[narrator]
This is a story about clothing. It's about the clothes we wear, the people who make these clothes, and the impact that it's having
on our world. It's a story about greed and fear, power and poverty. It's complex, as it extends
all the way around the world. But it's also simple, revealing just how connected we are
to the many hearts and hands behind our clothes. I came into this story
with no background in fashion at all, beginning with nothing more
than a few simple questions. What I've discovered has forever changed the way
I think about the things I wear, and my hope is that
it might just do the same for you. [interviewer]
Maybe just start and say your name and talk about how this kind of began. My name is Lucy Siegle. I am a journalist and broadcaster
based in the UK, and I have been obsessed, consumed with the environmental and social impacts
of the fashion industry for about a decade. [woman]
Well, I love everything about clothes. I love the poetry, I love the fabric,
I love the colors, I love the textures, I love the way that they make you feel.
You know, they are our chosen skin. Well, I had the classic massive closet, clothes everywhere, bags constantly coming into my house,
you know, every day, every other day
with some other item in, and never had anything to wear. I could
never put together a coherent outfit. [de Castro]
We communicate who we are to a certain extent through clothing. And this is, this is again,
throughout history. You know, you have the trends at court, and Marie Antoinette
making these huge hats. It's always been our personal
communication in many ways. That's what interests me, that it is fundamentally a part of what,
um, we wish to communicate about ourselves. [Siegle] We used to have a system,
a fashion system where people would go to the, uh, shows, so they would do spring, summer,
autumn, winter, and those kind of ran like clockwork
for very many years. "Okay, rip that up,
throw it out the window." That has absolutely nothing to do
with the fashion industry today. It has been re-invented. [de Castro]
The shift is moving ruthlessly, um, towards a way of producing which only really looks after big business interest. Growing up, I never gave much thought to anything other than the price
of the clothes that I bought, usually making choices
based on the style or a good deal. Looking back,
I learned that for a long time most of our clothing was actually
made right here in America. As recently as the 1960s, we were
still making 95 percent of our clothes. Today, we only make about 3 percent and the other 97 percent is outsourced to developing countries around the world. [man] I've been in the business
for over nine years now. In terms of scale, we've got 25,000 people
just on garment manufacturing side. We produce one in six dress-shirts
sold in the U.S. If you actually go to a store and you benchmark the price
of a garment over the last 20 years, you will find that there's actually
a deflation of the product, i.e., the price has gone down over time. Now, has our cost gone down?
Absolutely not. Okay? Our cost has gone up. The more production we've outsourced, the cheaper prices have become
on the clothing we buy, making way for a whole new model,
known as "Fast Fashion," almost overnight, transforming
the way clothing is bought and sold. [woman] The newest H&M store
on 5th Avenue in Manhattan is the company's largest ever and just one of many new stores
it's planning around the country. [man] It's all part
of a high street revolution, Fast Fashion. And instead of two seasons a year,
we practically have 52 seasons a year. So, we have something new
coming in every week. And Fast Fashion has created this, so that it can essentially shift
more products. [all screaming] [crowd]
We love Topshop! [man] You can get this fringe
metallic skirt $39 at Joe Fresh, a brand-new store in town. With price tags that might look
a little bit more appealing to shoppers. [man]
American consumers, they really have grasped
the fashion part of H&M, and we know that American consumers are
very value-oriented. If you match these two together,
with fashion and value, then you have a recipe. [woman]
One Japanese clothing retailer is making a fast and furious mark here in the U.S. The price has dropped. The way of making that product
has completely, completely changed. And you have to ask yourself
at some point, "Where does it end?" The global marketplace is some place where we export work to have happen in whatever conditions we want,
and then the products come back to me, cheap enough to throw away
without thinking about it. Globalized production basically means that all of the making of goods has been outsourced to low-cost economies, particularly where wages are very low
and kept low. And what that means is that those
at the top of the value chain, they get to choose
where the products are being made, and they get to switch if, for example,
one factory says, "We can't make it that cheap anymore." The brand will say,
"We're not gonna come to you. We're gonna switch to another place
which is cheaper." [man] In the West,
they're using "everyday low price." So, every day, they're hampering me, and I'm hampering my workers,
this is how it is. They're competing.
The stores are competing. When the stores are coming to us
for an order and negotiating, they're telling, "Look, that particular store is selling
this shirt, like, for $5, so I need to sell it at $4. So you better squeeze your price."
So we are squeezing. Then other store is coming and saying,
"Hey, they're selling it at $4? So the target price is 3.
If you can make that 3, you're getting business,
otherwise you are not getting." Because we want that business so badly, and we don't have other options, okay. Every time we are trying
to survive, actually. [Lee]
Ultimately, something's gonna give. Either the price
of the product has to go up, or manufacturers have to shut down or cut corners to make it work. [narrator] Cutting corners
and disregarding safety measures had become an accepted part
of doing business in this new model, until an early morning in April, when an event just outside
of Dhaka, Bangladesh brought a hidden side of fashion
to front page news. State media in Bangladesh say an eight-story building has collapsed
near the capital of Dhaka, killing more than 70 people. [crowd clamoring]
[whistle blowing] [wailing in foreign language] [woman 1]
Rescue workers are racing against time, searching through the rubble,
trying to find as many survivors as they can. [man 1]
Hundreds are dead, hundreds more might still be buried alive,
after officials in Bangladesh say factory owners ignored
an order to evacuate. [man 2] Some 400 dead,
hundreds still believed to be missing. Garment workers in Bangladesh paying
the price for cheap clothing. [woman 2] A huge crowd has gathered
near the building site, many of them family members looking
for loved ones, and they say they can still hear
people screaming from underneath the rubble,
crying out for help. Many are simply losing hope. [speaking in foreign language] [clears throat] [Siegle]
Anybody who, like me, had written about problems
in the supply chain, particularly for Fast Fashion, and tried to articulate how the risk was being carried by those who are most vulnerable
and the worst paid. You try to articulate that,
but you could never have envisaged that there would be such
a catastrophic illustration of what you were trying to say. And Rana Plaza, to me,
was like some horror story. [woman]
Two weeks after the catastrophe and the death toll now stands
at a staggering 931, making it the worst
garment-industry disaster in history. I think one of the most profoundly
impressing things about the Rana Plaza disaster
was that news that the workers had already
pointed out to the management the cracks in the building. They'd already pointed out that the building was structurally unsafe, and yet they'd been forced back in. [woman]
Survivors are asking how they could've been forced
to return to work when management already was aware
of the cracks in the building, and workers' concerns
on the very day of the collapse. A lot of clothes in American stores
are made in Bangladesh by workers who earn about $2 a day. Last month there,
a garment factory collapsed, killing more than 1,000, and a few months before that,
a factory fire killed more than 100. [woman] And as bodies are
being pulled out of the rubble, another factory in Bangladesh caught fire
early this morning, killing eight more people. [narrator] As story after story
of disasters kept filling the news, it was now the case that three
of the four worst tragedies... ...in the history of fashion had
all happened in the last year. As the death toll rose,
so did the profits generated. The year following the disaster
at Rana Plaza was the industry's most profitable
of all time. The global fashion industry is now an almost $3 trillion annual industry. [man]
Bangladesh is now the second largest apparel exporter, after China. How? Well, unlike some
of its competitors, Bangladeshi manufacturing remains
dirt cheap, and unions have limited power. The country cornered the absolute bottom
of the value chain. Those 1000 poor girls lost their lives because everybody didn't bother,
didn't give a damn shit. They just wanted the cheap price
and a good profit. It shouldn't be like that. Everybody should take
the responsibility for those kids. That's how it is. There might be more coming. Sorry, but you know that it's not only
the price pressure, it is something-- Ignoring other people's lives. It's not... It shouldn't...
It's not right. It's the 21st century. It's a global world we are living in, and we just ignore other people's lives? How come? This enormous, rapacious industry that is generating so much profit for a handful of people, why is it that it is unable to support millions
of its workers properly? Why is it that it is not able
to guarantee their safety? We're talking
about essential human rights. Why is it unable to guarantee that whilst generating
these tremendous profits? Is it because it doesn't work properly? That is my question. [narrator] Lucy's question sounds
like the obvious one. But instead of answering it,
everywhere I looked, I found people who were constantly justifying the cost because of the economic benefits
being generated. So, this low-wage manufacturing,
or so-called "sweatshops," they're not just the least bad option
workers have today, they're part of the very process
that raises living standards and leads to higher wages
and better working conditions over time. Your proximate causes of development
are physical capital, technology and human capital
or skills of the workers. When sweatshops come to these countries,
they bring all three to these workers and start getting that process going. Is it possible that sweatshops are
actually good? Yes, horrible, awful sweatshops. The word itself, "sweatshop," it evokes terrible images
of poor people and children suffering in third world countries,
slaving away in awful conditions to make products
for us selfish Americans. And thank you. What? Does it bother me that people
are working in a factory, making clothes for Americans or for, you know, Europeans? Or that they're... That's how
they're spending their lives? Is that what you're kind of asking me? [interviewer]
Um, yeah, sure. Um... No. I mean, you know,
they're doing a job. Uh, there are a lot worse things
that they can be doing. It is live television,
and I will ask you: define sweatshops. We have to be clear
what we're talking about from the outset. So, we're talking about places
with very poor working conditions as us normal Americans
would experience it, very low wages by our standard,
maybe children working places that might not obey local labor laws, but there are characteristics of the ones
I want to talk to you about tonight, and that's they're places
where people choose to work, admittedly from a bad set
of other options. Well, there's nothing intrinsically
dangerous with sewing clothes. [chuckles] So, we're kind of starting out with, you know,
a relatively safe industry. It's not like coal mining,
or natural gas mining, or a lot of things that you could--
That are much more dangerous. So, sweatshop jobs look like
horrible working conditions and wages to anybody in the West
who's wealthy enough to own a TV and watch your video. But we have to keep in mind
that the alternatives available for these workers aren't
our own alternatives, they're much worse than our alternatives, and they're usually much worse
than the factory job that the worker has. Low wages, unsafe conditions,
and factory disasters are all excused because of
the needed jobs they create for people with no alternatives. This story has become the narrative, used to explain the way
the fashion industry now operates all over the world. But there are those who believe
that there must be a better way of making and selling clothing
that does generate economic growth, but without taking such an enormous toll. [woman]
So, we don't know yet, um, how long this embroidery is taking. Do you think you could ask Santo
to just roughly... How long that whole panel is taking? I guess we'll see it in the FAB breakdown,
but it would be great to know. So, I'm Safia Minney,
I'm founder and CEO of People Tree, and, uh, People Tree is
a Fair Trade fashion brand that started over 20 years ago in Japan. You were worried we had too much navy. What are you feeling now?
Because we did put more black in to SS14 and that has worked really, really well with, um, Orla's designer, um,
collaboration. Have we got enough black prints
in the collection? Uh, well, we've lost
that abstract dust print, this one here, in the black,
but I think this pink, we really--- It's one of those prints that everyone's
nervous of but actually will do well. [Minney]
I think most fashion brands start with a concept
of a collection or a look. Um, they don't tend to think,
uh, you know, who is gonna make the product? And how can I ensure
that producers or suppliers, um, are gonna eat? So, what we're trying to do at People Tree
is start with the skills that we have at each producer group,
and then design the collection up, whilst also looking at the integrity
of the collection in its aesthetic. I worked originally
with freelance designers and went into Bangladesh, Zimbabwe,
India, Nepal, the Philippines, and bit by bit, we put together,
you know, an amazing network of like-minded Fair Trade organizations that put women's development, the workers' social development
and environment absolutely essential
to everything they do. [woman]
One, two, three. [all]
Happy World Fair Trade Day! [cheering and whistling] [speaking in Japanese] [instrumental music playing
over speakers] [speaks in Japanese] Thank you. Good job! It was so...
Really, really great! Yeah. [speaking in Japanese] [speaks in Japanese] That's beautiful. Fair Trade is a citizen's response to correcting the social injustice in an international trading system
that is largely dysfunctional, where, uh, workers and farmers are not paid, um, a living wage, and where the environment is not
considered to make the products we buy. [speaks in foreign language] [speaking in foreign language] Shima is one of about
40 million garment-factory workers in the world. Almost four million of these workers
are here in Bangladesh, working in almost 5000 factories, making clothing for major Western brands. Over 85 percent
of these workers are women. And with a minimum wage
of less than $3 a day, they are among the lowest paid
garment workers in the world. [Akhter speaking in foreign language] [interviewer] [Akhter] [man] The workers must not have
any kind of distrust on their owners. If they have, there will not be any good
working atmosphere in the factory. They must respect,
the owner is paying us as per rule. If they do not have
this kind of confidence, you won't get the result. [Akhter speaking in foreign language] It's estimated that one
in every six people alive in the world today work in some part
of the global fashion industry, making it the most
labor-dependent industry on earth. Most of this work is done by people,
like Shima, who have no voice in the larger supply chain. But to fully understand the impact
that fashion is having on our world, we have to go back
to where it all begins. [engine starts] [woman] My grandparents settled
out here in the '20s, and so this is a part of my heritage. People ask why I'm a cotton farmer,
it's 'cause I don't know better. My granddaddy was an old German farmer that felt like we should respect the land,
we're stewards of the land, and respect the life that's in the land. You are actually sitting in,
uh, the high plains of Texas, and there's 3.6 million acres
of cotton growing in this region. We're literally the biggest
cotton patch in the world. In just the past ten years,
80 percent of that is now GMO, genetically modified cotton. Most of it is, uh, Roundup Ready, meaning that instead
of the farmers spot-spraying weeds, occasionally, in their field, or hiring laborers to walk the field
and eliminate the weeds, now they're spraying whole fields. Cotton produces the fiber that's responsible for most
of the clothing worn by the world today. And as our appetite
for fashion grows, the cotton plant itself is being
re-engineered to keep up. There's been this big drive towards the industrialization
of agriculture, the intensification of agriculture. So, instead of the old forms of farming, which were very much in-tune with nature, they were linked to the cycles of the natural year and the seasons, what you see now is an intensification where the land is almost reconsidered
as if it was a factory. [man] What you've created is
this general practice of "we treat millions of acres the same." We put a dose of chemical on it all, and that's when you get
these big ecological effects that nobody has a grasp
of what's really happening. Nature tends to heal itself
in small pockets. But when you get this big,
broad approach, we really don't know what's going on. For us, it's not reducing
the amount of pesticides and chemicals going on the cotton,
that's one of the big-- It reduces that. Not in our area, where we are spraying millions and millions of acres
and dollars of Roundup across the entire South Plains. What kind of impact is
that having on our soil, with residuals that are left
at the microbacterial level? What kind of impact is that having
on the people in our communities? Where is the cost on that? [man] Monsanto is proud
to be the leader in agricultural innovation, because of what these agricultural
advancements can do to help you, double yields for the future needs
of the world. We're dedicated to the future
of agriculture and providing farmers with innovations that help them produce more
and conserve more, while improving the lives
of people around the world. Together, we can face the challenges of the next generation and beyond. [woman]
After the wars, where all these redundant factories that made war chemicals,
explosives, uh, were lying around, the Western countries thought
that it would be a good idea to market them to the third world. After all, the same industry
that makes explosives makes nitrogen fertilizers. And they started
to push nitrogen fertilizers, from the '50s onwards,
after we became independent. But the nitrogen fertilizers don't do
very well with native crops. There's a problem of lodging. So, the whole system then organized itself to redesign the plant in order to take on more chemicals. Bt Cotton is a cotton in which
a gene has been added, from a bacteria, to produce a toxin. But the Bt Cotton, which is supposed to control a pest, has been offered because it's a way
for companies to own the seed. [narrator] By patenting
these genetically modified plants, Monsanto has become the largest seed
and chemical corporation in history. I wanted to speak with someone
who'd worked with the company, and I got word that a former
managing director for India was willing to talk. [man] One of my close friends
in the research division, working on these modified crops, he came to my hotel for a drink. We are sitting having a drink,
and after a few drinks he told me, "Hey, Jag, they're going to change
the type of business you're doing in India." I said, "What do you mean?" "They're going to get
into seeds business. And they're going to make
the seed business of all crops, so that we have a monopoly on seeds, and every farmer has to come to us
to buy seeds every time." That rang a bell in my mind. If a poor farmer has to go
to Monsanto to buy seeds every time, and such expensive seeds, at the time there's no idea
of Bt at all for me. Genetically modified seed,
it's not in my mind. Even seed monopoly
is something very bad. [Shiva] So farmers get into debt
when they get the seed because of the high cost,
17,000 percent more. They get into deeper debt because
it doesn't deliver on the promise of controlling pests,
so they have to buy more pesticides. The tragedy with chemicals,
whether it's fertilizers or pesticides, is that they are what has been called
ecological narcotics: the more you use them,
the more you need to use them. For a while, the yield
of the single commodity climbs and then it starts to decline because you have contaminated the soil. Most of India's cotton is grown
in the Punjab region, which has quickly become
the largest user of pesticides in India. Dr. Pritpal Singh has
been studying the effects of these chemicals on human health, and his reports show dramatic rise
in the number of birth defects, cancers and mental illness
here in the region. [boy whimpering] Companies that make the GM seeds
and make the chemicals are the same companies. And they're also the same companies
that make the medicines which they are now patenting. So you get cancer,
there are more profits. For them it's a win, win, win. As for nature and people,
it's a lose, lose, lose. It's the day those agents
of these companies come to the farmer and say, "You owe me this much.
You haven't paid back. Now your land is my land." That day the farmer will go
into his field, drink a bottle of pesticide, and end his life. And every widow I've talked to said, "And the neighbors came and said
they found my husband lying in the field." [speaking indistinctly] In the last 16 years, there have been more than 250,000 recorded farmer suicides in India. That's about one farmer every 30 minutes. And it's the largest recorded wave
of suicides in history. As it becomes clear just how much
of an impact fashion is having, there's an increasing amount of research to suggest that it's also having
a growing effect on us, the people buying these clothes. What we now know 20 years later,
and hundreds of studies later, is that the more the people are focused
on those materialistic values, the more that they say
that money and image and status and possessions
are important to them, the less happy they are, the more depressed they are,
the more anxious they are. We know that all of these kinds
of psychological problems tend to go up
as materialistic values go up. Now, that's really at odds
with the thousands of messages that we receive every day
from, uh, advertisements suggesting that materialism
and the pursuit of possessions and owning stuff
is what's gonna make us happy. It's important to understand
that advertising is a species or a category of propaganda. You think of propaganda
as a totalitarian thing, very grim, loudspeakers, you know,
chanting crowds and so on, and we think of Hitler. We always think of it
as a foreign thing, okay, but it's actually as American
as apple pie. [Kasser] Well, the reason
that advertising works is because the smart advertisers, at least, are trying to tie the consumption
of their product to a message that suggests that your needs will be satisfied by consuming this thing. It wants you to believe that you'll look wonderful in that thing. But then to put it on and feel like, "Nah, you look kind of fat in it,
you don't look that good in it, you're sorry you bought it,
but there's another one you can buy." [Kasser] So think of all of the car
commercials you see that show, "Well, I've really made it now,
I'm a competent person because I'm driving this BMW
or this Audi." Or think of all the shampoo
commercials you've seen, where the person now
has beautiful flowing hair and is loved and appreciated
by the people around them. The basic message is the same: the way to solve
the problems of your life, we all have problems in our life, the way to solve the problem in your life
is through consumption. Hey, you guys! Today I am coming to you guys
with a clothing haul! I went shopping a couple days ago
and literally went insane and bought so many things. My spam box, I don't know,
where it's literally blown up, by you guys saying
you guys wanted a haul. So, here it is. Okey-dokey, so first off,
I have some things that I got from H&M. So, then I went to Forever 21. It wasn't even a question,
it was just fate. I had to get it. Like, if it could levitate towards me,
it would have levitated. I got this skirt, bright yellow, and it was $8.50. It's a jean button-up thing. And I just loved this,
I just loved it, loved it, loved it! It's a gray knit sweater,
and it has pink hearts all over it. I loved... I love tie-dye things. Like tie-dye things are literally
the bomb.net. It has a little yin yang sign
on the front of it. I just love these so much. And it's just this really pretty,
light blue sweater. I don't know if I'm gonna wear this.
I don't know if I like it that much. I need to stop. [man]
I try to understand better why people don't realize that they're
becoming poorer and poorer. And I ask myself, okay,
but what has changed in respect of when I was young? And fashion is something
that has dramatically changed. I was able to buy one, two T-shirts, four T-shirts, for example, a year. Now, I mean, also my children,
they used to buy, every party, they buy a T-shirt. And so I understood that Fast Fashion
is something totally new. If you have noticed, the price has
decreased in the last years. And it does follow
the middle class disappearing. So all the things that people really need
are very costly, like a home, like studies,
like, uh, life insurance. On the other side,
there is a source of consolation, um, part of their life. They can, uh, buy a T-shirt, two T-shirts a party,
or eventually a day, although I'm very poor
and I've got lost-- I've lost all the things
I really needed. Today we purchase over
80 billion pieces of new clothing each year. That's 400 percent more than the amount
we bought just two decades ago. The way we buy clothes
has changed so much, so fast that few people have
actually stepped back to understand the origin
of this new model or the consequence of such an unprecedented increase
in consumption. [Miller] There's, um,
an article in Printers' Ink, which is the leading
advertising trade journal of its day, uh, by a very famous copywriter,
named Earnest Elmo Calkins. He was a grand old man
of the art of writing advertising copy. It was an article called
"Consumptionism." In that article, he says
there are two kinds of products. Okay, there are the kind
that you use, like washing machines,
cars and so on, things that you buy
and use for a long time. And then there are
the things that you use up, like chewing gum and cigarettes,
other perishables. He said, uh, consumptionism
is all about getting people to treat the things they use as the things they use up. [woman] With their innovative
Buy 1, Get 3 Free pricing, a suit from Joseph A. Bank is effectively cheaper
than paper towels. And now they come
in these easy-to-use dispensers. With four suits for the price
of a modest dinner, I can feel good about
throwing them away when I'm done. You just have to look at landfill
and you can see in landfill that the amount of clothes
and textiles being chucked away has been increasing steadily
over the last ten years, um, as the sort of dirty shadow
of the Fast Fashion industry. [Siegle]
As we get sort of closer and closer to species degradation, to, uh, trashing our last remaining
pristine wilderness, we seem hell-bent on producing
more and more disposable stuff. It makes no sense. Fashion should never
and can never be thought of as a disposable product. [Dean] I think after any big change
in any industry, it takes a while to sort of feel and smell the dirt that comes out of something,
um, that is polluting. So, I think now there is a change because you can't deny that the Fast Fashion industry is having a massive impact
in developing countries. [narrator] The average American
throws away 82 pounds of textile waste each year. Adding up to more than
11 million tons of textile waste from the U.S. alone. Most of this waste is non-biodegradable. Meaning it sits in landfills
for 200 years or more, while releasing harmful gases
into the air. [de Castro] The sheer amount
of cheap clothing, even though people feel,
perhaps somehow, um, that they're offsetting
by giving to charity. You know, the journey of a T-shirt
donated to charity is unpalatable in itself. [woman] Pepe, um...
It is a disease in Haiti. Not only in Haiti, I think like in any
third world country that you're visiting. Like, you know...
It's a problem, it's a huge problem. Pepe, a bunch of clothes, most of them came from the States. People will go and buy
a box full of clothes. They don't even know what they're buying. Those are clothes
people donate to charity, and charity cannot sell them
on their thrift store or whatever. They pack them, ship them
to those third countries, and most of them end up here. It turns out that only about 10 percent
of the clothes we donate actually get sold
in local thrift stores. And as we're going through
our clothing faster and faster, now more of it is being dumped
into developing countries, like Haiti. As the amount of secondhand clothing
coming into Haiti has increased, the local clothing industry here
has disappeared. Once a proud, local tailoring sector, Haiti now produces mostly cheap T-shirts for export to America. [speaking in foreign language] [Charlot] So I'll tell people,
stop buying things that is not good, that is costing, like 10 dollars, you going to go on a ball,
you going out today. You just go to a store
and buy yourself a dress for 10 dollars. Because it cost 10 dollars
and I can throw it away. And tomorrow you are going to do the
same thing over and over and over again. As awareness of fashion's impact
on our world is growing, there are key leaders in the industry
who are beginning to question the impacts of a model
built on careless production and endless consumption. [man] At Patagonia,
we hate the word "consumers." [chuckles] We've got to find a better word,
we prefer, uh, "customers," and we prefer also customers
who recognize the impact of their consumption. They recognize that, uh, as consumers,
they're part of the problem. Uh, we are hopeful that we can
encourage our customers to join us in really questioning consumption. Because without a reduction
in consumption, we don't feel that we'll really
collectively find a solution to the problems we face,
that are collectively, year by year, uh, resulting in the continued decline
of the, uh, health of our planet. [woman] I mean, the fashion industry
just needs to think. It needs to just stop and sort of look
at how it's been working in a conventional way, and just sort of
question it, challenge it. That's for me, as a designer, that's the most exciting thing
that I do now. More exciting than saying,
"Oh, I love this color this season," or, "This is the silhouette
or the hemline." For me, a way bigger challenge and excitement is actually looking
at my industry and saying, "I'm gonna do it in a way
that is not as harmful to the planet." Business through advertising
has, uh, pulled society along into this belief that, uh, happiness is
based on stuff, that, uh, true happiness can
only be achieved with, you know, an annual,
seasonal, weekly, daily increase in the amount of stuff
you're bringing into your life. That we want to encourage
our customers to think twice about
those assumptions, to understand where they came from. And through that understanding,
to know that, uh, we can all together, we can change how this is done. The customer has to know
that they're in charge. Without them, we don't have jobs. And that is really important. So you don't have to buy into it. If you don't like it,
you don't have to buy into it. [Minney]
I love the embroidery, Shantu. The embroidery is really nice. You think we should have
the embroidery on both sides? I think we should definitely add
the embroidery here as well. I think it looks a bit mean
to have it just on the front, so let's have it on the sides, too. It won't add much cost, it's not so dense, is it? [indistinct chatter] Swallows is a fair trade
fashion business, but it's also a development society. So it helps more than 3000 people
in this village. I come here every four months. We call them "production trips." And, um, we're working
with the producers, trying to find out what are the barriers to making a great product
and to getting it to the market. And we're also doing
fair trade capacity building. So, looking at, you know,
what are the obstacles to delivering more social benefit or improving the environmental
protection in these areas? For me, this is about partnering. This is about finding creative solutions,
together with them, with the team here, and listening to what their problems are
and finding a way that works, together. I want to invite the best employee
here at Swallows, I want to invite one female
representative from Swallows to come to London in autumn
or next spring. And I would like you to think who would be that best representative. But I want you to know
who your customers are, and I want you to really
understand the marketplace and come back
and tell all your friends. [man speaking in foreign language] [Minney]
With you. [women laugh] Either, if she does it single thread,
single stitch, then maybe she needs
to do more densely? -Okay.
-More concentrated. [speaking in foreign language] So, um...
If she continues for a bit, we're gonna go up
to the sample room now, for SS15. Can she come and show us
the next one that she does? Yeah. [Minney] I hoped that People Tree
wouldn't be necessary, and I hoped that we would have
a trading system that looked after people's rights and the environment. But the more and more involved
I got in developing and working closely with partners,
the more, you know, dirt and filth I discovered about how trading practices
undermine everything that we believe in and everything I know
most people believe and value. Um... I don't know,
People Tree just grew organically. It grew from, um,
a really great collection of people that feel passionately
that there's a different way of... Of working, of living, of consuming, of, you know, interacting with people
by a humane way. Um... And, uh, you know, I didn't necessarily feel
that there'd be a thousand shops selling People Tree today, um, and I see that there's so much more
that we need to do. So, I think it's not just about,
you know, creating jobs for the 7000 people that work
for People Tree. It's also about being a catalyst
for change within the industry, and showing, proving the model works. [Pepper]
When we first went organic, there was only two or three of us
at the time, and we formed the Texas Organic
Cotton Marketing Cooperative, and the deal was they'd grow it
and I'd sell it. So, I started going to, like, Jacob Javits and having this whole deal,
cotton plants and everything, and of, "Yeah, we've got organic cotton," and people would just look at us
like we were absolutely crazy. Many times consumers become aware of organic milk,
or they have an allergy. And so, interestingly enough, cotton,
and what they put on their body, even though the skin's
the largest organ on your body, isn't even on their radar screen because they're not getting the connection
of, "Oh, I eat this organic apple, therefore I'm not directly ingesting pesticides or chemicals,
or whatever the case may be." But they don't get that connection
with clothing. So, you have to start looking
in that bigger community scope. That it is about our air,
it's about our world. It's about our planet,
it's about our people. And so it is that awareness of-- You may not feel that you're having direct
impact by buying this organic shirt. But the impact you're having is in the bigger picture
in the world at large, and especially in the community
where the cotton's grown. As the hard freeze comes, as organic farmers,
we wait for that freeze because that literally defoliates, uh,
takes the leaves off the plant, so that when we harvest,
the bolls open that are mature, and it leaves the cotton here, and you can see
it kind of comes out in sections. So, this, uh, machine that's coming
is called a Cotton Stripper. And it's called a Cotton Stripper
because it comes along and strips, uses kind of fingers,
and it literally strips all of the bolls off of this plant. So, when you look over there,
you can see the harvester's been there
and it's taken all the plants off. I think one of the problems
that we have in the current model is it's all about the profit. And it doesn't take into consideration:
"This cost at what cost?" The cost of polluting the water,
the cost of labor, the cost of bars on the window that people die when a fire breaks out
in the factory, the cost of farmers
that don't have access to education and health care. And so we haven't really factored in
what the true cost is. [man]
Kanpur is situated along river Ganga, which is the holiest river. And it's also very important
for 800 million Hindus, and also it serves as the lifeline
of North India. So, this river is being polluted
and killed by the leather factories of Kanpur. With growing demand
for materials like cheap leather, Kanpur is now
the leather export capital of India. Every day here, more than
50 million liters of toxic wastewater pour out of the local tanneries. Heavy chemicals used
to treat the leather like chromium-6 flow into local farming
and even drinking water. In places like Kanpur,
far from the eyes of the world, major western brands are able
to source cheap materials while avoiding all accountability
for the growing cost to human health and the environment. People in that area are in the tight grip
of tannery pollution. The local environment is contaminated,
soil is contaminated. The only drinking water source, ground water, is contaminated
with chromium. Agricultural produce, even vegetables and, uh, salad items, are, uh, produced there. People's health is affected. People have different kinds
of dermal problems: skin rashes, boils, pustules, even numbness in the limbs. People have stomach ailments,
maybe they have cancers also. [speaking in foreign language] You can have the best
of materials moving into the high-end fashion market,
in Milan or Paris or London. But there has been so much work
which has gone behind it, and so much of chemicals has gone into it, the effluents have been discharging
to so many rivers. But we are only looking
at that point of time into the finished product. We need to step back and think about it. Fashion today is the number two
most polluting industry on earth, second only to the oil industry. The alarming thing is
that not only is fashion using a huge amount of natural resources and creating staggering
environmental impacts, these natural resources and this impact
is often not even measured. Because they've been
so abundant, these resources, uh, it's been assumed that they're going
to be there forever. Uh, so, I think business has
not accounted for them because, uh, it's only since the 1950s that we've really had
this industrial expansion at such a rate that we started
to see exponential growth and exponential use of natural resources. The first economy on which our lives rest
is nature's economy. Nature has an economy. That economy is huge.
It's not counted. Then we have people's economy,
women working, laborers working, farmers growing. And that was made invisible
through this construct, first in the Depression,
and then during the war years, of the number called the GDP,
the Gross Domestic Product, which measures only that which is traded, and has become a commodity. [Schragger]
A lot of the resources that we use to, uh, make
our clothing are not accounted for in the cost of producing those clothes. Uh, so one has, uh, water that's used
to produce clothing, land that's used to grow the fiber, uh, chemicals that, uh, are used to dye. Those things, uh, all are inputs. And as inputs, they cost something, uh, and they also give outputs, in some cases good outputs,
the clothing themselves, jobs, but in other cases bad outputs,
like harmful chemicals, or greenhouse gas emissions, and those things have costs as well. [speaking in foreign language] [interviewer] [Akhter] [Nadia speaks in foreign language] [interviewer] [Akhter] The same low wages that have
made places like Bangladesh so attractive for brands to do business have left millions of workers here
working incredibly long hours, unable to afford
to keep their children with them, even in the cities' worst slums. In order to give their children
an education and the chance of a better future
than life in the factories, many garment workers here,
like Shima, are leaving their children to be raised by family or friends
in villages outside the city, only getting to see them
once or twice a year. [speaking in foreign language] [all speaking in foreign language] [speaking in foreign language] You know, we are actually profiting from their, um, need to work,
to use them as slaves. And I'm not saying that we don't--
We need to give them work, but they have to be treated
with the same respect that we treat our children, our friends. They're not different from us. Livia Firth has been calling
for major change in the fashion industry. She made headlines by starting something
called "The Green Carpet Challenge," urging celebrities and top designers to take part in more mindful forms
of fashion. She runs a sustainability
consulting firm called Eco Age and had just been invited to speak
on the future of fashion. [Firth] If Fast Fashion didn't exist, we wouldn't need to have
a summit in Copenhagen to try and clean the mess
of environmental destruction, social justice destruction,
that has been caused in the last 15 to 20 years
of its existence. Fast Fashion wants to produce fast, so the garment worker has
to produce faster and cheap. So, the garment worker
is the only point of the supply chain where the margins are squeezed. And you have these huge,
you know, companies going to the factory in Bangladesh,
place an order for 1.5 million jeans for, you know, 30 cents each,
50 cents each... How can you make it ethical?
I don't know. But also, from the consumer point of view, is it really democratic
to buy a T-shirt for $5 or pay $20 for your jeans? Or are they taking us for a ride? Because they're making us believe
that we are rich or wealthy because we can buy a lot. But in fact they are making us poorer. And the only person
who is becoming richer is the owner of the Fast Fashion brand. So that makes me a little bit angry. [audience cheering and whistling] You spoke about a commitment to try and promise a basic living wage. What does that mean? Uh, how do you define
a fair living wage in Bangladesh? You know, uh, what does that mean? And to have a pilot project
in three factories, and by 2018, 15 percent of your factories
are going to have that? It's not good enough.
It's not. It's very clear for us
that what a living wage is, is something that the workers should say, and that's incorporated in our way
of working. [Firth]
How much is it? And that's not for us to say a sum, but we do an assessment all the time. How much is it? And to make sure that it covers
the basic needs of the workers. I can show you that later on. H&M has mastered the model
of Fast Fashion, becoming the second largest
clothing corporation in history. With annual revenue
of more than $18 billion, they are now one
of the largest producers of clothing in both Bangladesh and Cambodia. Sadly, along with every other
major retailer I asked, they declined
all interview requests for this film. [crowd cheering] [man yelling in foreign language] In Cambodia,
garment workers have had enough. Recently taking to the streets to demand a minimum wage
increase in the country. As protests continued, workers were met
with violent crackdowns, as police began to open fire
with live rounds. [yelling in foreign language] [wailing] [crowd clamoring]
[car horns honking] [gunfire] [man] A woman has been killed
and several people injured in clashes between clothes factory workers and riot police in Cambodia. [gunfire] [crowd clamoring] [speaking in foreign language] For two days, Cambodia was a battleground. The city of Phnom Penh. The police, the paratroopers
were brought in as if there were war
on the streets of Phnom Penh. Why? Because workers
in the textile industry continued to demand a minimum wage of at least $160. [woman speaking in foreign language] [man] Today is the, uh,
funeral of a factory worker. He was beaten to death. He had, uh, suffered a lot
before his death this morning. And he had done nothing wrong. He, among his, uh, fellow workers, wanted to have better living conditions. [chanting in foreign language] [chanting continues] We will continue his fight so that all Cambodian workers will have decent living conditions. [interviewer]
Thank you, sir. [narrator] The Cambodian government,
like other developing countries are desperate for the business
that multinational retailers bring. Because of the constant threat
that these brands will relocate production
to other low-cost countries, the government holds down wages, routinely avoiding enforcement
of local labor laws. But because the major brands
do not officially employ the workers, or own any of the factories
they produce in, they're able to profit hugely, all while remaining free
of responsibility for the effects of poverty wages,
factory disasters, and the ongoing violent treatment
of workers. The whole system begins to feel like a perfectly engineered nightmare for the workers trapped inside of it. [Mu] You cannot fool us,
and exploit our human resources, exploit our workers. The workers will continue to rise up. I call on the international brands to put that struggle into dollars, into pounds, into Euros. It translates into human capital. It translates into social responsibility of these big corporations. It translates into economic justice. When everything is concentrated
on making profits for the big corporations, what you see is that human rights, the environment, workers' rights
get lost all together. You see that workers
are increasingly exploited because the price of everything
is pushed down and down and down, just to satisfy this impulse
to accumulate capital. And that's profoundly problematic, 'cause it leads
to the mass impoverishment of hundreds of millions of people
around the world. [woman] If you write to these companies,
they'll send you their code of conduct. And it's beautiful, and it says,
"Oh, yes, we take responsibility for the conditions under which
our product is made, you know, the product that you buy. All the factories where we produce, we require them to respect
the minimum-wage laws, you know,
all of the laws of the country, to respect women, not to hire children, uh, no forced labor, um, no excessive overtime hours,"
all that stuff. Um... But when we submitted a bill
in Congress a few years ago, or worked with people to do that, we called it "The Decent Working
Conditions and Fair Competition Act," the companies responded in one voice, "Oh, no. That would be
an impediment to free trade. We can't have rules.
We can't have that." They want to keep it
with voluntary codes of conduct. You know, they've fought for
and they've won laws to protect their stuff
and their interests, but what about the workers? The workers are left
with voluntary codes of conduct. And what we see,
in case, after case, after case, is that those voluntary codes of conduct are not worth the paper
that they're written on. We need to acknowledge,
particularly in the fashion industry, that human capital is part
of this miraculous formula. Without human capital,
without cheap labor, cheap female labor, it would not be generating
the profits that it is. That needs to be acknowledged,
it needs to be dealt with, and those people need to be
rewarded instead of exploited. Where is their piece of the pie? That's what we constantly
have to ask ourselves. Are those buyers immoral?
Or they just don't--? Or are they amoral? The system they're working for
and the system that allows companies to do this is amoral. The individuals concerned
are simply products of that system and having to drive it through
to its logical conclusion. What we need to do is change the way
those companies operate. Operating within a system
that only measures profit, companies have little incentive
to do anything other than to make this quarter
better than the last. No matter what damage
is caused along the way. As corporations that make up
the global fashion industry, major brands, as well as seed
and chemical companies, are growing today to reach
unprecedented global size and power. This mandate for profit at all cost
is beginning to stand in direct opposition
to the values that we share. Richard Wolff is an economist, who after graduating from Harvard,
Stanford and Yale, became convinced that the real problem
is within this system itself. So, America became a peculiar country. You could criticize the education system
to make the schools better. You could criticize the transportation
system to make that work better. But you couldn't criticize
the economic system. That got a free pass. You couldn't criticize, just-- And if you don't criticize something
for 50 years, it rots, it goes to seed. One of the ways a healthy society works is it subjects its component systems
to criticism, so that we can debate it,
and hopefully fix it, or improve it or do better. Capitalism couldn't be questioned. Capitalism is the reason the fashion industry looks
as it does today. It's the reason why workers
in Bangladesh are paid so little. Because if you're operating
in a capitalist system, the main thing you have to do
is create profit and you have to create more profit
than your competitors. And this is what drives companies to push wages down and down and down. But companies don't go--
Like fashion retailers don't go to places like Bangladesh,
for any other reason except they can get the cheapest labor possible. There's no collective rights
in Bangladesh, there's no trade union rights, there's a very, very low minimum wage, there's no, like, maternity benefits,
there's no pensions, that is why the fashion industry
is in Bangladesh because it can reap the biggest profits
out of those people that are making the clothes for them. Before you can solve a problem,
you have to admit you got one and before we're gonna fix
an economic system that's working this way,
and producing such tensions and inequalities and strains
on our community, we have to face the real scope
of the problem we have and that's with the system as a whole. And at the very least, we have to open up
a national debate about it, and at the most, I think
we have to think long and hard about alternative systems
that might work better. [Hilary] For the environment,
the great threat is that capital must continue to expand infinitely
in order to survive. It can't have any limits
on its expansion and its growth. The natural world
clearly does have limits. There are very defined limits
to how much the world can sustain in terms of production,
in terms of trade, in terms of transport and distribution. And it's quite clear
that we've already overstepped a lot of those limits, which is why
you're seeing such stress in the natural world at the moment. [Hoskins] The system we live in isn't one
that most people want to live in. I think it's a system that makes
most people very unhappy, and I don't think people want to live
on a slowly dying planet or to be exploiting, um, you know,
their neighbors. So, I think we need
huge systemic change. [Wolff]
If you don't change the system, you're leaving intact the decision-making of these enterprises, which means a small group
of executives and shareholders are gonna be working
in the same system, subject to the same pattern
of rewards and punishments, which will sooner or later
make them reimpose, there or elsewhere, the very conditions
you're fighting against. So, stop this stuff about improving
their conditions, deal with the system,
or else you're not serious. [Kasser] Our economic system
is one of consumer capitalism, and that's why the government needs
to have consumption at very high levels, um, and why, of course, the corporations do, and why at some level
most people then buy into it. I can't tell you the number of people
I talked to who say, "Well, but if we became less materialistic
our economy would tank." Well, they're right in some level,
because our economy is based on materialism,
it's based on these kinds of values. That's what it needs
in order to survive. That's part of the fuel that it needs. The problem is that comes
at a really high price. ♪ Black Friday's here
Can we go please? ♪ ♪ Go, go, go, go, go
Shop, shop, shop, shop ♪ Black Friday shopping mania still playing out tonight
at malls across America. In some places across
this country tonight, it's as if someone announced we're in danger of running out of stuff, and those who need stuff
had better go out and buy it now 'cause it's going away forever. [woman] Walmart, doing more
than 10 million transactions in the first four hours of the frenzy. A record 15,000 people at Macy's
in New York City, shoppers hung tough. Black Friday will be the single
largest day of the retail year. Certainly in the case of Macy's,
we'll do more business on this day than on any other, uh, day of the year. Nation, this orgy of Christmas shopping
proves America is back! We are once again... Yes! [audience cheering] Oh, yes! We are once again
spending money we don't have on things we don't need
to give to people we don't like. [audience cheering] Yeah. [chanting]
U.S.A.! U.S.A.! U.S.A.! [woman screaming] [man]
Oh, my God! [inaudible dialogue] [crowd clamoring] [speaking in foreign language] [speaking in foreign language] [Akhter speaking in foreign language] [Pepper] I grew up on a farm,
married a guy that grew up on a farm, and, uh, those of us living
on the farm live there. It needs to be safe for us, too.
The new chemicals that are coming out, and the intensity of the use,
was just continuing to increase. And, um, then in 2005, um... Terry started having some loss
of fine motor skills, and this and that,
and come to find out he had a glioblastoma multiforme,
Stage 4 brain tumor, and, uh, at the prime age
of 47 years old. And, uh, he died at the age of 50. They gave us six months,
we had two-and-a-half years, and the brain surgeon
that worked on him-- Lubbock has got huge cancer clinics
and a medical hub. We didn't have to go someplace else
to have a brain tumor surgery. We were able to stay right here
because he does so many of them. He said that these kinds of tumors
are found in men, aged 45-65, that work in the agricultural industry
or the oil field. And so while I don't have a smoking gun
and the blood tests that say the use of, uh, cotton chemicals,
agricultural chemicals, directly led to my husband's death, there's just too many linkages
with his father's death. Growing up
on a chemically-intensive farm, we live in the middle
of 3.6 million acres of cotton that use a lot of chemicals. And so, at that point in time, organic was no longer important to me, it was imperative. It's imperative
that we change agriculture. It's imperative, if we're talking
about the long-term sustainability and well-being
of our lives on this planet and our children's lives on the planet, that we have to change. [Minney] This is the beginning
of a turning point not just for, you know,
a responsible way of doing fashion, but for a new way of doing capitalism,
for a new way of doing economics. I'm sure that we will see
a significant change over the next ten years. Um, whether it's in time or not
is another question. [Kasser]
Martin Luther King Jr., at a speech in a Brooklyn church,
he said that what America needed was
a revolution of values. It needed to stop
treating people like things. It needed to stop treating
people in ways that were just about profit. But instead to treat people
in a real and human way. [Wolff] My God,
we can do better than this. If what we want is to spread,
as I would argue we do, spread industry around the world,
not concentrated in one place. Let the benefits be shared globally. Then let's do that in an orderly,
reasonable, careful way. [Shiva] We need to recognize
that capital is just money. Money is a means, and people should be accountable
for how it's used. We need to celebrate the creative power
of human beings. And we need to talk of creative work,
we must stop talking about labor. We need to look at the land
as not a commodity, to be speculated on and traded, but as the very basis of our life,
as Mother Earth. [Siegle] You change all consumers
into activists, all consumers asking ethical questions, all consumers asking
quite simple questions about where their clothes are from, all consumers saying, "I'm sorry,
it's not acceptable for someone to die in the course of a working day." We can't just roll over and say,
"Yes, have it. Do what you like." It's too important,
it's too significant an industry. It has too much impact and effect
on millions of people worldwide and common resources. [narrator] Will we continue
to search for happiness in the consumption of things? Will we be satisfied with a system
that makes us feel rich, while leaving our world
so desperately poor? Will we continue to turn a blind eye to the lives of those behind our clothes? Or will this be a turning point,
a new chapter in our story, when together,
we begin to make a real change, as we remember that everything we wear
was touched by human hands? In the midst of all the challenges
facing us today, for all the problems
that feel bigger than us and beyond our control, maybe we could start here with clothing.
TL,DW: Cheap labor hurts the people on the front and back end. Working conditions are terrible plus all that shit ends up being donated and then shipped over to 3rd world countries where it depresses local textile industries that can't compete with free.
Another reason to buy stable pieces that you’ll keep for a decade and vintage. Don’t support fast fashion brands.
I’ve worked in fashion and had to leave that life behind. I try to buy quality, practical clothes now and don’t buy as much as I used to. I was lucky enough to work for a designer in London who used the local factories and it was a positive experience but I also experienced working for a large brand that couldn’t give a fuck and not only created cheap Fast fashion but went out their way to rip off Independent small designers designs.
I went to the premiere of this doc in LA when it came out. Great movie. Not sure why it says 2020 though, as it was released in 2015.
Im so happy to see this! It was taken down from netflix a year or so ago and didnt want to have to buy/rent it just to rewatch it. I recommend everyone to watch it
fuck man , this is so dark
Such an educational movie. High schoolers should be required to watch this!!!!
We don’t need 100 tops and 100 bottoms. Try on 10 things for everything you buy and only buy things that make you look great. Not going to save the world this way, but definitely not as bad as piling things into your cart for shits and giggles.
Any links to sustainable and responsible brands for those of us wishing to change where we spend our money? The video had featured Patagonia as being aware, any others?