Slow it down

“Stop the world I want to get off!” was a lyric from one of my friend’s Steve’s songs. It always impacted me because at times I could totally relate to it. It seems especially true these days, when I feel like there are a million things coming at me and they are all coming at a massive speed. The juggling act that most of us are trying to pull would make a professional performer look stupid with a mere three fire-lit bowling pins.

But in the last few days as I dig deeper into this sustainability concept, it is becoming clear to me that it is not about stopping, but maybe simply slowing. Slowing the pace that we’re all going at. Slowing the need to achieve more, faster and maybe simply looking at what’s important and sitting there for a minute.

The term “Slow-food” has been around for a while now. The first time I heard of it was about ten years ago when my boy was a toddler.  My friend’s husband who is a chef was all over this, and it made sense to me: buy ingredients that are physically close to you and cook them the old fashioned way, do not use any shortcuts, and leave the products as whole as possible.

Professor Guttorm Fløistad summarizes the (slow movement) philosophy, stating:

“The only thing for certain is that everything changes. The rate of change increases. If you want to hang on you better speed up. That is the message of today. It could however be useful to remind everyone that our basic needs never change. The need to be seen and appreciated! It is the need to belong. The need for nearness and care, and for a little love! This is given only through slowness in human relations. In order to master changes, we have to recover slowness, reflection and togetherness. There we will find real renewal.” (from Wikipedia the free encyclopedia, Slow movement article. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Slow_Movement)

The Slow Movement is very popular today and it is influencing other areas including fashion. There are some people who have started calling the sustainability of fashion: “slow fashion”. It is simple, in some ways it is almost just the opposite of fast fashion which dictates a new fad every two weeks and which made cutting corners acceptable in order to keep deadlines. But I think there’s more to it and this is what I’m trying to dissect.

The way I see it there are four different areas that will make a clothing product sustainable:

1.       Economic: How does it affect our economy? Are we able to buy local? Are we supporting our small businesses?

2.       Ethical: If not made locally, is it upholding the dignity of those who make it? Is it providing a job that supplies the person with enough to make a decent living? Is it putting the person at risk by working under conditions we would never tolerate in our part of the world?

3.       Environmental: Is it too much for Mother earth to handle? Does it break down? Is it eating away at the only resources that we have? Does it meet the three R’s (Reuse, reduce and recyle)?

4.       Extra Consumption: Is it serving our needs or our wants? Is it truly necessary? Or is it just adding to our "stuff"?

In some cases we’ll get all 4/4 whohoo! Call yourself a winner. In others we’ll barely scrape by with one. But I think the point is to strive to achieve all of them most of the time. And don’t get me wrong, this is probably the hardest thing I’ve set myself out to do, especially when I have a champagne taste on a beer budget. A lot of people have given me the look, you know, the one of ‘where are you going to buy stuff like that at reasonable price?” And the truth is that I don’t have an answer yet. I have found lots of sustainable fashion sites that have a fair amount of options, but a lot of them ARE more money than what I’m used to.

Yet, I am determined to keep on, to move forward and find answers. I know for instance, that one of the answers is simply to buy good quality used clothing. This is becoming increasingly harder because a lot of the donated items are often from a fast fashion source. But it is not impossible. Another answer is to shop more sporadically and buy investment pieces, something that is classic and will last for more than a year. And then, for some of us lucky ones there’s making our own clothes, starting from scratch, calling the shots of how it’s made and what it looks like.

There are many more solutions and it will only get easier once I start. Yet I think the main stumbling block for many of us is: convenience, it’s this need for immediate gratification and the need for the ultimate and greatest thing as fast as we can without even thinking about it. But the thing about convenience is that it is not always good for us in the long run. You just have to think about the convenience of having fries at a fast food place vs. the work it takes to go buy the vegetables and make something from scratch at home. Not as convenient, but definitely worth it.

Once we change our mindset to think “slow”, to think the way we used to, when everything had a process that we had to wait for, that made things worth it, then slow fashion will make sense.

Yes it is a big undertaking but not an impossible one. When you think of the waves that slow food movements (i.e. Jaime Oliver Revolution) have made in the last few years over the fast food kings, it is encouraging that we might be able to change the status quo in fashion too.

And in the process we might be able to slow down and smell those roses after all!

For more information on the slow movement check out Wikipedia’s description and sources, great information!

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Slow_Movement

Dressmaking for picky clients...

I just made a dress for my youngest daughter. Mainly because she begged me to make her something when we were at the fabric store and she got to pick her own fabric. I don’t usually make my kid’s stuff. Don’t get me wrong, I would like to but it usually ends up in a fight over “creative differences” (which really translates into me not letting them have micro miniskirts or low cut cleavage tops –they are 6 & 8, for goodness sake!).

In any case I agreed to make a ‘sundress’. I had a pattern I had made previously and I knew it wouldn’t be much trouble to make.

As I was making such dress, I thought of a time long ago when mothers made their children’s clothes. Nowadays it is practically something unheard of. One of the reasons is because of the lack availability of good supplies such as fabric and notions. These items have become scarce because there is an increasing decline in home sewing so the demand is not there. Also, most fabric is no longer made in North America and with most of the mills overseas needing large orders we basically get the ‘scraps’. And the bottom line is most people are not learning how to sew because they don’t NEED to. It is simply cheaper to buy it!

Here’s the ugly truth, a dress like the one I made, could possibly retail at a store such as Wal-mart or another private label store for maybe $20 more than likely $15. Here’s the breakdown of how much it should retail for if I were a designer selling to a buyer.

My cost: Fabric: $10; Thread and notions: $.50; Pattern: $.25: Labour: $15.25 (Let's say it took me an hour to complete). Total: $26. Now, that’s just my cost. If I want to make some sort of a living I have to sell it at wholesale to cover some of my overhead and expenses. So the traditional mark up from cost to wholesale has been 100%, this would make the wholesale price of the dress $52.00. If that dress was going to a children’s boutique then the retailer would have to make his profit and charge typically double again at $104.00. Now, granted this is one dress which makes it more like a custom piece, and if you start making more than one your labour cost improves.

                                      

In her book “Overdressed”, author Elizabeth Cline talks about the decline of the garment industry in the United States (a story that’s not much different from the one in Canada). She interviewed several manufacturers who explained how the main cost of manufacturing clothing is the labour, therefore it is practically impossible for a domestic factory to compete with labour costs across the world. Cline mentions that in the U.S., sewing machine operators make typically minimum wage which is $9.00 or $1660 monthly. In parts of China wages for the same position would be $147 a month, and in Bangladesh where wages recently went up it would be $43 a month.  

I just rented a bike rack for my minivan, and I figured it would be a good idea to have it installed so it was correct. The cost of labour for the 10 minutes it took to put the hooks around my trunk was $15.00. I never even flinched or thought of bargaining for a better price. So, why is it unreasonable to pay a skilled machinist who can whip up a welt pocket in 10 minutes at least minimum wage?

Domestic manufacture in Canada is practically a minority. In the US it has gone from 50% in 1950 to 2% in 2004, according to Cline. I shiver at the thought of what would happen if suddenly these countries decided they did not want to take our orders, what if they decided they had better offers elsewhere and stopped producing. What would we do without cheap fashion? Could we go a few weeks without shopping? How about a few months? Where would everyone learn to sew in a jiffy?

And yet this is all too abstract for many of us to worry about. We just care that the cost of the garment is low so we can get more bang for our buck. But are we really getting more? Or have we all been duped into believing that we have the upper hand? Do we really believe that the massive amounts of jobs lost in the manufacturing sector have all been replaced by other types of jobs in the fashion industry?  

In the end I understand that things come down to dollars and cents. For a consumer on a budget it can seem black and white. However, I believe that there’s more to this story and this is what we’ll unfold. How can we be supportive of local economy and build it up thus creating more jobs while still getting a ‘bargain’? Well, I think it all depends on what we consider a ‘bargain’. And so this is what I’ll continue to discern.

In the meantime, I enjoyed making the dress for my daughter…even if after all that, she decided that while she loved it, it was much too itchy for her to wear…darn cheap fabric!