EP. 98 — The High Cost of Cheap Clothes with Dana Thomas

Adam: [00:00:22] Hello, everyone, welcome to Factually! I’m Adam Conover. Before we get started, a couple of pieces of housekeeping. First of all, we have had so many incredible authors on this show. We had Pulitzer Prize winner Elizabeth Kolbert, who wrote The Sixth Extinction and Under a White Sky. We had Rutger Bregman, whose new book, Humankind: A Hopeful History, has been on the bestseller list for months. And we had Angela Chan, who wrote Ace, an incredible guide to what asexuality reveals about desire, our society and the meaning of sex. And it occurred to me, hey, maybe after you’ve heard these interviews, you would like a place to go where you could easily purchase their book and support the show. Well, we have created that place for you. If you had to this short, easy to remember url factuallypod.com/books. You will be presented with a bookstore on which you will see the book of every guest we have ever had on the show. And because we are running that little bookstore through bookshop.org, your purchase will not only support the show, it will also support a local bookstore in your neighborhood. So check it out. That url once again is factuallypod.com/books. That’s factuallypod.com/books. And for our second bit of housekeeping, check out Comedy Week on Stitcher. That’s right. This week, Stitcher is celebrating this podcast and all of the other amazing comedy podcasts in honor of April Fool’s. Not a real holiday, but you know what comedy needs the attention. We’ll take it all right. They got no tricks, just the treats of listening to Factually! And many more podcasts, all for free on Stitcher. That was the copy that they wrote for me. Seems a little more Halloween related, but, you know, again, I will take it. You can check out their curated comedy home page to find your next comedy podcast obsession. And don’t forget that if you sign up for stitcher premium, you can listen to Factually! that’s this show ad free, as well as our bonus series Questions & Adam. That’s right. I’m still very proud of that name Questions & Adam, which is exclusive to Stitcher Premium. That’s the show where I interview some of my favorite comedians and ask them your questions. And plus you can listen to many other comedy pods ad free like Comedy Bang Bang, How Did This Get Made? And more for only $4.99/month or $34.99/year use code FACT when you sign up for Stitcher Premium and you can get your first month free code is only valid on stitcher.com/premium and not valid on in app purchases. OK, housekeeping complete. Let’s get to this show. Today we are talking about fashion and I know I know a lot of you probably thinking fashion, Adam, that is so frivolous and silly and unimportant. If I wanted stuff like that, I’d watch reality show or read a magazine in the dentist’s office. But no, look, I am here to tell you that fashion is important. In fact, you cannot understand the last two hundred and fifty years of world history or our modern economy without it. The truth is the essential commodity in the creation of the world economy in the 18th and 19th centuries was cotton. You know, the thing we used to make clothes. In fact, it’s not a stretch to say that without cotton and cotton clothes, we wouldn’t have America as we know it today at all. Demand for cotton drove America’s violent slavery fueled territorial expansion, and it created an industrial base in the Northeast and was America’s leading export from 1803 all the way to 1937. That’s a pretty important one hundred and thirty four years of American history. And in that one hundred thirty four years, America grew to be a bona fide world economic power, in large part because of all that damn cotton. But it wasn’t just the cotton itself that fueled the industrialization of America and the world, its fashion itself. In the nineteenth century, the idea of fashion took hold in industrializing countries, specifically the idea that fashion is seasonal, that people should want and desire new goods season after season, new looks, new styles, and that women of all classes should do so. While cotton created a supply for industrial global capitalism, it was fashion that created the demand without all these people demanding new fall fashions. As soon as there’s a nip in the air, oh my God, it’s gotten a little cooler. I think I need a new warm jacket for the season. Well, we wouldn’t have the economy that we do today. Now, the fashion industry, needless to say, has also always relied on exploitation from the cotton field to the sweatshop. And that’s why fashion also has a pivotal role in the history of the labor movement. In 1911, the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory in New York City caught fire. The factory employed hundreds of women working in sweatshop conditions, but the doors of the factory were locked because the rapacious employers accused the women of stealing. So they locked the doors, so they weren’t able to get out and the fire escapes were faulty, as a result, 146 workers perished in the fire. A social reformer named Frances Perkins led a committee to investigate which led to the creation of a number of labor laws to protect workers. Perkins would go on to become FDR’s Secretary of Labor during the Great Depression and help enact a minimum wage, end child labor and give workers the right to organize and form a union. In that way, the fashion industry, far from trivial, is at the root of the worker protections that we have today. And fashion is no less essential for understanding our global economy today than it was a century ago and what we might call the positive side of the fashion industry. Fashion today is a two trillion dollar business that employs tens of millions of people around the globe. And the industry pumps out an incredible number of clothes at incredibly low prices. Clothes in 2016, where more than 50 percent cheaper than they were in 1980, just a few decades earlier, half the price. That means that Americans can buy vastly more clothes for less money than ever before. And that is to some extent a good thing. But as ever, there is a negative side to the fashion industry as well. Many fashion industry workers who are more likely today to live in Bangladesh or Vietnam than the Lower East Side face the very same abuses that existed in the industry of the 1890s, where, frankly, abuses that are even worse. And beyond that, the fashion industry we have today has a devastating impact on the environment. You know, how much clean water do we really need to waste to give our jeans that perfect worn in fade? How many cute tops does it take to justify the two billion metric tons of yearly greenhouse gas emissions? Sure, it’s great to be able to buy a new T-shirt for a nickel, but when the costs are so high, is that discount really worth it? Well, to help us answer these questions today, we have what I have to say is the perfect guest. Her name is Dana Thomas. She is a veteran fashion reporter for publications all over the world. And let’s be clear, as a fashion reporter, she doesn’t just write about trends. She does investigative work into the industry and its practices. She’s the author of a new book called Fashionopolis: The Price of Fast Fashion and the Future of Clothes. Please welcome Dana Thomas. Dana Thomas, thank you so much for being here. [00:07:52][450.1]

Dana: [00:07:52] My pleasure. [00:07:53][0.3]

Adam: [00:07:54] So you are a lifelong or at least career long fashion reporter. You’ve spent your life in that world. What led you to write a book about how fast fashion is destroying the planet? That seems like a little bit in the other direction. [00:08:09][14.8]

Dana: [00:08:10] Well, it is. And it is. And I’ve always been sort of an investigative reporter on the fashion industry, and I’m one of the few that is I kind of invented the beat in a way, and that’s because I started my career at The Washington Post. It that that whole idea of investigation sort of permeated over the whole newsroom. So even on the on the fashion desk, we were like, you know what, we got to dig. We can’t just write about hemlines and shoes and beauty. So I worked for this wonderful editor named Nina Hyde, who’d been there since the early 70s and late 60s and was hired by Ben Bradlee. And I worked under Ben Bradlee in the beginning of my career. And she taught me that fashion is just like politics and business you got to cover it is is the beat because it is in the end politics and business. And it’s not about hemlines and shoe heel heights. It’s about, you know, a major global industry that touches everyone from the workers in Bangladesh to Park Avenue socialites and then everybody who’s reading the paper. Because what we do every morning, we get up, we brush our teeth, we get dressed. So, you know how what is the story behind those clothes that we’re putting on? So I’ve actually written three books about it. The first one was Deluxe: How Luxury Lost Its Luster. That really was a deep dove into the luxury fashion industry and took apart and really did the history as well of Louis Vuitton, Hermes, Prada, Gucci, Chanel. And then I wrote Gods and Kings: The Rise and Fall of Alexander McQueen and John Galliano, which was a double biography because these two sort of ran parallel and were competing with each other and then burned out at the same time and now Fashionopolis. And I see it kind of as a trilogy where Deluxe was about how the luxury industry sacrificed its integrity for the sake of profit. Gods and Kings was about how the fashion industry sacrificed the creative for the sake of profit, that we could drive them to the point of suicide and alcoholism. And and this one is about how it just sacrifice the planet and humanity for the sake of profit, that it’s just capitalism at its absolute worst and now is reverberating to the to humanity and the planet that it just it’s all about it’s driven by greed. When I first started working on these books, I sat down and I wrote down the Seven Deadly Sins and I thought, OK, which ones are applying here? And it was just it turned out it was just all about greed, greed, greed and greed is the machine that drives the fashion industry. We talk about beauty and sexy and, you know, and allure and glamor. But in the end, it’s just greed, plain and simple. And I decided because I’ve had the advantage of working first for The Washington Post and secondly for The New York Times and thirdly for Newsweek. I was the European cultural and fashion correspondent for Newsweek for 15 years in Paris, where none of these these outlets were beholden to these brands for advertising. I had free rein to actually dig and do the work I needed to do. And so that’s why I was able to sort of carve out this idea of being the Woodward and Bernstein of fashion. And. And now there’s a whole crop of young reporters who are following my footsteps. And they’re actually kind of dusting me because they’re young, single and they don’t have kids. [00:11:34][204.1]

Adam: [00:11:37] Well, I think you’re right that this is a of course, you’re right, that this is a topic that deserves to be taken seriously as an industry that deserves to be taken seriously. [00:11:45][7.9]

Dana: [00:11:46] And a trillion dollar industry, one trillion I mean it’s enormous. One out of six people in the on the planet somehow work in the fashion industry, whether it’s growing cotton or modeling on the runway. I mean, that’s basically you swing a cat, you’re going to hit somebody. [00:12:03][17.1]

Adam: [00:12:03] One out of how many? [00:12:04][0.7]

Dana: [00:12:04] One out of six. [00:12:05][0.5]

Adam: [00:12:06] One out of six people work in. [00:12:08][2.0]

Dana: [00:12:08] In somehow to the fashion industry. [00:12:10][1.6]

Adam: [00:12:11] Wow. That’s. [00:12:13][1.4]

Dana: [00:12:13] It might be the woman who spritzing perfume on you as you through the department store if we ever do that again. Or it could be, you know, the cotton farmer in Texas or in India. But, you know. Within within reach, somebody you encounter, somebody who works in the fashion industry all the time, every day. [00:12:32][18.8]

Adam: [00:12:33] Wow, one trillion and you say three trillion by 2030. [00:12:37][3.7]

Dana: [00:12:37] Three trillion by 2030. [00:12:38][0.6]

Adam: [00:12:39] That. [00:12:39][0.0]

Dana: [00:12:42] And one trillion is a conservative figure because it’s it’s a bit fuzzy, it’s fuzzy arithmetic, as George Bush used to say. [00:12:49][7.2]

Adam: [00:12:49] That must be difficult to measure something that’s so large and that is so in so many different segments. And so, I mean, you’re talking about both Galiano high fashion and, you know, someone sellings, you know, making and selling something very locally in the country or India or someplace like that. [00:13:08][18.6]

Dana: [00:13:08] And you’re tailor. Yeah, absolutely. You know, it’s and that’s actually one of the things that comes under fire regularly is that the numbers are a bit fuzzy math because they most of them are not peer reviewed. So like there’s some figures that the World Bank puts out. And then when you dig deep, they’re like, where did the World Bank get these numbers? And if you can’t trust the World Bank, who can you trust? Or McKinsey and they’re like, where’d you get those figures? So there’s actually some digging and peer review work to be done on these figures. And they haven’t been done because nobody takes the fashion industry seriously. They think it’s frivolous but it’s not frivolous. It’s an actual seriously mega mega business. And it’s, you know, think about the ships, the cargo coming across the Atlantic, the trees that are being felled to make rayon. And because they’re all made of tree pulp and and, you know, like Indonesian rainforest in the Brazilian rainforest and the cotton farmers from south southwest America to India and China and the people who grow indigo. And it’s an enormous, enormous, enormous business. And then we have Naomi Campbell. [00:14:18][70.2]

Adam: [00:14:22] Right. Who’s all the way at the other end of that. I mean, how does the rise of fast fashion change this? Because, I mean, how much waste is involved and how much is that grown recently? [00:14:37][14.9]

Dana: [00:14:38] Well, the waste is extraordinary. I mean, we sell. Roughly. Because that figures and also it’s hard to nail down, but roughly one hundred billion garments a year, we no they produce one hundred billion garments a year roughly. [00:14:53][15.1]

Adam: [00:14:55] Wow. [00:14:55][0.0]

Dana: [00:14:55] They only sell 80 billion. Wow, 20 billion are destroyed every year before they ever hit the shop floor. [00:15:05][9.9]

Adam: [00:15:07] That’s enough for every person to wear one of those garments. I mean, there’s only, what, seven, eight billion people on the planet. [00:15:12][5.7]

Dana: [00:15:13] Yes. Right? [00:15:13][0.4]

Adam: [00:15:16] That’s enormous. What happens to these things? I mean, are they burned? [00:15:20][3.7]

Dana: [00:15:20] They’re burned they’re shredded. They’re water’s poured on them and then they rot. And, you know, a company like Burberry got busted for announcing that they did this in there and destroying how much they destroy in their annual report because they’re a publicly traded company. So they were obliged to disclose this in their annual report and they got taken to the woodshed for it. But as I wrote my first book, Deluxe, this has been going on for years. Chanel didn’t sell whatever it did, it would just shred it and burn it, throw it in a dump. [00:15:51][31.4]

Adam: [00:15:53] And what’s the reason for this enormous waste? I mean, obviously, waste is bad for the planet because we’re producing we don’t need. [00:15:59][5.7]

Dana: [00:15:59] Exclusivity. We just there and again, like I described in my book Deluxe, I went out to the outlets out near Palm Springs, California, and I found a cardboard box at the Dior outlet that was filled with all these leftover John Galliano corsets and bras. And they were selling them for five euros or five dollars apiece. And and you were like, well, that’s not terribly luxury. And that’s what kills the exclusivity. If you can go out to these outlets outside of Palm Springs and and pick up stuff for five, 10, 15, one hundred bucks that normally sells for a hundred times more than. It kills the allure of the product, so rather than putting it in a cardboard box that you could just rifle through and say, oh, look at this pretty corset for 20 bucks, they’d rather destroy it and eat the loss. [00:16:51][51.5]

Adam: [00:16:52] I also feel, though, has something changed in the way that we, the consumer buy fashion. Like the clothes seem more disposable to me as well. I remember my experience of going to like an H and M like this is a number of years ago, too, in New York. And just having it seem like the clothes were like lying on the floor, they’re all like a lot of them are ripped and torn, like they’re already a little bit like disposable in this way, which felt like a new thing to me. To have clothes sold in that manner is there’s. [00:17:24][32.6]

Dana: [00:17:25] We buy five times more clothes than we did per person than we did a generation ago, the average American. Yeah. And just think about it for a minute. I mean, oh, sorry, that was French. So if you hit me, if you live in a in a modern house, it’s normal to have a walk in closet. Right. Like everyone has a walk in closet. But if you live in an apartment that was pre-war, how big is your closet? [00:17:50][24.4]

Adam: [00:17:51] Very small. [00:17:52][0.4]

Dana: [00:17:52] It’s very small, it’s very small, and yes, people have wardrobe’s as piece of furniture, but even they weren’t terribly big, you know, for a woman one hundred years ago to buy a new dress every season she was a wealthy woman. You didn’t buy a new dress for Friday night’s dinner date. But now we do and now we we also over we we buy. I mean, give you an idea today, the average American has seven pairs of blue jeans in their closet, one for every day of the week. [00:18:23][30.4]

Adam: [00:18:24] I’ve got three or four, so that’s pretty close. I think I have four, which is more than I need. [00:18:31][6.8]

Dana: [00:18:32] And before when blue jeans were first invented one hundred and fifty years ago by Levi Strauss, they were made to be sustainable. They were they were the original sustainable garment, those rivets would hold the seams together and the mine. And they were made from miners who were crawling around in the earth digging for silver and gold right during the California gold rush. And they would take those jeans and they would pass them on to the next miner like you struck gold. You’re like, I’m done, I’m out of here. And then they would pass those jeans on. But now we want like we need our straight legs. We need our our boot cut. We need our stovepipe. We need our low low cut. We need our mom jeans. We need you know, we need white jeans. [00:19:11][39.0]

Adam: [00:19:13] And it’s going to be made to last. They come with holes in them already,. [00:19:16][2.2]

Dana: [00:19:17] Holes in them already already and frayed. And they fall apart in six months and then we need to buy a new pair. And that’s the whole thing that the fashion industry realized in the last twenty five years since I’ve been writing about it, that if they adopted, like so many other industries built in obsolescence, then we’re obliged to buy more and then their numbers go up. You know, when I started covering the industry, it was it was one sixth of the turnover that it is today. These companies like Louis Vuitton was a big company, at one billion. Now it does 10 or 12 billion dollars a year in sales. Most companies were sort of like one hundred to two hundred million dollars a year in sales. Three hundred max. Four hundred max and now they’re all three, four or five billion dollars. I’m talking about like Dior and Gucci. They were little companies. When I first started in the nineteen seventies, Louis Vuitton had two boutiques two, and they’ve had those two boutiques for one hundred years and they did, they did like 14, 15, 20 million dollars a year in sales. It was a tiny little company in nineteen seventy seven. Now they have hundreds and hundreds I think four hundred fifty or five hundred stores around the world. And like I said, and they do 10 to 12 billion dollars a year in sales. And that’s because they built in this idea like like when your washing machine breaks or you’re on your cell phone doesn’t sync up any more to to the to the new tech that you got to go out and get the new one. They build in the obsolete obsolescence so that it may go out of fashion or it may wear out. You need to replace it and you need replace it often. [00:20:54][97.0]

Adam: [00:20:56] Yeah, I mean, it makes sense if you’re selling a product and you can make it cheaper and sell it to people twice as often, three times as often, you’re going to make a lot more money without without increasing your a number of buyers, you vastly increase the number of products that you’re selling. [00:21:11][14.7]

Dana: [00:21:11] And the shift with this was fast fashion. And what happened was fast fashion is a new is a new phenomenon, it’s only about twenty five years old and a bit like fast food came into the came into being in the nineteen fifties with the automobile and and then grew into this corrupted, dark, dark, dark world. And if you ever want to read a really good book on that that’s read Fast Food Nation by Eric Schlosser. So the fast fashion is the same thing, and it grew out of this American industry idea of trying to compete with overseas producers by doing things quicker. And what they call quick response and quick response was that you did as you produced a small amount and you put it in stores and you saw how well it’s sold and what sold well, say the navy blue t shirt sold really well, then, boom, we’ll just produce more navy blue t shirts. But if the red t shirts weren’t selling very well, then we’ll just stop making the red t shirts. We won’t have the waste. And then these this brand in Spain called Zara a little known brand little spanish brand took this QR idea and ran with it and they started doing this where they’re studying what’s selling, but they’re doing fashion as opposed to just like basics. And and their numbers went up so quickly when they started replacing, moving the items really quickly, the quick response and then also doing what we call drops more often. So instead of changing the clothes only a couple of times a year, the falsies in the winter season, in the spring season, the summer season, they were changing them every two or three weeks. There would be new stuff on the floor. And so their numbers went up from customers showing up in Spain at their at their original stores from four to five times a year to 17 times a year because people came in and said, what do you got new? What’s new? I want to see what’s new. And then you’ve got hooked. And every time you came in, you went out with something. So their numbers also went up. Exponentially and so everybody else tapped into this. And first it was H&M. and it was Gap and it was Benneton and these other sort of midrange brands. But then the luxury fashion industry tapped into it, too, and said, right, well, we need you know, if we get people in the store more, they’re going to buy more because we’re changing it up all the time. And so that’s when they started doing more and more seasons and more and more collections. And when John Galliano left Dior when he first started Dior, he was doing six shows a year when he left between his house and Dior he was doing thirty two collections a year. Am I speaking to somebody at Dior not long ago and they said, you know, we do one basically once a week, something something new every week. It’s shoes. Bathing suits, underwear, ready to wear fur. There’s something new to put in the store every week, at Dior, which is just like Zara. So what’s the difference? The price. But the model is exactly the same. And that basically they got us addicted to shopping. It’s like a drug. They were addicted to shopping. We go into the store, we’re like, I need a fix. I need to do this. We call it retail therapy. I mean. Right. And we’re going to go buy some more and go buy some more and go buy some more. And then what do we do with it? The average garment today is worn seven times before it’s thrown away. [00:24:21][189.7]

Adam: [00:24:22] Wow. Seven times. [00:24:24][1.8]

Dana: [00:24:25] Thrown Away. [00:24:25][0.0]

Adam: [00:24:28] You don’t even need to wash it. [00:24:28][0.7]

Dana: [00:24:30] And in China it’s three times. Well, that’s the problem. Some of these clothes at the fast fashion brands cost more to dry-clean than they did to buy it. So you’re like, why would I spend twenty five bucks to dry-clean this dress when it only cost me 12.99? I’ll just toss it and go buy a new one. [00:24:43][13.4]

Adam: [00:24:44] OK, but is there any benefit to the consumer of this model or is it just addictive. I mean. [00:24:50][6.5]

Dana: [00:24:52] It’s like a drug. [00:24:52][0.1]

Adam: [00:24:54] Is it fulfilling any actual need that we have? I mean, many of our modern innovations in retail or industry, they do provide something that even fast food gives people a reliable meal at like a pretty low price and, you know, served a need for busy people. And we can criticize if we say, hey, at least it’s giving people this one thing. But is this doing anything to the fact that you can go to an H&M now and buy a shirt for a dollar and wear it seven times and throw it away. Is that is that at all an improvement or is it in your view [00:25:25][31.4]

Dana: [00:25:26] Well yes and no, it does it, as Anna Wintour told me, bring better fashion to more people, meaning that you can know that just because it’s cheap doesn’t mean it has to be ugly. It can be cute and cute and sexy. Right. So there are people on a fixed budget who are saying, but if you take away fast fashion, I won’t have any anything decent to wear that’s kind of cool and cute. [00:25:45][19.1]

Adam: [00:25:47] Because I can’t afford the really well made. [00:25:49][1.6]

Dana: [00:25:49] Because I can’t afford Dior. I can’t afford Gucci. Right. [00:25:52][2.7]

Adam: [00:25:52] That’s very good for you, but I can’t afford it. [00:25:54][1.7]

Dana: [00:25:54] And and that’s one of the problems that this fast fashion revolution has caused, is that the price of fashion dropped. And that range area kind of disappeared. So it’s either super cheap or super expensive. And one of the things that I learned while writing this book was that everyone kept telling me and I kept reading that fashion has never been cheaper than it is today and I was like, what does this mean? So then I started thinking about it and I realized that, you know, the clothes of my 18, 19 year old daughter was wearing and buying and wearing were costing her less than I was paying for clothes when I was her age in the late 70s and early 80s. And she earns 10 to 12 dollars an hour babysitting and I was earning one dollar an hour babysitting, so she has ten times the purchasing power at a cheaper price. [00:26:55][61.0]

Adam: [00:26:56] Wow. Not even adjusted for inflation is just straight up cheaper. [00:26:59][2.7]

Dana: [00:26:59] Straight up. And then I start then I read a piece from The New Yorker in about from about nineteen forty and they were talking about clothes during the Depression. And that the and they were citing some of the prices of the French fashion houses at the time, and they were about the same price as we pay today for the luxury fashion. And then there was this very famous retailer in New York City whose name Hatti Carnegie who introduced a sportswear line during the Depression, which Raymond Chandler called the Long Goodbye the secretary special. Sort of think about the suit that Lauren Bacall wears in The Big Sleep. Right. It’s kind of in the secretary’s special or the one of those cute little dresses that they were with a brooch and they were selling for between 19.99 and 25.99 for a nice day dress, a little suit. And this is at the height of the depression, and that is what you would pay today for the same thing at H&M or in Zara and I thought, right, we have a lot more purchasing power today than we did during the Depression, but the clothes cost the same price. Now, why do they cost why do they cost the same price? And. [00:28:13][73.7]

Adam: [00:28:13] The price of everything else has gone up. [00:28:14][1.0]

Dana: [00:28:15] And the price of everything else has gone up.So then I saw a pie chart, you know, those pie charts where they show how you’re dividing what you’re spending is in your life, so you spend so much on house and so much on insurance and so much food and so much utilities and so and that. And in nineteen sixty we spent I can’t remember to figure out exactly, but we spent. In the 20 percentage, twenty twenty five percent on clothing and today it’s in single digits of that pie chart, but we buy five times more clothes than we did then, maybe more, maybe six or seven times more clothes than we did when this pie chart was originally designed. So that shows that we are dedicating less of our monthly or annual budget to clothes and we’re buying five to six times more clothes with that that sliver of what we used to spend. Now, the reason that these clothes cost so little is because during the age of globalization, we we moved all of our manufacturing of clothes offshore. Now, we’ve heard all about this with NAFTA and people are complaining about how NAFTA gutted the American industry across the board, not just in the fashion industry and the textile industry, but across the board automobile and everything else. Right. Everything went overseas. And that’s when the the owners of companies, the CEOs and the shareholders got wildly, wildly, wildly rich, and we talk about the and the salaries of CEOs going up hundreds and thousands of percentage points versus the average worker. But at the same time, and we and we lost all these jobs with so many people went on the dole and towns were gutted and the south, you drive across the south and it’s just heartbreaking, right? The hillbilly elegy south and and they went to places like Bangladesh, China, Southeast Asia, Vietnam, Cambodia, Myanmar. [00:30:11][116.4]

Adam: [00:30:12] Yeah. [00:30:12][0.0]

Dana: [00:30:13] And where people are paid a fraction. Not even a fraction like tiny when I went to Bangladesh for this book, people were earning sixty eight dollars a month to sew clothes. Sixty eight dollars a month, which was half a living wage, which is half of what you need to house, clothe and feed your family. They don’t get vacation. They don’t get overtime. They don’t get maternity leave. They don’t have any health care benefits. And the the brands that outsource to these factories only do a subcontract. They are not related. They are not responsible for anything. So when it when a factory goes down or a factory goes up in flames, when it collapses or goes up in flames, they can say, not our problem. That’s their problem. Somebody else’s owns the factory. We just we just contract them. We have no. And so some companies say, like Ralph Lauren, Ralph Lauren in the old days made their own clothes. They had factories, they made their clothes. Then they started offshoring to places like China and Hong Kong and elsewhere in South Asia, Southeast Asia or maybe Central America. And so then they became a company that just designs things. And they sent it off to have it made and then it goes back and then they sell them, but they actually don’t make their clothes anymore, right. And so that’s why the price dropped, because everyone is getting nickeled and dimed and squeezed, squeezed, squeezed to to offer these brands the lowest price possible. So if they’re selling it to you for one hundred, that means the person who made it was paid ten not even five. And so that’s why the price of clothes went down, because they don’t have to pay all that all that other expense benefits, pensions, vacations, unions. La, la, la, la. That’s gone. And also things like that used to be corporate paternalism, where if the factory was in your town, they also underwrote the the Little League team. They gave money to the local library. They sponsored. [00:32:13][120.2]

Adam: [00:32:14] They paid employment taxes. [00:32:14][0.1]

Dana: [00:32:14] The stadium lights. They did all those things. And they didn’t have to spend money on that anymore either. So it was just all profit, profit, profit, profit, profit. And they could drop the prices because it costs them nothing to produce everything. [00:32:29][15.3]

Adam: [00:32:31] I mean, when you look at it that way, it’s like we went through this massive change in how our clothing was made, where we offshore it pay people nothing, we sort of export misery to other places. [00:32:44][12.5]

Dana: [00:32:45] And it wasn’t misery when it was well-run in America, the golden age of manufacturing in America was great, as we see in something like the marvelous Mrs. Masel Masel. The father in law owns a dress company in the garment district. And we go into that factory and he says, You know pick out a dress, right? Or in Goodfellas, you know, go pick out a dress, go pick out a fur coat that was made in New York City and the life was OK. People live well. They went they had retreats in places like the Poconos for the workers. They had baseball teams and basketball teams and theater groups. And they lived well. It was a good it was a good life. [00:33:20][35.0]

Adam: [00:33:21] Yeah. This this change solved the problem that we didn’t have, I mean, I think in the Depression to us, but in twenty five percent of your income on your clothes is probably too much. I know they had to go to long lengths to preserve clothes at the time. They had to starch the collars and bleach everything and that sort of thing. But I would imagine from the 60s or 70s,. [00:33:40][18.4]

Dana: [00:33:40] My grandfather during the Depression owned two suits and he wore one all week, and then he went to the dry cleaners and dropped it off and picked up the other one and wore that the whole week. [00:33:49][8.6]

Adam: [00:33:52] But like the situation that we have now as consumers, where we pay pennies, we pay tiny amounts for bad clothes that fall apart, you know. [00:34:01][8.4]

Dana: [00:34:02] Bad clothes that fall apart. [00:34:02][0.0]

Adam: [00:34:03] Like you go to H&M, you’re not getting great stuff. You know, you get you get that little pop of oh I’ve got something new, but you’re not really it’s enriching your life. [00:34:10][7.7]

Dana: [00:34:11] But that’s what they call it in England, the thrill of the till. [00:34:13][2.0]

Adam: [00:34:17] And so and on top of this, it’s creating massive waste. And so it seems to have gotten worse in every way versus what it was a couple of decades ago. [00:34:26][9.4]

Dana: [00:34:27] In every way. Yeah. [00:34:27][0.7]

Adam: [00:34:28] Well, look, I have so many more questions. I want to ask a lot more about the labor piece on the you know, on the other side of the ocean from where I’m sitting right now. But we got to take a really quick break. We’ll be right back with more Dana Thomas, this is wonderful. We’re back with Dana Thomas. I want to ask more about when I go to the shop. We’ve talked a lot about my experience going to the store and why I pay so little for clothes that fall apart as I take them off the rack. But I want to talk about the person at the other end of the chain. Actually, I suppose the absolute other end of the chain would be the folks making the textiles growing, the growing, the initial plant materials or doing whatever chemistry results in these fabrics. But let’s talk about the person who’s making the clothes. [00:35:22][53.1]

Dana: [00:35:22] Who’s sewing. [00:35:24][1.5]

Adam: [00:35:24] Sewing yes, thank you. So you talked about how incredibly low these folks are being paid. We always say, oh, well, is it the cost of living low there? But you said no. Actually, they’re being paid half of a living wage. They’re being paid far less than what they need to. But I’ve also heard this line many times that I think I read this in like a Nicholas Friedman column like 10 years ago about how these are the stages that economies go through. You know, if you look at the Lower East Side, you had, you know, the the Jewish textile industry or you had immigrants, you had folks working in sweatshop conditions and then they bettered their condition. And it was unfortunate. But that’s the stage you have to go through. And that’s what’s happening in Myanmar, one of those other places. And this is you know, it’s not perfect, but it’s a step on the way to a better future. You’re shaking your head as I say this. Please tell me why. [00:36:13][48.3]

Dana: [00:36:15] Well, because the only reason it got better in New York City was because we had the famous Triangle Shirtwaist Factory fire where more than one hundred women died and they were jumping out of the building on fire and landing on the sidewalk. OK, let’s just think about that for a second. It was the second worst business catastrophe in New York City. After 9/11. [00:36:43][28.3]

Adam: [00:36:44] Wow. [00:36:44][0.0]

Dana: [00:36:47] And after that, a wonderful woman named Frances Perkins was tapped by then Governor Franklin D. Roosevelt to reform working conditions in downtown Manhattan, in the sweatshops, if you are ever in New York and you have an afternoon to kick back and do some sightseeing, skip the Met and go visit the Tenement Museum. [00:37:14][27.7]

Adam: [00:37:15] I’ve been there. It’s amazing. [00:37:16][0.9]

Dana: [00:37:17] It’s amazing. On Orchard Street. [00:37:18][1.9]

Adam: [00:37:20] That’s the Lower East Side yeah. [00:37:21][1.0]

Dana: [00:37:21] It’s wonderful. It’s so fascinating. And when you see that, then you go, yeah, I don’t buy any of this stuff that Nicholas Kristof and the others are putting out and the so the reason that it reform. [00:37:35][13.8]

Adam: [00:37:36] Nick Kristof sorry I confused my New York Times columnist, I said Nicholas Friedman. I combined them. They say the same shit. [00:37:42][6.0]

Dana: [00:37:44] And so the only reason that New York got better was because Frances Perkins and her committee passed some laws saying you just can’t do that anymore. Sorry. You got you can’t lock your exits your fire exits. You can’t let people smoke on the factory floor. You can’t, you know. No, no, no, no, no. [00:38:05][20.6]

Adam: [00:38:05] And the workers organized and formed a union. [00:38:08][2.4]

Dana: [00:38:08] And there were unions. And then Frances Perkins was tapped by then President Roosevelt to be the Secretary of Labor. First woman in the cabinet. Held the position longer than any other cabinet member in the history of the country, she she was secretary of labor for 12 years. And during that 12 years, she, Frances Perkins is the one who put through things like the 40 hour work week, paid vacation, you know, things that we just think we’ve always had when we did until the until the Depression, until the New Deal, until Frances Perkins, and because all because of the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory fire. Now, the same thing has happened in Bangladesh sort of after the Rana Plaza factory collapse. But why did it happen, not because we had some trailblazing fabulous and, you know courageous politician like Franklin Roosevelt take a courageous and ahead and ahead of her time woman suffragette Frances Perkins and say, fix this, honey. And she did. But because the brands were afraid of the bad publicity, plain and simple, there had been a terrible fire in Bangladesh in 2012 where. [00:39:35][87.5]

Adam: [00:39:36] Tell me about this. [00:39:36][0.5]

Dana: [00:39:37] Called the Tazreen factory fire where more than one hundred people perished just like a triangle. And it was almost one hundred years to the date of the Triangle Factory and six months later we had the Rana Plaza factory collapse where more than two thousand people were killed. And the back to back was like a one two punch, and the brands, there were brands who said, you know, we didn’t we didn’t produce there no no no, but they still their clothes said on the label made in Bangladesh and people would be freaking out that the clothes were made in Bangladesh where factories collapse and kill and crush people. And it was horrific. I’ve been there and I’ve met with and I, I detail this in the book, the whole story of the Tazreen fire and the Rana Plaza collapse. And I went to Bangladesh on the fifth anniversary and met survivors of that collapse and heard their stories and watched them cry and saw their injuries and that they walk on canes and that they can’t work. And they they and PTSD like you cannot imagine and. What happened was then the brands got together and said, OK, we will have a binding agreement that enforces factory safety. But it’s minimum stuff that they’re asking for like that we don’t block the fire exits because they don’t have the fire exits because they’re afraid people will steal stuff or that there’s a fire escape or that there’s a sprinkler system or that there aren’t exposed wires dangling from the ceilings. You know, really basic stuff. When I got to Dhaka and Bangladesh, I was off the plane half an hour and I was already visiting a sweatshop. And it was the I have been covering the fashion industry for nearly 30 years. And I know I visited factories all over the world and I’ve heard about sweatshops, but nothing prepared me for what I saw as a sweatshop in Bangladesh. Oh, my gosh. [00:41:28][111.5]

Adam: [00:41:29] Tell me about it. [00:41:29][0.4]

Dana: [00:41:32] It was beyond imagination already, the walls look like somebody had taken kind of a port o john on and just spun it around and everything went slop against the walls, OK? Nasty, nasty. There was one staircase and it was encumbered by these huge cartons of a jeans company that you and I have heard of that was going to ship out. There was no fire escape of any sort. The windows all had bars on them anyway. So if there is a fire, too bad for you and then the glass is all broken. To get air. The floors were roughhewn, everyone worked barefoot. I’m not sure why they’re barefoot. It might have to do with something like hiding stuff in their shoes. Someone stood on corrugated cardboard patches on the floor so they wouldn’t get splinters on their feet. They were people as young as 12, 13, working in a factory and as old as 70. They were all really skinny. Their eyes were sunken in. They look like their souls had been rushed. They were using ancient, ancient, ancient material machinery, dangerously not well trained. I thought that guy, he’s about to cut off his hand. Oh, my gosh. Like using a jigsaw and cutting it through five times as much fabric as you should free hand without any protection. Nobody is wearing masks to breathe, not breathe in the fibers. Nobody’s wearing goggles to not get all this stuff flying in their eyes. Nobody’s I mean, and it was one hundred and twenty degrees and they had fans blowing around dust. There’s bolts of fabric on the floor to trip over. There’s leftover fabric piled up here and there. Cotton fabrics are very flammable. People were smoking. It was insane. I was like, where am I? I am in the fashion equivalent of hell. [00:43:18][105.8]

Adam: [00:43:19] How many people are in this place? [00:43:21][1.6]

Dana: [00:43:22] 50, 60, one hundred. [00:43:23][1.0]

Adam: [00:43:24] Wow. And these are folks, again, being paid extremely little. [00:43:27][2.8]

Dana: [00:43:27] Oh, and those people are being paid far less than the sixty eight dollars a month. I would guess they’re making half that. And no overtime. But they would be forced to work overtime and slavery essentially. [00:43:39][11.6]

Adam: [00:43:40] I want to know what brands I want to know what brand name you saw. [00:43:43][2.7]

Dana: [00:43:45] That was part of the deal. [00:43:45][0.5]

Adam: [00:43:45] You can’t say. [00:43:45][0.4]

Dana: [00:43:46] It was part of the deal sneaking me in there as I promised I wouldn’t reveal who was in there, but I didn’t want to put the people who got me in jeopardy. [00:43:53][7.1]

Adam: [00:43:54] I understand. But it’s a brand that if I if I were to go down to the. [00:43:58][3.7]

Dana: [00:43:59] I mean it’s not Levi’s Wrangler or Lee you know, it’s just like some jeans brand. But if I said you’d be like, oh, yeah, I’ve heard of them. [00:44:02][3.9]

Adam: [00:44:03] Yeah, OK. And they’d be on sale in my local mall most likely. [00:44:07][3.4]

Dana: [00:44:07] Yeah. Yeah. You find it easily enough. [00:44:10][2.2]

Adam: [00:44:11] And I mean. Here, here’s the thing that sort of baffles me. We’ve been hearing these stories for decades. [00:44:16][5.9]

Dana: [00:44:18] Decades! [00:44:18][0.0]

Adam: [00:44:18] When I was a teenager it was the or my yeah, my late teens were the height of the movement against Nike and sweatshops. It was extremely well publicized. And it struck me for a while that I was like, no one says that about Nike anymore. No one’s like, uh oh, Nike’s own sweatshops. [00:44:35][16.9]

Dana: [00:44:36] They worked really hard that that doesn’t, you know, because they’re worried about they’re worried about tarnishing their image. They’re not actually worried about the people they’re taking advantage of. It’s just PR. [00:44:47][10.6]

Adam: [00:44:48] And it worked. I mean, it’s now Nike is one of the most beloved bands at brands and fashion. [00:44:52][4.1]

Dana: [00:44:53] They also get better at hiding it. I don’t think the Nike does. I think Nike is careful. But there are other brands that are good at hiding it. [00:44:59][6.4]

Adam: [00:45:01] So how do they do that, how do they go through that transfer? How do they hide it? [00:45:06][5.8]

Dana: [00:45:07] Oh, well, I mean. There’s nobody like me out there digging up, trying to find them. I mean, when I in my first book, Deluxe, I was at a conference in Hong Kong, a big luxury conference, and the CEO of the conference said we do not produce in China. And the day before I’d been in a factory and saw them producing in China. [00:45:25][17.4]

Adam: [00:45:26] Wow. [00:45:26][0.0]

Dana: [00:45:26] I’m like you’re such a liar and you’re a publicly traded company. That’s fraud. [00:45:30][3.4]

Adam: [00:45:33] Yeah. Is it is it the subcontractor thing like, oh, well, we don’t produce in China we pay someone else. [00:45:38][5.2]

Dana: [00:45:39] They say they they subcontract. Yeah, definitely. Definitely. The good news is and that’s why we call Fashionopolis, my book, The Book of Hope. This all sounds like so down like, oh my God, I’m never going shopping again. This is the most depressing [00:45:54][14.7]

Adam: [00:45:54] Yes. You’ve brought us to our low point. [00:45:55][1.3]

Dana: [00:45:56] We are at the low point. But in fact, we called the Book of Hope because there is this whole movement. That’s a backlash to all of that. Thank goodness. And there is a bunch of young entrepreneurs are saying we don’t want to be a part of that, we don’t want to do any of that, we don’t want to even come close to being following that business model. They create a new business model where they’re sourcing sustainably. They’re paying their workers well. They’re doing made to order not only to order, but, well, direct to consumer already as opposed to having middlemen. So that takes the price lower. But then they like there’s a company I spotlit called Alabama Chanin that’s out of Florence, Alabama. Muscle Shoals, the RV Mecca. And and she doesn’t make anything until you’ve ordered it on her website. And then you order on Monday and you’ll get it by Friday. And she has somebody make it so there’s no waste, zero waste. They’re brands that want to do zero waste. Organically sourced. People pay not just a living wage, but above a living wage and or minimum wage, whether it’s home or abroad. American Apparel, for all of its horrors and there were a lot of horrors, it did actually pay its workers above the California. They paid their workers very well. They had a factory in L.A. They made everything in L.A. and that factory and they paid everyone really, really well. So they showed that besides the whole sex corruption nasty thing that was going on with Dov Charney, that the business model worked and you make a decent profit on it. [00:47:36][99.9]

Adam: [00:47:36] Well, Dov Charney also, you know, after he was ousted for American Apparel and that collapsed, he started a new company called Los Angeles Apparel, which I know because it’s in Los Angeles where I live. There’s billboards all over the place. Yes. And yes, he still has a factory in Los Angeles. But but his factory was shut down because everybody got covid. And a bunch of people died. [00:47:52][15.8]

Dana: [00:47:54] And another reason. But he still he does prove on the business level that you can have a fashion factory, a fashion company in America, make everything in America above the board, follow the rules, pay everyone well and and make an absolutely decent sum of money. [00:48:11][16.6]

Adam: [00:48:12] Yes. [00:48:12][0.0]

Dana: [00:48:13] So the old model. Is it really, you know, the way things are done and have been done two hundred and fifty years. I mean, we forget that the Industrial Revolution began with the fashion industry. It was Richard Arkwright who started cotton mills and they were using the cotton to make clothes and linens for the home. Yeah, and that kicked it off, it wasn’t steam engines, it wasn’t all it was cotton milling. [00:48:41][28.7]

Adam: [00:48:42] Yeah. [00:48:42][0.0]

Dana: [00:48:43] Two hundred fifty years. And what did they do? They hired women and they hired children. They paid them nothing and they treated them badly. And then they died young and sick the same. And they got really, really rich off the backs of these really poor people. And it’s the same business model is going on today with the globalization offshoring of fashion production. Same same thing. [00:49:02][19.2]

Adam: [00:49:04] But there are companies that are moving. [00:49:07][2.6]

Dana: [00:49:07] There is hope, there is hope. And so that’s why I say with the book that I based it. I sort of structured it like Charles Dickens, A Christmas Carol. There’s the ghost of fashion past, which is terrible so scary. There’s the ghost of fashion present, which is like, it’s OK. There’s bad, there’s good, but there’s bad and there’s good. But the ghost of future could be great if we decide to change. [00:49:30][23.4]

Adam: [00:49:32] Yeah. [00:49:32][0.0]

Dana: [00:49:33] And we can change in different ways, we can buy less, we can buy smarter, we can we should pay more for our clothes. And while people are like, but I can’t afford it, it’s like, actually, you can. Because we proved that with that pie chart, I talked about the beginning in 1960where we did devote more money, more of our income to clothing than we do today. We did pay more for clothing. So instead of buying 10 t shirts at ten dollars apiece, you just buy one at 70. That’ll last you so much longer will be so much more beautiful. And you’ve actually saved thirty dollars. [00:50:07][33.8]

Adam: [00:50:08] You know, the funny thing about that is, first of all, I agree that there are many cases where you can buy you can spend more on one thing that lasts longer. And I try to buy things that way myself,. [00:50:18][10.1]

Dana: [00:50:19] Like our friend, the blue jean that we were talking about earlier. [00:50:21][2.0]

Adam: [00:50:21] Yeah, I’ve been wearing the same pair of jeans for two or three years and, you know, and I’ll continue to wear it for a little while longer. But the odd thing about the American economy is that there’s certain things that have become that little sliver of the pie chart. Like you said, clothing, food. We now spend very little, a very low percentage of our income on food compared to other folks elsewhere in the world compared to earlier in American history. But then there’s other parts of the pie chart that are massive housing and health care are these huge parts where people are spending half of their income on housing and one percent on food. And so it’s a little hard for me to say, hey, you know what? Anyone can afford to spend a little bit more on clothing when when there are these other pressures on them that are so massive. And that’s an entirely different episode of the show. Why we’ve done multiple episodes of this. But I think we we can say, hey, we don’t need to spend only one percent of our income as a nation on clothing, like on a societal level, investing a little bit more in this part of our lives. And this part of paying those workers more is possible. [00:51:30][68.5]

Dana: [00:51:31] Buy better. And it’s because we’re contributing to the whole thing. It’s a big economic picture to think about. But if you think about the factories and the jobs that went offshore. Thus, we lost all those work jobs in the south of the United States or the eastern seaboard in manufacturing. And then those people who lost their jobs are buying those clothes that are made offshore, they’re contributing to their misery in a sense. Because they’re propping up they’re validating this business model that gutted their lives. It’s a big, thick idea. I know. So, you got to wrap your head around this. But if If you buy into the thing that just ruined your life, you’re supporting this monster that ruined your life, right? [00:52:27][56.3]

Adam: [00:52:28] Yeah. [00:52:28][0.0]

Dana: [00:52:29] So better to buy local if you can pay more and keep it longer. Buy better, buy, buy less. Buy better is what I say my daughter might like I was telling you, she’s now 20 year old daughter’s wearing my blue jeans that I bought in the 1980s because they were good Levi’s. And back then, if you own three pairs of jeans, you basically have three pairs of jeans. We bought the kind that weren’t prewashed. They were stiff as all get out. It was like putting on cardboard. Right. So you had the first pair of shrink to fit. You like put them on, you got in your bathtub and you sat there. Right. And then you wash them and you wore them. You washed me, wore them. And after about six months they started not giving you a wedgie when you wore them. And then while they’re starting to break in and get good, then you sort of saved your money one year on and you bought the next pair. And so then you’re starting the cycle and then you had like a three year cycle going on. So by the third year, that first pair was get really good, right. The second one was getting decent. The first ones were giving you the wedgie. And then that first pair would eventually wear out. You turn them into cut offs. So you kept them mean you like, but you paid more. I paid more then for a pair of 501 blue jeans and they cost today. And I was earning a fraction of what I earn today. So it just shows that we kind of you saved your money. You saved your money to buy your blue jeans. You didn’t just go out on a Tuesday afternoon and go, I got a new pair of jeans. You saved you like right. In April, I’m going to go buy a new pair of blue jeans and then you had this whole project of making them work for you. And because of that, they’ve lasted thirty years. They’ve been sitting in my closet. My now my daughter wears them and she gets compliments all the time. Those are bad ass jeans and their worn so well. And it’s like yeah well and they were tailored. We took them in like we make them look. Maybe get back to that idea that, you know, you buy something, you love it, you wear it, if it wears out, you patch it up. There are three the three R’s I write about in the book that are really important resale. If you’re tired of something, don’t ever, ever, ever throw it in the trash. Please do not throw clothes in the trash, resell them. There’s loads of there’s the RealReal. But there’s all sorts. There’s Vestiaire Collective. There’s eBay, there’s all sorts of resale places. Resell them, get your money, get some money coming in and give that government a second life. Somebody else will love it. As a friend of mine says, pre loved they’re pre loved. Give them to somebody else who wants it pre loved. There’s so there’s resale, there’s repair, repair, repair, repair. It’s kind of fun. Do take some sewing classes, some embroidery classes. You can do it on YouTube. You do a zoom and and do needlework and do like what they call a parent mending where you can see that it’s been patched up sort of like in the 60s when we did that cool embroidery and mending and patching. Right. And then there’s renting. If you’ve got a big fancy gig coming up and you need a gown for don’t go spend three thousand dollars on a gown that you’re going to wear twice. Go spend three hundred dollars renting something that you would have never bought otherwise. You look fantastic. You will feel like Cinderella. [00:55:39][190.7]

Adam: [00:55:41] Yeah. [00:55:41][0.0]

Dana: [00:55:42] And then you return it and it doesn’t hang in your closet gathering dust going oh I’ll never wear that again. I mean men where men rent tuxedos all the time, right? You rent you rented your tuxedo for the prom. [00:55:55][12.5]

Adam: [00:55:56] I did, and I did, indeed. [00:55:57][1.1]

Dana: [00:55:58] But your date, she bought a dress. [00:55:59][1.6]

Adam: [00:56:01] Now, two things two thoughts this gives me. One is, in addition to learning embroidery and sewing, you can go to your local dry cleaner and get things tailored. And it was so late in life that I learned, oh, there’s a guy I can bring my pants to and pay five or ten dollars and they’ll patch the holes in my pants, like, and these exist in. [00:56:21][19.7]

Dana: [00:56:23] They’ll replace the buttons, they’ll stitch up that seam for you and re-hem it yeah. The lining if it wears out. Yeah absolutely. [00:56:30][7.0]

Adam: [00:56:30] And it feels so good. [00:56:31][0.8]

Dana: [00:56:32] Support your local artisans. [00:56:33][0.9]

Adam: [00:56:34] I’ve got a pair of unico jeans that I bought for like thirty dollars cheap ass jeans and they fit great and I’ve been getting them repaired once a year for the past like eight years because the crotch blows out over and over again. but here’s a here’s a question I’ve always had. And you’re the perfect person to ask this, because when I started paying more attention to clothes in my late 20s, it was these sort of like revival of classic menswear movements of tailored clothes and like buying nice leather shoes that you can get fixed up and things like that. And there’s a lot of that culture still embedded in men’s clothes, buying tailored clothing, buying resoleable Brooks Brothers shoes I’m sorry, Brooks Brothers suits, Allen Edmonds shoes, that sort of thing. And my girlfriend at the same time was buying shoes. And we were like, hold on a second. The shoes that she’s buying, they’re almost never resoleable in that way. The clothes are not designed to be repaired and there’s plenty of crappy men’s clothes as well. But there’s still this strain of like, you know, the average thing that a businessman wears is going to be a lot more repairable and a lot longer lasting. And I’ve noticed that gender divide in men and women that fast fashion happened seem to happen more to women’s clothes. And I wondered if you had any idea why that was. [00:57:54][79.7]

Dana: [00:57:56] Well, I think it goes back. As I say, everything in France where I am, it all goes back to Versailles. It all goes back to Versaille and Marie Antoinette and how you had to dress, you had to dress like, you know, you had to change your fashion like the queen in order to keep up with the court and the women that couldn’t be seen in the same thing twice.And and there is that in women’s versus men’s, you know, like I said, my grandfather during the Depression where they had two suits and he just switched them out each week, a woman would not be able to go to the office every day in the same suit they’d be like you wore that yesterday. Did you not go home? [00:58:33][37.1]

Adam: [00:58:36] Yeah, I can show up in exactly the same outfit all week long. Yeah. [00:58:40][4.0]

Dana: [00:58:44] So it’s fashion is is inherently a female thing that we have to change it up, we have to change it up, we have to change it up. But again, like I said, there’s the three R’s resale rent repair. There’s also vintage. And we didn’t talk about vintage, but vintage is really important. What a friend of mine, like he said, is pre loved. And he also says it’s chic to repeat. I love that saying chic to repeat like you can it’s very chic to just keep wearing the same thing and say, yeah, I like my daughter. These were my mom’s jeans from the nineteen eighties. So chic. Right. And so you can go to great vintage shops like Decades on Melrose and find pre loved clothes for a fraction of the price. And that’s what Stella McCartney told me for the book. She said, listen, if you can’t afford me the first time around and I know I’m a luxury fashion designer, most people can’t. Then buy it on the sale, buy it on the second sale, buy it on the third sale, buy it vintage. And and and you can get great, great stuff. Vintage on resale sites. You can sell the things you don’t want any more, but you can also. Instead of spending a fortune on something junky that’s going to be spending. Say your spending your budgets one hundred bucks instead of buying a dress at fast fashion that’s going to fall apart and look terrible after three wears, go find something really great that’s vintage. [01:00:12][88.1]

Adam: [01:00:13] Yeah. [01:00:13][0.0]

Dana: [01:00:14] That’s beautifully made and has and has a life in it, and you’re carrying on that life. [01:00:19][5.0]

Adam: [01:00:20] I love that. And that’s a wonderful thing that we can do individually to assuage ourselves of the guilt and help a little bit. But I also know that the changes that you’re talking about were not driven by individual choices. They were driven by top down changes by the clothing producers. And so I’m curious if there are any policy changes that you want to see in terms of trade policy, in terms of regulation anything like that? You know, could Congress pass something that would improve this? [01:00:48][27.8]

Dana: [01:00:49] Fantastic question. And in fact, I am very heartened to say that Germany is now passing legislation, hopefully. I think it’s if it’s not done, it’s nearly done to require factories that are exporting clothes into Germany to meet their factory standards, their their standards, like you can’t treat your people badly and bring your clothes into Germany. And I was just speaking to somebody yesterday who is putting together I can find my notes legislation on the federal level and on New York state level to get factories, to get fashion companies to be more responsible. They’re working on two different bills on the state level in New York and on the on the federal level to hold businesses accountable to to regulate the business. I mean, if you think about every other industry, they’re regulated. Even if they’re deregulated, they’re regulated you know that somebody can’t just fly any sort of airplane into America as an airline. It has to meet FAA standards, right? But you can’t just sell any kind of junky car in America. It has to meet federal standards. You can’t sell any kind of chicken in a grocery store. It has to meet USDA standards, but we do not have these standards in the fashion industry. And that’s because people say the fashion is frivolous when it’s not. As we have already discussed, there’s even been lobbying. We’re lobbying as we us sort of activist journalists, people who are trying to make the world a better place in fashion, are lobbying the Biden administration to appoint what we’re calling a fashion czar, like the drug czar, like climate czar, a fashion czar who will basically say, you know, clothes should be made in factories that meet the standards of American factories, even if they’re halfway around the world, that the clothes at the factory, the clothing materials, meet our environmental standards, even if they’re made halfway around the world, that there isn’t so much waste that people are paid a living wage, that there are no sweatshops in America because there are sweatshops in downtown L.A.. I have seen them. [01:03:01][132.0]

Adam: [01:03:02] Yeah, really. [01:03:03][0.6]

Dana: [01:03:04] I have toured them where people pay two dollars an hour, even though the minimum wage in California is now, what, 10, 12, 14 dollars an hour. [01:03:11][7.1]

Adam: [01:03:11] It’s on its way to 15 yeah. It goes up every. [01:03:14][2.4]

Dana: [01:03:14] Two dollars an hour. And and so the fashion czar would crack down on all that stuff and get some legislation, because this is the one super mega industry that has zero regulation. [01:03:26][12.3]

Adam: [01:03:28] Yeah, we should and we could. It is possible to to have it. [01:03:33][4.9]

Dana: [01:03:33] And like Frances Perkins did. And then when we do, it moves into a golden age and it’s all great. Frances Perkins gave us gave us regulation because of the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory fire. And we needed again, it got it got lost along the way. And we needed again to protect our fellow Americans humanity and to protect the planet. [01:03:54][20.7]

Adam: [01:03:55] And if that is what happens if we take fashion seriously, then then we can make those changes and make everything better. [01:04:02][6.7]

Dana: [01:04:04] And we should. Because, I mean, what do we do when we get up in the morning? We brush our teeth and then we get get dressed. [01:04:08][4.2]

Adam: [01:04:10] Dana Thomas, thank you so much for being here. This is a wonderful interview. I thank you for you for this. Thank you for the work. And you’re such a good book plugger. But I want you to say the name of the book one more time for everybody. [01:04:19][9.4]

Dana: [01:04:21] Fashionopolis: The Price of Fast Fashion and the Future of Clothes. People ask me why fashionopolis? Well, I started reading Plato as one does. Plato talked about the polis, which means the city, the the city in Greek. And he said, you know, it should be the perfect polis is a just city. A just city. And I just loved that idea that we are being just right. And so I thought fashion should be too, that we have justice, humanity, equality. Goodness. [01:04:58][37.1]

Adam: [01:05:00] I agree. Thank you so much for being here, Dana. [01:05:02][2.3]

Dana: [01:05:03] Thank you. My pleasure. Any time. [01:05:04][1.4]

Adam: [01:05:10] Well, thank you once again to Dana Thomas for coming on the show, if you’d like a copy of her book Fashionopolis, you can get it at factuallypod.com/books. That’s factuallypod.com/books, and you’ll be supporting the show and your local bookstore. I want to thank our producers Kimmie Lucas and Sam Redman, our engineer, Andrew Carson, Andrew W.K. for our theme song, The fine folks at Falcon Northwest for building me the custom gaming PC that I am recording this very episode on. You can find me online at adamconover.net or @AdamConover wherever you get your social media. Until next time we’ll see you on Factually!. Thank you so much for listening. [01:05:10][0.0]

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