Purchase
The Shockingly High Cost of Cheap Fashion
Portfolio Penguin
June 2012
On Sale: June 14, 2012
244 pages
ISBN: 1591844614
EAN: 9781591844617
Kindle: B005GSZJ3Y
Hardcover / e-Book
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Non-Fiction
Until recently, Elizabeth Cline was a typical American
consumer. She’d grown accustomed to shopping at outlet
malls, discount stores like T.J. Maxx, and cheap but trendy
retailers like Forever 21, Target, and H&M. She was
buying a new item of clothing almost every week (the
national average is sixty-four per year) but all she had to
show for it was a closet and countless storage bins packed
full of low-quality fads she barely wore—including the same
sailor-stripe tops and fleece hoodies as a million other
shoppers. When she found herself lugging home seven pairs of
identical canvas flats from Kmart (a steal at $7 per pair,
marked down from $15!), she realized that something was
deeply wrong.
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.
Retailers are producing clothes at enormous volumes in
order to drive prices down and profits up, and they’ve
turned clothing into a disposable good. After all, 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.
But 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?
In Overdressed, Cline sets out to
uncover the true nature of the cheap fashion juggernaut,
tracing the rise of budget clothing chains, the death of
middle-market and independent retailers, and the roots of
our obsession with deals and steals. She travels to
cheap-chic factories in China, follows the fashion industry
as it chases even lower costs into Bangladesh, and looks at
the impact (both here and abroad) of America’s drastic
increase in imports. She even explores how cheap fashion
harms the charity thrift shops and textile recyclers where
our masses of clothing castoffs end up.
Sewing, once
a life skill for American women and a pathway from poverty
to the middle class for workers, is now a dead-end sweatshop
job. The pressures of cheap have forced retailers to
drastically reduce detail and craftsmanship, making the
clothes we wear more and more uniform, basic, and low
quality. Creative independent designers struggle to produce
good and sustainable clothes at affordable
prices.
Cline shows how consumers can break the
buy-and-toss cycle by supporting innovative and stylish
sustainable designers and retailers, refashioning clothes
throughout their lifetimes, and mending and even making
clothes themselves.
Overdressed will inspire
you to vote with your dollars and find a path back to being
well dressed and feeling good about what you wear.
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