HOW many pairs of shoes does one actually need at any given time? How many outfits? It depends on how one views oneself, doesn’t it? The image we project is really a kind of self-validation: this is how I want the world to see me.
Flamboyant, chic, quirky, risqué, conservative, wealthy—we clad ourselves in concepts of identity. It seems an innocuous enough method of expression. What harm is there in dressing up to show off yourself? A few days ago, I came across a news feature on the BBC that was startling. It was an appeal to the UK by the incoming environment minister of Chile, Maisa Rojas. Her concern? The illegal dumping of thousands of tonnes of clothes from Europe and the US in the Atacama Desert, the driest non-polar desert in the world.
Video footage showed mountains of clothes, stretching as far as the eye could see. Women were picking through them, trying to salvage what they could, either to sell, or for personal use. The gargantuan piles towered over them. It was an astonishing sight.
Over the years, I have seen reports warning that the western preoccupation with fast fashion was creating a chain of pernicious consequences to the labour market and to the environment. Somehow, they did not seem as ominous; vexing yes, but they did not jolt in this way.
A report earlier this week by Jack Wright in the online Daily Mail, linked the rise of fast fashion to social media and the influencer culture. “When a celebrity posts a photo wearing a new outfit that their followers like, ‘fast fashion’ brands rush to be the first to provide it.” The objective is to produce cheap knock-offs as quickly as possible, and of course, this means lower wages for workers.
Wright pinpointed overproduction in China and Bangladesh (and the exploitation of child labour) and said they are shipped off to western Europe and North America. But because these items have very short shelf-life—pure fad appeal—demand is short and surpluses are common. Most of these clothes are thrown away by trendy consumers after just a couple of uses. The unsold garments are then sold to textile merchants in countries like Chile and Uganda—the kind of third-world dumping grounds that we know too well. Around 60,000 tonnes of clothing arrive annually at one Chilean port, he wrote, and at least 39,000 tonnes end up in rubbish dumps in the desert. “With no legal means of disposal, the enormous piles of textiles which blight the landscape are burned, releasing toxic fumes and polluting the ground.”
The numbers might help to bring some scale to our minds. Annually, the water used in this industry can meet the needs of five million people, and 20 per cent of industrial water pollution is caused by textile treatment and dyeing processes.
Environmentalists calculate that the sector is responsible for ten per cent of total global carbon emissions. Wright cited a 2019 UN report that estimated that from 2000 to 2014 global clothing production doubled and that the industry was responsible for 20 per cent of global water waste. It’s not just the water going down the drain. “Clothing, either synthetic or treated with chemicals, can take 200 years to biodegrade and is as toxic as discarded tires or plastics,” he wrote.
It might be easy to shrug this off, to dismiss it as irrelevant to our part of the world. Yes, we know we are a fashionable people, but are we really contributing to environmental pollution every time we go on a shopping spree? It’s not an easy connection to make. We see, we like, we want, we get. No further consideration necessary.
I know one family who used to make two and three trips to the US annually, specifically to buy clothing and accessories. Every holiday was a shopping excursion, no matter the destination. The pandemic changed that, but has not suppressed the passion for fashion. Online shopping has simply replaced the malls.
Perhaps we could pause a little and reflect on these unexpected consequences of our actions. How many pairs of shoes do you really need at any given time? How many outfits? What do you do with them when they no longer appeal to you? Do you donate them? Do you leave them to dry-rot in your closets? If we could think of the afterlife—what happens next to a lot of the stuff that we blithely purchase—would we at least reconsider how much we buy and how we discard them?
The fashion industry is a massive one, covering a wide range of interests. It is the depressing reality faced by Chile’s incoming minister, Maisa Rojas. She has conceded that it seems a lost cause.
“Businesspeople need to play their part and stop importing rubbish, but developed countries also need to take responsibility. What’s happening here in Chile has environmental consequences for the whole planet,” she said. It is an echo that has been reverberating for decades for countries that have been the dumping grounds for the rich, fashionable ones.
It may seem insurmountable, but it is all fuelled by a culture of consumerism, and we cannot lose sight of the fact that it is the insatiable public appetite for more and more that drives it. We don’t have to go naked, but we can think twice about what dressing up means.
Email: vaneisabaksh@gmail.com
