Elizabeth L. Cline - Overdressed: The Shockingly High Cost of Cheap Fashion

Overdressed

Overdressed

The Shockingly
High Cost of
Cheap Fashion

ELIZABETH L. CLINE

PORTFOLIO / PENGUIN

PORTFOLIO / PENGUIN

Published by the Penguin Group

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First published in 2012 by Portfolio / Penguin,

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1 3 5 7 9 10 8 6 4 2

Copyright Elizabeth L. Cline, 2012

All rights reserved

LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGING IN PUBLICATION DATA

Cline, Elizabeth L.

Overdressed : the shockingly high cost of cheap fashion / Elizabeth L. Cline.

p. cm.

Includes bibliographical references and index.

ISBN: 978-1-101-56058-7

1. Clothing tradeSocial aspects. 2. Clothing tradeEnvironmental aspects. 3. FashionSocial aspects. 4. FashionEnvironmental aspects. 5. ShoppingEnvironmental aspects. 6. Consumption (Economics)Social aspects. I. Title.

HD9940.A2C54 2012

338.4774692dc23

2012004525

Printed in the United States of America

Set in Stempel Garamond LT Std

Designed by Alissa Amell

No part of this book may be reproduced, scanned, or distributed in any printed or electronic form without permission. Please do not participate in or encourage piracy of copyrighted materials in violation of the authors rights. Purchase only authorized editions.

ALWAYS LEARNING

PEARSON

Contents

Introduction

Seven Pairs of $7 Shoes

In the summer of 2009, I found myself standing in front of a rack of shoes at Kmart in Astor Place in Manhattan. This particular location is inside the former annex to Wanamakers, one of those regal midcentury department stores that sold fine goods of all varieties, including high-end fashions direct from Paris. Today, Wanamakers is gone. Today, Wanamakers is a Kmart.

The rack itself stretched up above my head, and the shoescanvas slip-ons made of nothing more than a rubber sole glued to a sheath of cottonhung down like fruit from a tree. In my mind, these shoes might as well have grown there on that metal tree. They had no origins, no story. They just magically appeared. And to my unbelievable fortune, they had been marked down from $15 to $7 a pair. My synapses starting firing, my pulse quickened, and before my thinking brain could kick in, I was standing at the cash register with my bright red plastic shopping basket brimming with seven pairs of plucked slip-ons. I cleared the store out of my size.

My arms ached as I carried my haul in two parachute-size bags back to the subway. Those shoes looked like a cross-section of the earths crust within a few weeksthe thin rubber soles cleaving and separating from the flimsy canvas tops. Before I could wear them all out, I got tired of them and the style changed, so Ive got two pairs left taking up space in my closet.

The average price of clothing has plummeted in recent decades. And cheap clothes have undergone a total image overhaul, where they no longer imply some inherent compromise in style and quality. Budget fashion is seen as chic, practical, and democratic, and our conversations are dotted with wow-inducing stories of clothing steals. At a birthday party last year, a college friend thrust a ruffled, canary yellow pleather bag in my face. Five dollars! she boasted. Another friend messaged me online recently to exclaim: I just paid $10 for a $50 dress! $30 for a $60 one! Fashion magazines, tabloids, and morning talk shows now routinely run stories on how to land fashion deals.

For a decade, I only bought cheap fashion, and the vast majority of it was from just four budget-fashion retailers that seemed to appear out of nowhere about ten years ago: H&M, Old Navy, Forever 21, and Target. I owned a few items from off-price stores Ross and T.J. Maxx, as well as from the buzzy basics chain UNIQLO and the Spanish retailer Zara. H&M, Zara, and Forever 21, known as fast-fashion retailers, are experts in constantly stocking new trends and know exactly how to hook consumers into shopping more regularly. But these arent the only retailers moving away from the seasonal cycle of selling and toward luring shoppers into their stores on a continual basis.

There are some regional differences in the cheap fashion available to people. Maybe your preference is for discounted name brands at the outlet mall or T.J. Maxx or regional fast-fashion stores like Cato, Charlotte Russe, Rainbow, and Rue 21. Maybe you shop at department store chains like Kohls, or at pure discounters like Walmart or even Dollar General. But these retailers are all running on the same high-volume, low-priced fashion formula that has squeezed the life out of the rest of the industry, forcing independent department stores to consolidate, middle-market manufacturers to shutter, and independent retailers either to go high-end or go home. Budget fashion has now remade the entire apparel industry in its image. And it has profoundly changed the way we think about clothing.

We tell ourselves we cant afford higher prices. Were in a recession. Health-care costs are out of control. And have you seen gas prices? But many consumers are just hooked on a cheap fashion treadmillweve quickly grown accustomed to paying less and getting more. My sister will pay $400 a month to drive a nice car, but dont try to charge her or me more than $40 for a dress. Ive seen guys in my local coffee shop working on $1,800 Apple laptops and wearing $10 Walmart shoes. Americans spend more money on eating out in restaurants every year than they do on clothes. Its not that we cant pay more money for fashion; we just dont see any reason to.

As any economist will tell you, cheaper prices stimulate consumption, and the current low rate of fashion has spurred a shopping free-for-all, where we are buying and hoarding roughly twenty billion garments per year as a nation. Were running out of oil and water. Icebergs are melting. Weve permanently altered our climate. China, where most of our clothes are now produced and where the population is gaining a taste for fashion, is in environmental crisis and on track to gobble up more fiber and fashion-related resources than we do. The problems created by the fashion industry in the West are quickly being matched and multiplied in other parts of the world. Buying so much clothing, and treating it as if it is disposable, is putting a huge added weight on the environment and is simply unsustainable.