A friend asked me if I loved shopping. Of course, I said yes! Then she asked me if I would be willing to go to an event that dealt with fashion. Of course, I said yes! I didn't know what was in store for me. I went to Acceler8 Coworking last April 29th and had my eyes peeled open after a couple of hours in a darkened theater.
The organizers were Fashion Revolution Philippines and they want to spearhead the change to sustainable fashion in the country. The event was showing of local fashion items like upcycled clothes, bags made from indigenous materials and jewelry from natural stones. They also had on display the winning garments from the contest from SOFA regarding upcycling clothing and I had the chance to speak to the winners and that was awesome.
There was a showing of the movie called The True Cost that showed what "Fast Fashion" meant for the garment industry. This included highlighting disasters like the factory that collapsed in Bangladesh and other similar tragedies where workers died because the factory owners were cutting corners in order to meet the low price demanded by first world country big shots like H&M. Even today, sweatshops are still acceptable to most Americans but there are a few that are already trying to change. Like People Tree, a fair-trade brand, and The Textile Exchange, an agricultural company who has adopted sustainable practices in growing cotton.
The movie also highlights the unfair treatment of workers, from being beaten up for forming a union to having to kill themselves because of land debt. Mothers need to leave their children in villages while they toil 16 hour days and see their family once a year. Farmers buy fertilizer and pesticide that cause birth defects that make their families suffer, and on top of that, the cost of these products drive them so deep in debt that they kill themselves thinking that the buck stops with them, not knowing that the debt will be passed on to their remaining family. Workers involved in leather-making have shortened lives because the materials they use are toxic and the very waters they drink and bathe in are already contaminated from byproducts.
Speakers in the movie say that most first world citizens believe that the way to solve problems in your life is through consumption and the big companies take advantage of it. All things people really need (like food and medicines) are expensive and as a consolation even when you're very poor you can buy 4 t-shirts in a day because it's cheap. Consumptionism is getting people to treat things that they use as things that they use up and careless production and endless consumption have been the cycle in the fashion industry since the beginning. This is because we have been trained to think that happiness is based on stuff. We need to know that the fashion is second most polluting industry next to oil industry. They make us think we are rich because we can buy a lot but they are making us poorer.
The call to action is simple: Be a catalyst of change. Yes, we do get cheap fashion at this cost but at what cost? We are poisoning our world and we are becoming mindless drones for fashion. Richard Wolff, an economist, said: "capitalism can't be questioned, and the system begins to rot when not criticized." This means that we need to ask the right questions to the right people so that the right decisions can be made toward revolutionizing the fashion industry. Organic is imperative. We have to change.
After the movie, there was a panel discussion with experts in the fashion field giving their two cents regarding the topic. The takeaway I got was that we need to tone down the buying and reuse, upcycle or resell our stuff to avoid fashion pollution. There are apps like Carousell that we can use to resell and we can always find other uses for our clothes if we only let our imagination run free. This was a very thought-provoking and soul-searing night for me and I'll never look at department stores the same way again.
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