today fashion is more individualistic and sophisticated, and the fads are exhausted a great deal faster. my numerous critics notwithstanding, nobody can dictate fashion anymore; it would be like telling people what they can eat.
Paris still gives fashion authority, but today fashion is born on the world's streets: in the East Village, on the King's Road, on the Corso.
- p16
the game of finding out and telling who copies whom is basically a futile exercise, because everyone copies everyone else. there is no such thing as a truly original idea on the fashion map. Saint Laurent goes to Russia or Marrakech. he borrows from painters like Braque, Picasso, and Mondrian. Karl Lagerfeld might look at a portrait of Marie Antoinette, Giorgio Armani at a Marlboro ad for the American cowboy. Ralph Lauren might go see an old Cary Grant comedy. Oscar de la Renta will study more than the bride at a wedding. and, of course, every designer pays particular attention to the competition.
when fashion gets out of hand, it is generally true that all designers return to Chanel. she was the forerunner of those few, such as Saint Laurent, Armani and the late Cristobal Balenciaga, who have managed to create timeless clothes.
many clothes are commercially successful, but their look is borrowed, and the fashion mood - which is so important.
the shape of all fashion begins with the silhouette, but there are only a few designers capable of creating a new silhouette. and it is these designers whose moods we follow. we want to know where they go, whom they see, what they are thinking on a daily basis. they are our heroes and, sometimes, our nightmares.
- p33
British Vivienne Westwood is the designer's designer, watched by intellectual and far-out designers, including Jean-Paul Gaultier. she is copied by the avant-garde French and Italian designers, because she is the Alice in Wonderland of fashion, and her clothes are wonderfully mad - fantastic enough to be worn at the Mad Hatter's tea party.
yet, copied as she is, Westwood struggles in her World's End shop in London, living from hand to mouth.
- p34
sometimes 'throw-away chic' worn by the right woman can outstyle the best of high fashion. i remember standing outside the Ritz Hotel on the rue Cambon very late one night in the pouring rain with Coco Chanel. i don't remember what she was talking about, but i remember that she wore her old raincoat tied smartly to one side. it was chic. so is the way Yves Saint Laurent wears his pocket handkerchief at just the right angle.
style is part of you or it isn't. you can't buy it.
- p157, Chic Savages - John Fairchild
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i treat my internet passwords as modern-day sigils, embedding them with wishes or promises to me, or even financial goals for the company. that way, every time i go to log in anywhere, i'm subtly reminding myself of what i'm working for.
this ensures that when i'm bogged down with day-to-day beaureaucracy and details, i don't lose sight of what i really want.
- p123
much of the world, from school to the workplace, is set up to reward extroverts, and therefore it can be easier for introverts to feel overlooked or as if they don't measure up.
for instance, even if you know all the answers but you don't want to call attention to yourself by raising your hand, you might end up feeling, or being percieved as, less smart than the kids flailing their arms to get the teacher's attention.
in business, a disproportionate amount of importance is placed on the ability to network. if you don't thrive on going out and meeting a million people, you might end up feeling that you have less of a chance of getting ahead in your career.
- p135, #GIRLBOSS - Sophia Amoruso
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the planet is under unprecedented pressure. this means that it has never been more important to take wise individual decisions, as well as collective ones. it has never been more critical for us to consume with care and intelligence. it's no secret that the present rates of consumption are unsustainable, and it will come as even less of a surprise that fashions are wildly out of kilter.
why give fashion the time of day? why not dress exclusively in old clothes and charity-shop finds? i've become pretty familiar with the school of thought that regards fashion as unnecessary and corrupt. but it is simiply untrue to say that all fashion is superficial, needless and stupid, and to ignore the semiotics of style. the way we dress is fundamental to our self-expression.
almost overnight we have become used to consuming fashion with reckless, addicted abandon, buying more clothes than ever before, reversing centuries of fashion heritage, knowledge and understanding the process. this is a revolution, and a largely unwelcome one.
- pX
as customers we rapidly changed our priorities. long-standing skills of buying clothes, such as assessing for quality or looking at labels, were junked in favour of getting our hands on what was new as we adjustd to the Zara-like thrill of swapping two wardrobe seasons a year for upwards of twenty. while the world's mainline Fashion Weeks continue the charade of spring/summer and autumn/winter seasons, in real terms they are now about as relevant to contemporary life as learning Gregorian plainsong.
- p24
i don't want to compound the air of regret, but if only it had stopped there. fast fashion had its merits - it certainly brought excitement. the jury's out on whether you can have responsible fast fashion, but what if it had stayed true to Jane Shepherdson's original idea, to make better, more fashionable clothes at affordable prices? naturally there would have been some deficit environmentally - every time you make something there's an impact - but we would have stood a chance of minimising the negative effects
- p26
there are several ways to define a sweatshop. the original phrase described a system that outsourced or subcontracted lablour. this still holds true, but the term is generally extended, applying to any production facility where the house menu includes long hours, unsafe working conditions and low pay, and where workers are not permitted to join unions or form an organisation to represent their interests. when i think of a sweatshop i also think of oppressive temperatures, overflowing toilets, the whole sorry scene policed by a pacing factory manager, possibly with a baton in his hand.
who are they? they are considered to be more easily pacified, especially as cultures throughout the Developing world dictate that they are less likely to question middlemen or subcontractors over pay and conditions.
- p41
retailers, manufacturing brands and consumers have all become fantastically adept at divorcing fashion from the fact that it has been made by an army of living, breathing human beings. as consumers we've been comletely anaesthetised by the seemingly incredible value of fashion over the last decade. we tend to make a joke about the fact that deep down we suspect they've been made in loathsome conditions, and sometimes we ignore it altogether.
- p42
the garment worker is short-changed at every turn, so don't be too soothed by a retailer's promise that it adheres to a minimum wage. naturally it will be referring to the minimum wage of the host country; and just because the government there has a minimum-wage law, that doesn't mean workers are being paid enough to live on. in the case of Bangladesh, the minimum wage level was set in 1994 at around Tk930, and stubbornly remained unchanged for over a decade. after a series of protests prompted by a swathe of fires in factories it was upped to Tk1,662.50 a month, and then to Tk3,000 in July 2010. this looks like a big increase - until you work out that Tk3,000 is 27 pounds.
most of these workers are the sole source of income for their families, and 1 pound a day is far below what a family of three, our or five need to survive.
we should also remember that just because a minimum wage is recommended by a government wage board, there is absolutely no guarantee that factory owners will observe it.
- p47
'listen, love,' a middle-aged man said to me on a Sunday-morning TV discussion programmed on which the 'sweatshop' issue came up, 'they're glad of the work.' i'm not unfamiliar with this sentiment; i must hear it at least ten times a week. it is second only to the classic 'they're just having their industrial revolution now.' cheap fast fashion is so often still presented as a wealth-creation scheme for poor brown people that it is frankly a wonder Primark hasn't been given a Social Justice Award. it's not an attractive line of argument.
first, there's the crude division between 'us' and 'them'. second, it just seems too convenient to rebrand our unsustainable, exploitative habits of consumption into a beneficient means of assisting unfortunates in the Developing World.
garment workers are, after all, individuals with aspirations, just like non-garment workers.
- p51
whereas it would take a year on the job to learn to stitch a full piece as a tailor, newcomers to the modern assembly lines were given a two-hour tailoring course that taught them little more than how to sew a straight line.
- p52
party top. wash with care - if you can be bothered, with all those sequins. otherwise, wear once at Christmas, divert straight to charity shop/bin.
you might assume that these sequin discs were added by machine. wrong. a machine would crease and split them too easily. these are delicate and precious. anyway, who needs machines when there are 30 million women across the world who can do the job in their homes for even less than you'd pay a factory worker?
communities based downstream from a collection of 'bad' dyehouses - the fishermen, housewives and schoolchildren who do not read Vogue online or the scoops from the shows - will often know what colour is big or autumn/winter season next year without recourse to a team of Geneva-based colour futurists. they know because the river literally changes colour as a result of the dyehouses' inability or refusal to manage waste water.
- p116
..some of the most hazardous [pesticides] for people and planet that humankind has ever managed to manufacture. among the roll call of the deadliest chemicals in use is Aldicarb, a powerful nerve agent and one of the most toxic pesticides. exposure to it can cause symptoms including nausea, abdominal cramps, vomiting, hypertension, cardio-respiratory depresion, dyspnoea and bronchorrhea, which can lead to pulmonary oedema. to give an idea of how hazardous it is, just one drop absorbed through the skin is enough to kill an adult. yet, astonishingly, it remains the second most prevalent pesticide in the cotton industry.
- p140
we consumers may never feel the impact of this, but the communities whose soil and water resources are close to cotton-producing areas probably will. according to the World Health Organisation, between 20,000 and 40,000 cotton workers die each year from pesticide poisoning. i heard of tragic stories in Mali, where villagers unable to read or interpret warning signs on empty pesticide containers filled them with water and drank from them, with fatal consequences.
- p141
every cotton product i own has a huge 'embodied water footprint' (taking into account all the water used not just in the growing of the cotton, but in its production). if you're talking in terms of accounting for water - and some day the world may have to do this - in order to get one kilogram (enough for a pair of jeans) of finished cotton textile, you need 11,000 to 20,000 litres of water, while a shirt weighing 250 grams requireds 2,700 litres.
if you really want to find that out, you need to account for the 'virtual water footprint', adding in all the extra water that has been used in diluting the pollution from growing and processing the cotton, and from combatting the salinisation associated with irrigation.
as a rule of thumb, however, environmental experts say that as much as 20,000 litres of water can be used to produce a single t-shirt
- p143
the Aral sea is dead, and it was killed by cotton, and once a sea dies, the surrounding population is plummeted into a spiral of neglect and decline too. thirty-five million people who depended on the Aral for fishing, leisure or associated activities lost out as the waters evaporated. conservative estimates suggest that the lives of five million people have been devastated (not just affected or inconvenienced) by the loss of the Aral, and by living in a saline dustbowl full of the remnants of cotton chemicals. respiratory infections are the main cuase of death among children, tuberculosis (at its peak there were 4000 cases per 100,000 people in some towns) is endemic and the drinking water contains more than six grams of salt per litre (four times higher than the saf level recommended by the WHO).
over 10 years, mortality rates increased by fifteen times.
- p145
there's a cost to democratisation, you know
by contrast to fast fashion, ethical fashion production runs are generally very small, and lead times generally much longer. the designer also takes responsibility for the supply chain. the term 'ethical fashion' is broad: it can refer to the fibres used, low-impact production methods, local or heritage production, superior animal-welfare standards, a fairtrade supply route, and indigenous textiles and handicrafts.
- p276, To Die For - Lucy Siegle
