To put it bluntly, the world is hurtling towards climate emergency. And the fashion industry is fueling that crisis. While climate emergency is big and scary, if we compartmentalize and think about the areas where we can create meaningful environmental change, the fashion industry is a great place to start. But first, you need the tools to understand it all.
The industry has done a fantastic job of gatekeeping the conversation around its environmental destruction and labor violations, keeping the barrier for entry too high. There’s a lot of confusion around what an ethical landscape would look like. It’s not exactly everyone buying $300 dresses. But it is a world where workers get paid fairly and we don’t buy quite as many items of clothing we’ve been purchasing these past 20 years (on average, it’s 68 items a year for fast fashion consumers).
For many folks involved in the sustainable fashion conversation, sometimes it feels like we’re having the same conversations over and over again. The purpose of Consumed is to bring everyone up to speed, help ordinary folks understand where the problems are, who the biggest culprits are, and what individuals can do to help. I hope this book makes people feel like they too can be a part of creating a fashion industry we can all believe in.
Conspicuous Consumption
I grew up in a very affluent area in a working-class family. The definition of what qualifies as “working class” definitely changes, depending on whom you ask, but I would argue that my family is working class. Because I’m American, let’s use the American standard of working class, which can also include low-level white-collar workers. To which group my father belongs, and my mother, who was a schoolteacher, was definitely working class. There was no safety net for my parents if things didn’t go according to plan, and their work was their only form of security. We had the privilege of upward mobility, which is not afforded to every Black family in America. . . but there’s a huge difference between privilege that comes from sacrifice and privilege that comes from generational wealth, of which my family has none.
I was discussing this exact topic with my friend who is an inclusion consultant, Rabya Lomas. We were chatting about our childhoods and the similarities, as I am Black and Rabya is Pakistani. We both recognize how privileged we are today, but we also had parents who had zero safety net in our upbringing. Describing her upbringing and her parents, Rabya says, “Not poor but not exactly rolling in it either. Able to get on the property ladder eventually, afford a mortgage and send three kids to university, but at the expense of not having much left over. Still having to work today, even though they really ought to be retired.”
Both my parents still work, too, and the similarities in our experience isn’t missed by me. Both Rabya and I spend a lot of time talking about wanting to give back to our parents for the sacrifices they made for us to have better. “I think that’s the difference to those with generational wealth. Fundamentally, there is no sacrificial element. Both generations are able to live in financial ease. No one goes without,” says Rabya.
I was fortunate that my parents did well for themselves. They were both college-educated, as they had access to student loans. (I remember the year my mother finally paid off her student loans, and the look of relief on her face and the joy she felt. I didn’t quite understand what the debt meant, but I completely understood her sense of relief.)
Anyway, I grew up in a very affluent area, where test scores were high and taking grade-level math in high school was something I hid from my peers (as many of them were taking math courses above their grade level). The idea of going to vocational school instead of university, senior year, was frowned upon... of course in a silent and very insidious way. Our high school had a wall where all the graduates put their names up, along with the school they would be attending, on a cut-out profile of a graduation head and bust. I remember only seeing one vocational school. There’s absolutely zero wrong with vocational school. Our society wouldn’t function without people doing all sorts of jobs (plumbers, mechanics, carpenters), but vocational school signified something shameful about your socioeconomic status that went unspoken yet held us all in its system.
This is how power and opportunity inequality work; they are silent governors of us all, but they are never openly spoken about. It’s why, contrary to popular belief, we will never get ourselves out of the mess which is systemic racism if we just all “stop talking about race so much,” because numerous reports and statistics show that there is inequality present in all aspects of life, from home ownership to health outcomes. The route out isn’t quick and it isn’t clear, and it holds us all in the place in which we were born. These methods of silence have been used to perpetuate some of the worst oppression in our society. If you don’t have the vocabulary to talk about the harmful system that clearly exists, then those who benefit from the harmful system can claim that the system doesn’t actually exist at all. And this starts when you are young, and it’s why vocational school was stigmatized and university was revered. It’s why people like me feel ashamed about taking a grade-level math class... and so the gap widens. This is the system which has been created so that shame is allowed to fester and inhibit growth.
Growing up in an affluent area can really mess with one’s perception of self. For the vast majority of my life I considered my own family “poor.” We weren’t. I was just surrounded by people who were far richer than we were. Let’s look at some of the ways Resource Generation qualifies “poor and working-poor,” and you can decide whether it’s fitting for you as well:
- “Substandard, unstable, or inconsistent housing”
Nope. We always had a roof over our head and never worried about that.
- “Underemployed/underpaid, sometimes long-term use of public benefits”
My family has never been on benefits.
- “Little access to higher education”
My parents made sure we all went to university, even if they had to sacrifice.
- “Chronic lack of health care, food, or other necessities”
We always had health insurance through my dad’s job. I asked my dad if staying at his job for forty-one years was a sacrifice on his part, and he responded, “Not exactly. Many of us in general (BIPOC people, sometimes white women as well) stay at our jobs because we feel like it’s a risk to move to another job and leave a secure job for uncertainty. Once you got security at a job, you stayed there. Now why is it a risk? Because of racism and sexism. We haven’t come to where we need to be to allow people to be hired on the content of their character.”
- “Frequent involuntary moves, chaos, and disruption of life”
My parents live in the house which they moved into when I was one.
- “Often raised with strong value on resource sharing and taking care of each other”
Okay, I feel like this is many BIPOC individuals and family I know. This one fits.
- “Targeted and incarcerated disproportionately by the state generally and specifically through systems like child protective services, vagrancy laws, immigration enforcement, and money/cash bail”
As a child I was notoriously clumsy, always tripping and falling (I had hearing damage in one ear, which aids to it). And so one time my mother took me to the doctor for a regular checkup, and she felt uncomfortable with the line of questioning being pointed at her by the doctors. In a nutshell, they were itching to call child protective services because of my self-inflicted bruises and scrapes. That’s racial profiling for you.
- “Intellectual, artistic, and labor contributions frequently stolen, co-opted, or made invisible in dominant society”
Ooof, talk about cultural appropriation.
Okay, so most of those qualifiers really did not fit me. At all.
A few, but let’s get real. We weren’t poor.
Also note that, according to Resource Generation, the “poor and working-poor,” who make up “approximately 20 percent of the population, control roughly 1 percent of US total net worth.” Well, those are certainly not the people keeping these companies in billion-dollar profits.
Growing up, I knew there was a wealth divide, which was of course also made worse by the fact that I stuck out like a sore thumb because of my Blackness in what was a predominantly white elementary school during my years in attendance.
I wasn’t poor, but I was made to feel poor because I never had the “right” clothes growing up, and much of what I wore included hand-me-downs and thrifted options; I was surrounded by snobs. I remember a kid asking me in the third grade if I wore the same clothing every day. I did not. But barbed insults like that stick with you and inform and coercively control your mindset as an adult, especially when it comes to consumption habits.
I remember clearly hating the sweater my mother convinced me to wear in my fourth grade school photo. It was a pastel yellow and blue V-neck from the brand Ocean Pacific. The worst thing about wearing hand-me-downs was the age gap between me and my older sister (five years). We were children of the eighties and teens of the nineties. And if you look at the sartorial styles of those decades, they changed rapidly during that time period. A sweater that my sister wore in 1987 looked dated and very out of place in 1992. When I got to school that day, I was teased without mercy. We try and pretend these things don’t sting and stick with us, but they completely inform who we become as adults. I never felt enough because of my upbringing.
I wasn’t poor, but I was made to feel poor because my parents lived in a townhouse (a terraced house in a beautiful neighborhood), while many of my elementary school classmates lived in big, newer, detached single-family homes.
I wasn’t poor, but I was made to feel poor because I always had part-time jobs at a young age for my spending money. That was just our parents’ way of teaching us the value of money: we had to earn it ourselves and were never given an allowance. So I would spend weekends dog sitting, babysitting, and doing a host of other odd jobs, when many of my other classmates spent their weekends at sleepovers.
I wasn’t poor, but I was able to buy my own clothes from age eleven. I was lucky to have the agency to do so, because my mother and I didn’t see eye to eye on what I wanted or needed. . . but I still felt very poor.
I wasn’t poor, but I was made to feel poor because my parents could never help me buy a house in northern Virginia in my twenties, while so many of my peers had help from generational wealth. I wasn’t poor, but I was made to feel poor because my dad brought me to TV sets as a teenager, and I soon found myself working every summer on them as a production assistant and camera assistant, instead of sitting at the pool with my peers. My dad knew that getting us in the door was important for our future survival. It just so happened that those TV jobs enabled us to travel outside of the country, which infinitely broadened my horizons and is arguably the reason I’m sitting here typing to you from my dining-room table in London.
All these things made me feel very poor at the time.
In fact, all these things actually made me normal. The vast majority of the world doesn’t have generational wealth in that way. But they still made me feel “poor” at various times in my life.
Yet it’s actually ridiculous looking back at it, because we always had enough to eat and presents under the Christmas tree. There was never a stress of how an electricity bill would be paid or whether we would be evicted from our house. My mother loves a coupon and has always budgeted, but it didn’t equal poverty despite her often telling us we “didn’t have a pot to pee in.” (The origin of that phrase comes from the Great Depression. Families that were really hard up would collect their urine in a big pot for the leather tanneries to use in exchange for a small fee. If you didn’t have a pot to pee in, you were really in a bad place.)
There’s a massive difference between “feeling poor” and “being poor,” but so often many of us who are nowhere near the poverty line conflate those feelings with actual poverty. Poverty is a system of oppression that’s very hard to escape from. From a young age I had internalized a supposed lack of “abundance” with being poor. But all of this is due to growing up in an area where there was probably an unhealthy amount of abundance and excess. Society can be divisive, and these feelings are pernicious. When you live in a townhouse but your area is surrounded by McMansions, it’s an easy mistake to fall prey to.
My mother grew up without much in a family of nine Black kids in Jim Crow-era Alabama, so the fears of poverty have always followed her throughout her life. It’s a hard thing to shake, and in some way that mindset permeated our household, too. As well as all the frugal habits. We didn’t waste a thing in my family.
So, with all these feelings swimming around, I felt “poor” and I felt lacking. Which is why I was already naturally indoctrinated into becoming the perfect consumer of fast fashion! I was someone who had enough disposable income, and who never felt “good enough” in relation to my peers. I looked at what was on offer and thought “This is for me! Finally, I can dress like everyone else, in a way of keeping up appearances with new clothes, whenever I want!”
This is what I would say really started me on the path of fast fashion consumption, and I believe that it’s the same for millions and millions of us. It fills the gaps that our society makes us feel we have in ourselves and our lives. The void that never fitting in left in me. Perhaps this could be plugged by buying myself a place in the world and concealing these insecurities in piles of clothing? It is important for you to understand your own sense of lacking, and whatever engendered it at this stage in your journey, because it will explain what drives this sense of not being enough that forces you to acquire more.
Excerpted from the book Consumed: The Need for Collective Change: Colonialism, Climate Change, and Consumerism by Aja Barber. Copyright © 2021 by Aja Barber. Reprinted by permission of Grand Central Publishing/Balance, New York, NY. All rights reserved.
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