Introduction
You buy inexpensive clothes frequently, enjoying the thrill of new trends without considering the true cost. Behind these low prices lies a hidden network of exploited labor, toxic chemicals, and mountains of discarded waste that devastates ecosystems worldwide. You might wonder how an industry once built on craftsmanship transformed into a high-speed machine of disposable garments.
Dana Thomas investigates the global apparel supply chain to expose the devastating realities of modern manufacturing. The book traces how the industry shifted from local tailoring to automated mass production, driven by profit and consumer demand for cheap variety.
You will discover how innovators are fighting back with sustainable materials and circular economic models. The following questions guide this exploration:
- How did the fashion industry become a leading global polluter?
- What are the true human and environmental costs of cheap clothing?
- Which technologies and practices can rescue the apparel business?
- How can you change your shopping habits to support a sustainable future?
1. The Rise and Economics of Fast Fashion
The modern fashion industry operates as a three-tier pyramid structured from exclusive handmade couture at the top to mass-produced fast-fashion at the base. You can trace this hierarchy from elite runways down to high-street retail racks.
The fashion industry operates as a multi-tier pyramid fueled by cheap synthetic materials, outsourced labor, and rapid design theft that drives massive overconsumption.
The Fashion Pyramid
The top consists of haute couture and bespoke tailoring, which are hand-sewn for elite clients. The middle is ready-to-wear, providing well-made factory clothing for department stores. The bottom and widest tier is fast-fashion, delivering trendy, cheap clothes produced rapidly in massive volumes.
Actresses wear haute couture and bespoke creations on red carpets for publicity. Starting prices for an haute couture suit or dress begin at $25,000 and up, while evening gowns cost $100,000 or more. A bespoke suit costs between $6,000 and $10,000. Designers like Mary Katrantzou produce ready-to-wear collections, while brands like Zara and H&M dominate the fast-fashion base.
Fast-fashion brands maximize profits by outsourcing production to the poorest countries, using cheap synthetic materials, and paying poverty wages. By minimizing production costs through low-wage foreign labor and cheap synthetics like polyester and rayon, brands generate massive profit margins while garments are worn only a handful of times before disposal.
The global fashion industry reaches an annual size of 3 trillion dollars. Brands produce 100 billion items annually, while you and other shoppers buy 80 billion items annually. Out of this total, 20 billion items are destroyed or burned annually, and the average garment is worn only seven times before disposal.
In 2018 in Bangladesh, the minimum wage for apparel workers was $68 a month, translating to less than $3 a day. Meanwhile, Americans bought 3.5 billion T-shirts annually, yielding seventeen billion dollars in profit for US brands on T-shirts alone.
Fast-fashion brands routinely copy high-end ready-to-wear designs immediately after fashion shows and mass-produce them via cheap overseas labor. Design teams monitor runway shows and social media engagement to identify popular items, slightly alter them to evade legal trouble, and quickly manufacture cheap knockoffs in developing nations.
After Mary Katrantzou presented her collection at the Roundhouse in London in September 2018, top online retail executives anticipated that fast-fashion brands like Topshop would immediately copy her prints. You can find fake designer knockoffs in stores for less than one hundred dollars within weeks of a runway show.
Industrial Roots and Global Trade
The modern fashion manufacturing system originated during the Industrial Revolution through mechanized mills, long labor hours, and mass textile production. Richard Arkwright combined mechanical inventions to open the first water-powered textile mill in 1771, initiating mass production that drew poor workers to factories and eventually shifted the primary clothing material from wool to cotton.
Richard Arkwright opened the world's first water-powered textile mill near Manchester, England. By 1790, he owned nearly two hundred mills across Great Britain, turning Manchester into Cottonopolis. Factory employees worked daily shifts lasting thirteen hours.
Government tariffs historically protected domestic manufacturing, whereas the shift toward free trade and globalization encouraged companies to move production offshore. Tariffs act as a tax on imported goods and a form of protectionism to support local businesses, while free trade agreements remove these barriers, allowing companies to exploit cheaper overseas labor and maximize profits.
Following the Reagan Revolution and the passage of NAFTA in 1993, American apparel companies closed domestic factories and shifted production to countries with lower overhead and costs. This globalization resulted in the loss of 1 million US jobs due to NAFTA by 2006.
2. The Human and Environmental Cost of Production
The search for low prices pushes production into unregulated spaces. When you look at affordable garments, you rarely see the hidden toll on workers and ecosystems.
Garment manufacturing inflicts severe human abuse through domestic sweatshops and fatal overseas disasters while poisoning ecosystems with conventional cotton chemicals and toxic denim finishing.
Sweatshops and Global Disasters
Illegal sweatshops persist in American fashion manufacturing centers like Los Angeles by exploiting undocumented immigrant labor and underpaying legal minimum wages. Factory owners operate underground facilities in dilapidated buildings. Workers receive far below minimum wage, lack overtime pay or benefits, and face severe workplace hazards.
Mariela Martinez of the Garment Worker Center showed the author illegal sweatshops in Los Angeles's Bendix Building and Allied Crafts Building. Undocumented workers sewed clothes for brands like Forever 21 in unsafe conditions.
Los Angeles had an estimated 45,000 garment workers in 2017. Among them, 22,000 undocumented workers sewed in illegal sweatshops for $4 an hour while the California minimum wage sat at $10.50 an hour.
Historical garment manufacturing relied heavily on extreme labor exploitation, child labor, and dangerous working conditions that sparked public reform movements. Early textile mills and urban sweatshops subjected workers, including young children, to grueling hours, physical abuse, and hazardous environments.
The 1911 Triangle Shirtwaist Factory fire in New York City resulted in 146 deaths when workers were trapped by locked doors and a collapsed fire escape. This tragedy galvanized public outrage and led to the labor reforms of Frances Perkins. Child factory workers often started at eight or nine years of age.
The migration of garment manufacturing to developing countries brought back severe sweatshop abuses, culminating in catastrophic factory fires and building collapses. Western brands often maintain ignorance of overseas factory conditions through corrupt voluntary inspection systems and unauthorized subcontracting.
At the Tazreen Fashion factory fire and the Rana Plaza building collapse in Bangladesh, workers were locked inside unsafe buildings. They were forced to continue working despite visible structural cracks, resulting in 1,134 dead and 2,500 injured during the Rana Plaza disaster in 2013.
The Bangladesh minimum wage stood at $38 a month at the time of the Rana Plaza disaster. In 2018, 4 million garment workers produced clothes for export in Bangladesh, a country of 168 million citizens in 2019.
Toxic Agriculture and Denim Finishing
Conventional cotton farming relies heavily on hazardous chemical fertilizers and pesticides to drive down short-term costs, creating severe environmental and health risks. About sixty billion pounds of cotton are grown annually across more than one hundred countries, with India, China, and the United States as the top producers. Only one percent of cotton grown today is organic, while the remaining 99 percent is treated with chemical fertilizers, pesticides, and insecticides.
The World Health Organization reports that eight out of ten of the most popular cotton pesticides used by American farmers are classified as hazardous.
The industrial finishing process used to make rigid denim look broken-in and fashionable inflicts severe physical harm on workers and causes massive pollution. Unsanforized denim requires distressing and finishing processes in washhouses, where workers use pumice stones, acid, and sanders to fade and wreck jeans. Many washhouses lack proper air-conditioning and protective masks, causing workers to inhale dangerous denim dust and suffer from skin rashes and lung infections.
In Ho Chi Minh City, workers without protective masks stood in inches of navy-blue water. They manually sanded four hundred pairs of jeans a day in temperatures exceeding 100 degrees Fahrenheit.
In Xintang, China, 200,000 garment workers in 3,000 factories produce 300 million pairs of jeans annually. Factories dump untreated dye directly into the East River, turning it black. Older machines require 20 liters or 5 gallons of water to wash one kilogram of jeans.
3. Sustainable Innovations and Alternative Materials
Pioneering designers and scientists are revolutionizing apparel by replacing toxic dyes and synthetic fibers with organic agriculture, biofabricated materials, and circular recycling systems.
Sally Fox discovered bags of naturally brown cotton seeds and began breeding varieties that produced bolls naturally tinted blue, green, or yellow. The tannins giving the cotton its color also made the plants naturally resistant to diseases and insects. Levi Strauss partnered with her to scale production, growing from one hundred to three thousand acres over three years, but later canceled the order during a financial downturn, forcing Fox into bankruptcy.
Sally Fox spent one million dollars to secure seeds for Levi Strauss before the company underwent restructuring under Philip Marineau and canceled the project, destroying her business. Levi's reported 7.1 billion dollars in sales in 1996 while operating on a 130-acre farm in California.
Natural Dyes and Slow Fashion
After NAFTA wiped out Florence's textile manufacturing jobs, designers Natalie Chanin and Billy Reid established brands centered around slow fashion, local sourcing, and sustainable practices. They hired local freelance seamstresses within a strict geographic radius, ensuring safe working conditions and reviving community culture.
Natalie Chanin founded Alabama Chanin, employing local women who pick up sewing kits, sew garments by hand, and return them signed and numbered. Billy Reid established a lifestyle brand celebrating Southern roots after moving to Florence following the September 11 attacks. Alabama Chanin maintains 30 team members at its headquarters, while Billy Reid operates 12 stores in the United States and harvested 6 acres to produce 600 pounds of local organic cotton with 300 volunteers in 2012.
When you practice slow fashion, you can follow these steps:
- Select fabrics and stencils to package materials into a kit
- Assign the job to a freelance seamstress living within an hour and a half
- Pick up the kit, sew the garment by hand in a day or two, number and sign it
- Return the finished garment to the studio for packaging and shipping
Synthetic indigo is derived from toxic chemicals like petroleum, benzene, and formaldehyde, and its production creates severe water pollution. Natural indigo, a legume, puts nitrogen back into the soil and eliminates the need for chemical fertilizers, providing an alternative for farmers moving away from tobacco.
Sarah Bellos founded Stony Creek Colors in Tennessee, hiring ten farmers across thirty-five acres to grow indigo and reopening a former tobacco warehouse as a processing factory. Today, 99.99 percent of denim is dyed with synthetic indigo. Bellos grows three varieties of indigo, known as Persicaria tinctoria, Indigofera suffruticosa, and Indigofera tinctoria.
Biofabrication and Circularity
Traditional profit and loss reports only measure financial income and expenses. An Environmental Profit and Loss report calculates a brand's total impact on air pollution, water pollution, water consumption, and waste across the entire supply chain.
Stella McCartney introduced an EP&L report for her brand in 2013, which revealed that virgin cashmere caused the most damage among her raw materials, leading her to switch to regenerated cashmere. Regenerated cashmere is 92 percent less damaging to the environment than virgin cashmere. Four goats are required to get enough fiber for one cashmere sweater, whereas the wool of one sheep makes five sweaters, and 21 million goats graze in Mongolia today, up from 5 million in the 1990s.
Biotechnology allows companies to grow animal-free leather and silk in laboratories, bypassing the destructive supply chains of traditional farming and tanning. Biofabrication uses yeast or other organisms programmed with specific DNA to brew proteins like collagen or silk. This process uses significantly less water, electricity, and landmass while eliminating animal slaughter and toxic chemical tanning.
Suzanne Lee at Modern Meadow in Brooklyn grows lab-grown leather-like materials using bioreactors, while Bolt Threads produces Microsilk and Mylo from mushroom root structures for Stella McCartney, building on an approximate 5,000-year history of human silk production.
Transitioning from a linear consumer model to a circular system prevents textile waste by breaking old garments down to their molecular components to create new yarn.
The traditional linear fashion model follows a straight line from production to landfill. A circular system continuously recycles products. Start-ups like Evrnu and Worn Again dissolve cotton and polyester blend fabrics into a cellulose goo, then extrude it into high-quality new yarn.
Stacy Flynn founded Evrnu in Seattle, partnering with Levi's and Stella McCartney to turn postconsumer garment waste into regenerated cotton fiber. Today, only 1 percent of clothing is recycled, and 60 percent of all clothes contain polyester. Evrnu uses 98 percent less water compared to virgin cotton and produces 80 percent less greenhouse gas emissions compared to polyester, viscose, or elastane.
Nylon is petroleum-based and traditionally creates heavy environmental waste. Aquafil developed a chemical regeneration process to collect abandoned fishing nets from oceans and used nylon carpeting, transforming them into virgin-quality ECONYL yarn. Giulio Bonazzi of Aquafil launched ECONYL, supplying regenerated nylon to brands like Outerknown, Adidas, Speedo, and Stella McCartney. Aquafil collects 75 million pounds of used nylon carpeting annually, with figures expected to jump to 100 million pounds, while 640,000 tons of abandoned fishing nets exist in oceans.
4. Technology, Retail, and Consumer Action
Advanced automation, 3D printing, and alternative retail models like rental and secondhand platforms offer a viable path to dismantle the fast-fashion paradigm.
Rightshoring utilizes modern automation, robotics, and digitization to bring clean apparel manufacturing back to Western countries. Brendan McCormack and Steve Shaughnessy founded English Fine Cottons inside the historic Tower Mill in Stalybridge, England. They refitted the mill with computer-run machines, laser scanners, and robotic vacuums to spin luxury cotton yarns locally. At peak operation, Tower Mill housed 44,000 spindles, achieved an air replacement rate of 25 to 30 times an hour, and produced 450 tons of yarn in 2018.
SoftWear Automation installed Sewbots in a plant in Little Rock, Arkansas, for supplier Tianyuan Garments Company to produce T-shirts and jeans for Adidas. DARPA gave a $1.26 million grant in 2012 to invent sewing robots that use computer vision to sew garments with an error rate of just 0.7 percent. This technology lowers labor costs and waste while enabling manufacturing to return to Western countries.
Three-dimensional printing and digital finishing tools transform design and manufacturing by eliminating waste and reducing resource consumption.
Three-dimensional printing uses additive manufacturing to build objects layer by layer using computer-aided design files. Invented in the 1980s, the technology allows designers to produce complex, seamless garments without traditional sewing. Dutch couturier Iris van Herpen collaborated with architect Neri Oxman to create Anthozoa, fashion's first 3D-printed high-fashion dress. Michael Schmidt and Francis Bitonti collaborated with Dita Von Teese to print a flexible black gown featuring 3,000 moving joints.
Jose Vidal and Enrique Silla invented Jeanologia in Valencia, Spain, to replace toxic denim finishing with laser and ozone systems. Levi's adopted Jeanologia's laser distressing systems throughout its supply chain to reduce resource use. A Jeanologia-equipped factory processes 25,000 to 30,000 pairs of jeans daily, and in 2018, 30 percent of the six billion manufactured jeans went through at least part of the system. The equipment achieves a 33 percent decrease in energy consumption, a 67 percent decrease in chemicals, and a 71 percent decrease in water usage.
Rental, Resale, and Practical Action
The conventional fashion industry's obsession with offshoring creates a false economy marked by massive shipping waste and sample rejections. Maria Cornejo launched her brand Zero + Maria Cornejo in New York City with 28 employees, producing her ready-to-wear lines locally in the Garment District so her team could check factory conditions via a short subway ride. Her company generates $10 million annually in sales while avoiding the 650 samples ordered in China by major brands before cutting down to 200.
Surviving department stores focus heavily on sustainability to attract eco-conscious shoppers in a market where 8,640 mall stores closed in the US in 2017 alone. Selfridges in London appointed Daniella Vega as sustainability chief, banning single-use plastic water bottles, using recycled coffee cups for shopping bags, and introducing grass-green tags highlighting eco-friendly products.
Online platforms and sharing economies extend the lifecycle of garments. Julie Wainwright founded The RealReal in 2011, scaling first-year sales from $10 million to over $1 billion by 2019 by reselling luxury brands like Gucci and Chanel. Dana Thomas rented a Stella McCartney wool suit with a retail price of 1,720 euros for 255 euros from the Paris-based luxury rental company Panoply, wearing it to a conference before returning it via bicycle courier.
Individual consumers can actively reduce fashion's ecological footprint by altering their daily habits and purchasing choices. You can follow these practical steps to practice slow fashion and support green initiatives:
- Launder your clothes less frequently by breaking the habit of tossing jeans into the laundry after one wear, spot-cleaning stains, and using cold, short washing cycles.
- Shop your closet before buying new items, or organize clothing swap parties with friends.
- Rent your wardrobe for regular days and special occasions to reduce waste.
- Take a second look at secondhand by shopping in thrift stores and on consignment websites.
- Consign online to give gently worn garments a second life and earn money back.
- Skip plastic bags by bringing a canvas tote when shopping for clothes.
- Repair and re-wear stained or torn garments through overdyeing or covering holes with cool embroideries.
- Pick up a needle yourself to learn how to sew, knit, or repair your own clothes.
- Lead with your best foot forward by donating gently used shoes to local charities.
10 Key Ideas
- The modern fashion industry operates as a multi-tier pyramid fueled by cheap synthetic materials, outsourced labor, and rapid design theft that drives massive overconsumption.
- The modern fashion manufacturing system originated during the Industrial Revolution through mechanized mills, long labor hours, and mass textile production.
- Garment manufacturing inflicts severe human abuse through domestic sweatshops and fatal overseas disasters while poisoning ecosystems with conventional cotton chemicals and toxic denim finishing.
- Conventional cotton farming relies heavily on hazardous chemical fertilizers and pesticides to drive down short-term costs, creating severe environmental and health risks.
- Pioneering designers and scientists are revolutionizing apparel by replacing toxic dyes and synthetic fibers with organic agriculture, biofabricated materials, and circular recycling systems.
- Biotechnology allows companies to grow animal-free leather and silk in laboratories, bypassing the destructive supply chains of traditional farming and tanning.
- Transitioning from a linear consumer model to a circular system prevents textile waste by breaking old garments down to their molecular components to create new yarn.
- Advanced automation, 3D printing, and alternative retail models like rental and secondhand platforms offer a viable path to dismantle the fast-fashion paradigm.
- Three-dimensional printing and digital finishing tools transform design and manufacturing by eliminating waste and reducing resource consumption.
- Individual consumers can actively reduce fashion's ecological footprint by altering their daily habits and purchasing choices.