Overdressed: The Shockingly High Cost of Cheap Fashion

by Elizabeth L. Cline

Overview

“Overdressed does for T-shirts and leggings what Fast Food Nation did for burgers and fries.”
—Katha Pollitt
 
Cheap fashion has fundamentally changed the way most Americans dress. Stores ranging from discounters like Target to traditional chains like JCPenney now offer the newest trends at unprecedentedly low prices. And we have little reason to keep wearing and repairing the clothes we already own when styles change so fast and it’s cheaper to just buy more.
 
Cline sets out to uncover the true nature of the cheap fashion juggernaut. What are we doing with all these cheap clothes? And more important, what are they doing to us, our society, our environment, and our economic well-being?

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781591846543
Publisher:	Penguin Publishing Group
Publication date:	08/27/2013
Pages:	272
Sales rank:	529,898
Product dimensions:	5.48(w) x 8.19(h) x 0.70(d)
Age Range:	18 Years

About the Author

Elizabeth L. Cline has written for AMCtv.com, The Daily Beast, New York, The Etsy Blog, Popular Science, The New Republic, The Village Voice and seedmagazine.com. She lives in Brooklyn, New York.
 
Visit www.overdressedthebook.com

Table of Contents

Introduction Seven Pairs of $7 Shoes 1

1 "I Have Enough Clothing to Open a Store" 11

2 How America Lost Its Shirts 36

3 High and Low Fashion Make Friends 62

4 Fast Fashion 95

5 The Afterlife of Cheap Clothes 119

6 Sewing Is a Good Job, a Great Job 138

7 China and the End of Cheap Fashion 161

8 Make, Alter, and Mend 187

9 The Future of Fashion 207

Acknowledgments 223

Notes 225

Index 237

What People are Saying About This

From the Publisher

“Cline is the Michael Pollan of fashion…Hysterical levels of sartorial consumption are terrible for the environment, for workers, and even, ironically, for the way we look.”
—Michelle Goldberg, Newsweek/The Daily Beast
 
“How did Americans end up with closets crammed with flimsy, ridiculously cheap garments? Elizabeth Cline travels the world to trace the rise of fast fashion and its cost in human misery, environmental damage, and common sense.”
—Katha Pollitt, columnist for The Nation
 
“Overdressed is eye-opening and definitely turns retailing on its head. Cline’s insightful book reveals the serious problems facing our industry today. The tremendous values and advantages of domestic production are often ignored in favor of a price point that makes clothing disposable.”
—Erica Wolf, executive director, Save the Garment Center
 

Editorial Reviews

Cline is the Michael Pollan of fashion…Hysterical levels of sartorial consumption are terrible for the environment, for workers, and even, ironically, for the way we look.”
—Michelle Goldberg, Newsweek/The Daily Beast

“How did Americans end up with closets crammed with flimsy, ridiculously cheap garments? Elizabeth Cline travels the world to trace the rise of fast fashion and its cost in human misery, environmental damage, and common sense.”

—Katha Pollitt, columnist for The Nation

“Overdressed is eye-opening and definitely turns retailing on its head. Cline’s insightful book reveals the serious problems facing our industry today. The tremendous values and advantages of domestic production are often ignored in favor of a price point that makes clothing disposable.”

—Erica Wolf, executive director, Save the Garment Center

 

From the Publisher

The wastefulness encouraged by buying cheap and chasing the trends is obvious, but the hidden costs are even more galling. Cline contends that "disposable clothing" is damaging the environment, the economy and even our souls, and she presents a dense and sobering skein of data to support her thesis…Cline adheres to the "slow" mantra—"make, alter and mend"—and advises us to buy recycled, organic and locally produced clothing. She's a persuasive advocate…

The New York Times Book Review - Avis Cardella

The good news for shoppers, notes Brooklyn journalist Cline in her engagingly pointed, earnestly researched study, is that cheap knockoffs of designer clothing can be found in discount stores almost instantly. The bad news is that “fast fashion” has killed America’s garment industry and wreaked havoc on wages and the environment, especially in China, where most of the cheap clothes and textiles are now made. A self-described shopaholic of low-end stores H&M and Forever 21, which emerged from the first budget retailers in the 1990s like Old Navy and Target, which marketed cheap fashion as chic, Cline traces the phenomenon soup-to-nuts from the sad consolidation of the big department stores and depletion of New York’s garment district, once supplying the massive labor needed for making clothes. From there, she takes her narrative to the factories overseas where workers are paid a fraction of what Americans earn. Cheap imports flooded the U.S. market, for example, shutting down textile mecca Inman Mills, in Greenville, S.C. Cline visited the root of inequity at massive, state-of-the-art factories in China where millions of “flavor-of-the-month” garments are manufactured for export, creating a new middle class for some Chinese while locking the lowest paid workers (also in Bangladesh, Cambodia, and Vietnam) in nonunion, slave-like poverty. As the fabrication of artificial fibers takes a walloping environmental toll, Cline urges, in her sharp wakeup call, a virtuous return to sewing, retooling, and buying eco-friendly “slow fashion.” (June)

Publishers Weekly