The Issues With Clothing

After the presentation of my blog post regarding burning magazines I realized some people might think I don't like clothes. This is fucking ridiculous. I love clothes. I have so many fucking clothes that I'm not going to talk about them because it'll make me sound more spoiled, but I'm going to talk about them a little bit because I just remembered I don't care what other people think of me.

I have dresses: cocktail dresses, summer dresses, peplum, vintage, renaissance, a-line, short, long, tea-length, linen, silk, cashmere, cotton, wool, collared, boat-necked, v-necked, strapless. I have shirts and blouses and cardigans and jeans and skirts. But mostly I have shoes. Oh, I have shoes. Flats, sandals, pumps, booties, short boots, tall boots, 3 inch heels, 5 inch heels, 7 inch heels, spikes, tassels, straps, zippers, leather, suede, fur, wood, black, brown, pink, blue, tan, red, whatever the fuck you name I have it.

Why do I own so many clothes? A large part of this is that, unlike men's wardrobes which are more uniform, women's wardrobes are varied and require different looks for different occasions. We can't wear the skirt we wore to the bar to work, and it would be ridiculous to wear the dress we wore to our cousin's wedding on a casual date.

(By the way, if you are a grown man and you were wearing cargo shorts you are not allowed to speak to me. No, me having standards is not the same as women being mocked and insulted and degraded based on how they look for hundreds of years. Go cry to someone else about it.)

Another reason as to why I own so many clothing is that I fucking loves clothes. Fashion gets a bad rap, in large part because it's a feminized field (even though men receive higher accolades in the fashion industry). I know! Let's create a society in which women are constantly judged by their appearance and mocked until they adhere to strict rules, and then call them shallow when they worry about their looks!

Whatever. Fuck you. I look good.

Anyway, back to the matter at hand. Clothing production is a huge fucking business, unique in that it pays very little globally but requires a level of human attention that can't be replaced by machines. The majority of this work is done by underpaid women and is dangerous. Clothing production is a huge industry in LDCs (less-developed countries), and it's fueled by mass amounts of Western consumption.

Going through clothing quickly (buying pieces that will go out of style soon or that are shoddily made) is bad for the clothing industry and bad for the environment. There's a mysticism surrounding clothing that leads consumers to believe that clothing is scare and that someone will always want hand-me-downs. With the poor quality and the abundance of clothes, this simply isn't true. There's not some starving child in Africa who wants your own high school graduation T-Shirt.

The best thing one can do as a western consumer is consume less. Check the quality of clothing before you buy it (double hemmed? Lined? Come on, we're not savages). Make sure the fabric is quality. If you lose a button or tear the article, fix it yourself instead of throwing it out. And for the love of god, don't shop at Forever 21. Be better than that.

Thanks for reading! Here's a picture of me and my cat (necklace: vintage silver; shirt: Anthropologie; cat: stray followed me home).