This extract from The Unmaking Of, a publication to mark Kowtow’s 20th anniversary, is written by an award-winning climate journalist, and presents a clear-eyed view of the ugly side of fast fashion.
In association with Kowtow.
Walking down Jamestown beach in Accra, Ghana, the sand is studded with what might appear to be brightly coloured, patterned rocks. Get a little closer, though, and they seem to warp before your eyes. One sprouts a sleeve; another, a waistband. These are not rocks, you realise. They’re clothes.
These clothes have made an arduous journey to end up here: produced by a massive clothing company, sold to a customer in the Global North, worn a few times, perhaps, then dropped off at a secondhand shop. When they didn’t sell, they were passed along to an exporter, who put the clothes in bales. Those bales were bought by an importer here in Ghana, who sold them to a one-person retailer in the secondhand market. When individual garments didn’t sell, they were thrown out as waste, maybe ending up in the dump that borders the lagoon. Then it rained, and some part of the hill of that dump eroded and a landslide of clothes slid into the water, was pulled out by the tide into the ocean, and then pushed by a different tide up onto this beach.
How did these clothes come to be made and then so quickly become unwanted, embedded in the sand in such vast numbers that they have made this place almost unrecognisable? There are many answers: the greed of the corporate powers overproducing clothing, without thought to the cost of the farmers, workers or waters that would be harmed; the unwillingness of governments, especially in wealthy nations, to take responsibility for their own waste being another. The list could go on.
In the tiny microcosm of an individual’s life, there are ways we get sucked into complicity with this vast, unfeeling system. Though we may not bear responsibility at the level of a fast fashion CEO, it would be dishonest to try to wash our hands completely of this system, either. Most of us participate in it on some level. Among the many reasons that clothing ends up embedded on this beach, one is that we buy too much, and get rid of it too fast. Far too often, we’re incentivised to buy more than we need by the steady wave of trends washing over us every time we open our phones or walk into a store. What’s the harm in dressing with the times, looking current, signalling that we’re not stuck in the past? Nothing, in a way; and yet the ever-accelerating pace of the trend cycle manufactures the desire for more in those of us who already have enough.
But a future in which there are fewer beaches embedded with clothing waste, fewer soils depleted from years of growing pesticide-laden cotton, fewer factory-adjacent rivers running rainbow-coloured with dyes and microplastics, will necessarily be a future in which we are less beholden to trends, less easily tempted into buying what we don’t actually need.
To get there we will need to fight, all over the world, for legislation to regulate fashion companies and hold them to better labour practices, more environmentally friendly production and end-of-life responsibility. But as we do all that, we might also try modelling some of what we long to see on the global scale at the scale we can most easily control: that of our own little lives. We might try only buying new things when our bodies change so much the old ones don’t fit, or when we’ve worn things out and repaired them so much they’re literally going to pieces. We might try getting in touch with what works for our lifestyles and what we really, personally like, underneath all the outside influences — never at the cutting edge of a trend nor trailing behind the curve, but standing apart from it, somehow, by simply loving what we love regardless of what the marketers are selling.
In that future — the one where we are holding brands accountable, refusing to export our waste to the Global South, and modelling the world we want to see in our own closets — maybe we’ll walk down the beach at Jamestown in Accra and there will be nothing but sand beneath our feet. Maybe the turtles will have returned, and the fishermen will be singing as they work because there’s no textile waste weighing down their nets.
Maybe we will learn to let trends die so the ecosystem of this beach, and the whole delicate tapestry of the world to which it is connected, can live.
kowtowclothing.com
Words Whitney Bauck
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