Tell You About Globalisation.

Website: https://tansyhoskins.org/

Twitter: @TansyHoskins

Facebook: Tansy Hoskins Author Page

Photo credit: Sarah Van Looy