Fashionopolis

Dana Thomas, an investigative journalist and author of Deluxe and Gods and Kings, examines the global fashion industry's reliance on exploitation and environmental destruction, while profiling innovators working to build a more ethical and sustainable system.

Thomas opens with a striking image: in 2018, First Lady Melania Trump wore a $39 Zara anorak reading "I REALLY DON'T CARE, DO U?" to visit migrant children. Thomas treats the jacket as a symbol of the industry's indifference. Zara's parent company, Inditex, reported roughly $28.63 billion in sales for 2017, while the cotton in the jacket was grown with hazardous pesticides, dyed with polluting agents, and destined for landfill after a handful of wearings. Consumers now buy five times more clothing than in 1980, and the fashion industry has ballooned from a $500 billion trade to a $2.4 trillion global operation. Thomas identifies three consequences of this expansion: the loss of 1.2 million US textile and garment jobs between 1990 and 2012; human rights violations in developing nations, where fewer than two percent of workers earn a living wage; and severe environmental damage, with the sector responsible for nearly 20 percent of industrial water pollution and 10 percent of carbon emissions.

To explain how the industry reached this point, Thomas traces apparel manufacturing from its origins. Richard Arkwright opened the world's first water-powered textile mill in 1771 in Cromford, England, launching the factory system. American businessman Francis Cabot Lowell memorized power loom mechanics on a tour of Manchester's mills around 1810 and reconstructed the machines in Massachusetts to process cotton harvested by enslaved people. The trickle-down design model took shape when Charles Frederick Worth established modern couture in 1850s Paris, creating collections that set trends later copied by American manufacturers. Thomas charts the political decisions that drove production offshore, from Ronald Reagan's 1980 proposal for a North American trade accord through the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA), which encouraged companies to move manufacturing to countries with cheaper labor. Meanwhile, Zara founder Amancio Ortega adapted American-developed "quick response" manufacturing into "instant fashion," growing from 507 stores in 2001 to 2,200 in 96 countries by 2018. Between 2000 and 2014, global garment production doubled to 100 billion items annually while prices dropped.

Thomas investigates the human cost of this system by visiting clandestine sweatshops in Los Angeles, where an estimated half of the city's 45,000 garment workers are undocumented and earn as little as $4 an hour sewing for brands marketed as "Made in the USA." She draws parallels to historical abuses, from Friedrich Engels's 1845 account of Manchester mill horrors to the 1911 Triangle Shirtwaist Factory fire that killed 146 workers in New York. She credits labor advocate Frances Perkins with securing New Deal protections, including the Fair Labor Standards Act, which established minimum wage and banned child labor. But these gains eroded as production moved overseas. The book's most devastating section focuses on Bangladesh, the world's second-largest apparel producer. After a series of fatal factory fires failed to compel reform, the Rana Plaza factory compound in the Dhaka suburb of Savar collapsed on April 24, 2013. An engineer had wanted to condemn the building after a crack appeared the day before, but owner Sohel Rana refused. The disaster killed 1,134 people and injured 2,500, making it the deadliest garment factory accident in modern history. Thomas interviews survivors, including Shila Begum, a sewing machine operator pinned under concrete for 16 hours who can no longer work, and Mahmudul Hassan Hridoy, a quality inspector who walks with a crutch. In the aftermath, over 200 companies signed the Accord on Fire and Building Safety. Thomas visits Bangladesh in 2018 and finds improvements at compliant factories alongside persisting sweatshops with exposed wiring and children visibly in their early teens. Two members of a survivors' association died by suicide.

Thomas uses blue jeans to illustrate the industry's environmental toll. Cotton is one of agriculture's dirtiest crops: one-fifth of all insecticides protect it, and growing one kilogram requires roughly 2,600 gallons of water. She visits a Ho Chi Minh City washhouse where young workers hand-sand jeans without masks, and reports on Xintang, China, where factories producing 300 million pairs annually dump dye waste directly into the river. She profiles Sally Fox, considered the mother of modern organic cotton, whose partnership with Levi's to develop naturally colored denim collapsed after a management crisis following a 1996 leveraged buyout, sending Fox's company into bankruptcy. Thomas traces Levi's broader decline from a conscientious company to one that closed dozens of domestic plants and laid off tens of thousands of workers.

The book's second half profiles those building alternatives. In Florence, Alabama, once the Cotton T-shirt Capital of the World, designer Natalie Chanin runs Alabama Chanin, producing organic-cotton women's wear with local seamstresses who earn 25 to 50 percent of retail price. Nearby, menswear designer Billy Reid operates a direct-to-consumer brand controlling its own distribution and pocketing 60 to 70 percent of customer payments. Together they proved that a complete field-to-form supply chain could work by growing, ginning, spinning, and sewing organic cotton within the region. Thomas defines "rightshoring" as the reboot of domestic production using modern technology and transparency: At Tower Mill in Stalybridge, England, entrepreneurs launched the first large-scale cotton spinning operation in the UK in over three decades, while in the US, North Carolina's textile industry employed 42,000 in 700 factories by 2017. In Los Angeles, Yael Aflalo's Reformation produces fashion in clean local factories while claiming carbon neutrality through offsets.

Thomas devotes attention to cleaning up the denim supply chain. Sarah Bellos of Stony Creek Colors in Tennessee grows natural indigo commercially for the first time in over a century, offering farmers a profitable alternative to tobacco. Spanish company Jeanologia developed a three-step finishing system using lasers, ozone, and nanobubble washing that cuts water use by up to 71 percent, and Levi's adopted this technology through its Project F.L.X. initiative, developed at the Eureka Innovation Lab in San Francisco.

Thomas profiles British designer Stella McCartney as the industry's leading advocate of conscious fashion. A lifelong vegetarian and daughter of Paul McCartney, she has produced animal-free clothing since launching her own label in 2001 and publishes an Environmental Profit and Loss (EP&L) report measuring her supply chain's impact. Thomas explores emerging materials that could transform the industry: Modern Meadow, a biofabrication company, uses fermentation to grow collagen protein assembled into animal-free material biologically similar to leather, while Bolt Threads, a Bay Area biotech firm, produces lab-grown spider silk called Microsilk and a faux leather called Mylo, grown from mushroom mycelium. McCartney collaborated with Bolt on garments exhibited at the Museum of Modern Art and the Victoria and Albert Museum. Bolt raised $213 million and was valued at over $700 million by mid-2018.

Thomas traces the push for circularity, the practice of recycling materials into new fiber rather than discarding them. Stacy Flynn's Seattle-based Evrnu molecularly regenerates postconsumer cotton waste into new fiber using 98 percent less water than virgin cotton. Cyndi Rhoades's London-based Worn Again Technologies separates polyester from cotton in blended fabrics to produce virgin-quality pellets. Italy's Aquafil produces ECONYL, regenerated nylon made from abandoned fishing nets and used carpets, which accounted for 40 percent of its production in 2018.

Thomas examines technology's double-edged potential, from Dutch couturier Iris van Herpen's pioneering 3-D-printed garments to SoftWear Automation's Sewbots, sewing robots that produce T-shirts every 25 seconds in a factory in Little Rock, Arkansas. She acknowledges the tension between automation's potential to eliminate sweatshop conditions and the International Labour Organization's prediction that up to 90 percent of Southeast Asian garment workers could lose their jobs.

The book closes by surveying retail transformation. Lauren Santo Domingo, a former Vogue editor, cofounded Moda Operandi, which lets customers preorder from samples, yielding a 17 percent return rate versus 52 percent for traditional online retailers. Selfridges, under chairman Alannah Weston, has become the most ecologically responsible department store through reforms including recycled shopping bags, LED lighting, and supply-chain transparency tools. Julie Wainwright's The RealReal, a luxury consignment platform, projected about $1 billion in 2018 turnover, and Rent the Runway, cofounded by Jennifer Hyman, offers unlimited wardrobe subscriptions with the stated aim to "put Zara and H&M out of business" (254).

Thomas concludes by acknowledging that the many players she profiles are not fully aligned: rightshorers, slow fashion advocates, recyclers, and rental companies pursue different goals at different scales. But all push back against a model built on endless consumption, exploitative pricing, and environmental disregard. She urges consumers to buy less, repair more, consider supply chains and materials, and "fashion a personal style that does more good for the world than ill" (259).