I can’t remember how I got into Stella McCartney, but Stella just seemed like a natural link to all of this, with her non-fur and non-leather movement. Stella, when she heard that I was doing this, got so excited, like, “We will do whatever we can to help you, because we want this message to go global.”
I was like, right, okay, now I’m on it, now I’ve got it, now this is all coming together.
Blue jeans are an important throughline in the book—you use them as a case study for the fashion industry at large. Was that always the plan?
Yes, because I wanted to find something that everybody has in their closets. So it was either a cotton T-shirt or blue jeans.
The more I snooped around about blue jeans, the more I realized that was it. A friend in Nashville who does fashion PR said, “You need to go see this woman at Stony Creek Colors.” That was the beauty of this book, is that everybody was like, “You need to go see this person.”
When I went to see Sarah Bellos and talk to her about indigo I realized, “Oh, it’s much more about blue jeans than cotton shirts.” Cotton is a part of jeans, too, so I could do the whole cotton thing through jeans. I started digging into blue jeans more and learning about how many we have. Half the planet’s wearing blue jeans at any given time of the day.
[Another] book that’s always been an inspiration to me was Fast Food Nation. I loved how he took the fast-food meal and took it apart and said, you know, “This is how your French fries are made, this is where the meat comes from, this is all the different colors in the bun.” I’ve always been a big writer of process pieces, but it was more than a process piece; it was about taking something that you know, that’s part of your everyday life, and saying this is what’s really going on with it. So I decided blue jeans were the perfect way to do that.
Your title is taken from Cottonopolis, the 19th-century nickname for Manchester, the home of the global cotton industry at the time. How is the fashion economy today the same as it was in Manchester, and how is it different?
It’s a lot bigger, but it’s not a lot different. When I went to the sweatshop in Bangladesh, I saw the children in the mills, looking really tired and really thin. We should be ashamed that we’re okay with this.
You mention global initiatives like the Accord on Fire and Building Safety in Bangladesh that aim to combat those sorts of conditions. Are they helping?
What’s the saying that Obama got in trouble for years ago, putting lipstick on a pig? I don’t know if that’s the right analogy, but a sweatshop’s a sweatshop. People are being paid $28 a month to turn out clothes in a factory [that people] wear seven times and throw in the bin. There’s something fundamentally wrong with the whole system. And I don’t think that making sure that it’s clean and safe, if you’re still not paying a living wage, [will make a difference].
One of the biggest surprises in my research was this bit that I just fell across in reading an old New Yorker piece by Lois Long about Hattie Carnegie from like 1940. During the Depression, Hattie Carnegie’s clients, the Joan Crawfords but also the Mrs. Harrison Williamses of the world, paid pretty much what we’re paying today for ready-to-wear. [At first] they were paying $800, $1,000, $1,600, $3,000 dollars for a dress. And this wasn’t Paris couture, this was American made.
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