007 - Fast Fashion Fight

Twitter is really popping off today with Kim K’s newest Skims launch. People are complaining about the prices. People are complaining that clothing should cost that much, and that fast fashion has warped our idea of cost. People are complaining that ethical/sustainable/so-called Slow Fashion doesn’t serve plus sizes.


I think every one of those complaints is completely true. If Skims are a higher cost just for being associated with Kim K, and not because the people working to manufacture them are being paid a fair wage, that’s some shit. Fast fashion brands do completely warp our idea of how much clothing should cost and is worth. Slow Fashion brands are extremely limited on sizing - I understand that it isn’t sustainable or a great business practice to manufacture a bunch of clothing and hope it sells, but it also isn’t a great business practice to tout yourself as ethical while excluding 60% of the market.


I’d like to tell you a tale of two pants.

One pair is from Boohoo, one pair is me made.

I learned to sew when I was a kid. I started hand sewing clothes for my barbies when I was 7 or 8. I converted a pair of too-short jeans into a denim skirt at age 11. I took sewing in middle school - first a 6 week rotation in 6th grade, and then a full semester in 7th grade - and learned how to use a sewing machine and follow a pattern. Since then, it’s been a hobby. I wouldn’t consider myself professional level, but I’m a pretty good sewist. I can usually make something that I want - it’s hard to find the exact thing you want sometimes, so generally if I really really can’t live without it, I can sew it for myself.


I’m also extremely picky about pants. They generally just aren’t engineered for my shape. My waist is much smaller than my hips, but my butt sits up very high so even when pants are “my” size, they don’t always have enough vertical room for my behind, while still being baggy in the waist and hip. My legs are just a little longer than most average-length plus size pants, but talls are usually too long. I’m just a difficult fit. I went for years and years without wearing pants at all. When I started working at the library, that had to change. It was really difficult to shelve books and bend down to get books out of the sorter bins, and even just sit on the tiny stool at the sorter bin in a skirt. So I started trying out pants again.


I work for a clothing company, so I started there. The jeans I bought were so baggy in the waist but also way too short. I tried another store. The jeans were too low-waisted, and didn’t have enough butt room at the top. After lots of online orders and even more returns, I had one good pair of jeans, an okay pair of pull-on black pants, and a couple pairs of technically-they-fit jeans. In June, I saw a pair of stretchy pleated-front pants with pockets on Boohoo’s website. Their sizing is always weird but these pants were $12.80, so they were worth the gamble.


They were perfect. High-waisted. Stretchy. Dress-y enough for work but feel like leggings. Pockets. Make my butt look great. The only pants I ever wanted to wear again.


But. They were $12.80, and I really wouldn’t pay more than that for them. The more I wore them, the larger the holes in the inner thigh seam got. Not because they were too tight - the fabric was just sewn with a standard coverstitch machine needle, not a ballpoint needle for knits, so it punched a hole in the fabric instead of rolling between fibers. The fabric was thin. The elastic in the waistband folded over constantly. The quality just wasn’t great. But they were cheap, and convenient, and perfect. And cheap. So I bought 4 more pairs, in a few colors.


The more I wore them, the more I worried about them falling apart. So when one pair I ordered arrived, and the print wasn’t what I expected, I decided to take them apart and use that pair as a pattern to make my own perfect pants.


I used ponte knit, instead of the Liverpool knit Boohoo makes everything out of. Ponte is more durable, thicker, a little less stretchy but a lot longer lasting. I needed about 1.5 yards of fabric, as the ponte was very wide. The fabric alone cost $21 - already almost twice as much as the completed Boohoo pants. Elastic for the waistband was $2. Thread was $4 - and I used almost an entire spool of it. Then, it took me about 3 hours to assemble them. $27 in materials, plus 3 hours of labor. The average hourly rate seamstresses charge is $20, so in the end, my homemade dupe cost $87. To be fair, I could sew them faster now. The next pair I make will probably only take about 2 hours - I hadn’t sewed a pair of pants in almost 15 years and as I was copying a completed pair, there were no directions. I do plan to sew another pair in black, and those will cost $67. That’s how much pants cost. It takes time to pre-wash the fabric, cut it out, and assemble it. Fabric isn’t cheap. Making a garment at home will always cost more than buying fast fashion.


As we grow more and more accustomed to buying $40 jeans with a 30% off coupon, we get more and more out of touch with the true cost of clothing. Not just the raw materials, but the labor and the amount of skill that goes into making a garment. Most of us feel we should be getting paid more for our work, but we’re not following that through to the cost of goods we buy. I’m just as guilty of it as anyone else - I will wait for a sale, use a coupon code, balk at having to pay $8 in shipping on a $100 order.


A shift in perspective must come. Fast fashion is booming - but how long can that sustain itself? How many $4 graphic tees can we really buy? We are buying and throwing away clothing at an alarming rate. For all that we care for the environment, we seem to forget that polyester viscose blend dresses don’t recycle. That the discount in the price isn’t coming at the expense of the CEO, but at the expense of the factory worker who assembled it. Even garments labeled as “made in the USA” doesn't guarantee that the piece was ethically made. Saipan is an island in the pacific - it’s technically part of the US, but in the mid-90s there was a huge scandal over sweatshop labor. Chinese nationals are lured to Saipan to work, promised that they’ll be under US laws, then locked up in factory complexes and forced to work seven days a week for pennies. The New York Times just ran an article detailing the plight of garment workers in LA, who sewed for Fashion Nova.


If you’re joining the Fight for Fifteen, if you’re supporting the Green New Deal, keep in mind that everything comes from something. Clothes don’t exist in a vacuum. Support small brands doing it right. Shop second-hand. Wear things for as long as possible. Leave your cart overnight and see if you’re still dying for those pieces in the morning. Buy with intention. If you need a one-time-only outfit, borrow it, rent it, purchase from Poshmark and pass it forward. Let Slow Fashion brands know that you’d buy it if it came in your size.


In 2020, I’m trying not to buy anything that I could make myself. I have plenty of fabric. I have access to hundreds of patterns. I will try to only purchase things that I genuinely cannot make: jeans, coats, bras, etc. I will try to stop viewing shopping as a hobby, and re-frame to see it as a means to an end. Instead of endlessly scrolling the clearance section, I will close the tab and do something else. Let’s move the conversation forward, instead of tweeting about prices to one of America’s richest women.