To Die For: Is Fashion Wearing Out the World? By Lucy Siegle
This book is what really pushed me to start Dress to Protest. It changed the way I think about clothes and how I act as a shopper, and fired me up to share the information with other people. It’s comprehensive, relatable and impossible to forget, and if you really want to get under the skin of the problems in the modern clothing industry, it should be number one on your reading list.
Lucy Siegle writes from a place of knowledge, but not superiority. Through every denunciation, you still know you’re being spoken to by a true fashion-lover, but one who realises that things need to change and that we all play a part in both upholding to and but therefore also changing the status quo. Rather than trying to shame or shock her reader into self-disgust and guilt, Siegle shares the valuable information that she was moved to discover. It’s as if she’s done the leg work for us, and so all we need to do is take it all in. Pretty handy, really.
'The nation's penchant for instant 'McFashion' that resulted in one and a half million tonnes of unwanted clothing dumped in landfill every year, was found to translate into more than three million tonnes of carbon monoxide.'
This thick but readable book starts by looking at fast fashion, telling us the true cost of its speed and its affordability – and it’s not as pretty as Oxford Street’s window displays would have you believe. We are then taken through the production process and the problems with the ‘ethical codes’ and ‘regular auditing’ in outsourced factories. Don’t worry - with the human voices given to these stories, it’s far less dry and technical than it might sound. We then get our clothes unstitched before our eyes as Siegle tells us about the lifecycle of the different materials that make up the clothes we wear (you guessed it, not a pretty sight). But to end on a high note, we get a peek inside our fantasy ‘Perfect Wardrobe’, and Siegle ponders how we might realistically get there.
'While a piece might not be perfect in sustainable terms, it must have a level of integrity that you are comfortable with.'
As you might guess, the book can at times be a hard pill to swallow. As I got further in, I started to wince at every new chapter title as I anticipated what horrors it would reveal. At moments I felt less moved to action that I did to despair. But Siegle’s message is all about being critical, and making your own decisions. She emphasises the personal nature ethical shopping, acknowledging that we must all set our own ground rules, based on the knowledge we gather and the opinions we form.
Read it, weep, then change the way you approach fashion.
'[Opposing mainstream fashion] represents a chance to reconnect with what drew you to fashion in the first place, which I'm guess had nothing to do with the enslavement of Asian women or one-size-fits-all jeggings.'