Olivia: Alright Jackson, quick math problem. The average person buys five times more clothing today than in 1980. But in the UK, they throw out nearly 10,000 garments every five minutes. Where do you think it all goes? Jackson: Five minutes? That's... I can't even picture that. A landfill mountain made of last season's Zara? It sounds like a joke, but I have a sinking feeling it's not. That's an astronomical amount of waste. Olivia: It's completely real, and it's the perfect, absurd entry point into the world we're exploring today. That's the rabbit hole we're jumping down, guided by the book Fashionopolis: The Price of Fast Fashion and the Future of Clothes by Dana Thomas. Jackson: Fashionopolis. I like the name. It sounds like a sprawling, chaotic city, which, based on that statistic, seems pretty accurate. Olivia: Exactly. And what's fascinating is that Thomas is a veteran fashion journalist who spent decades in Paris covering haute couture for Newsweek and Vogue. She had a front-row seat to the industry's dramatic shift from craft to commodity. She saw fast fashion being born from the inside, which gives her this incredible, almost insider-witness perspective on how the whole system got so broken. Jackson: Okay, so she's not an outsider just throwing stones. She was in the belly of the beast. But how can one piece of clothing, like a single jacket, even begin to represent a problem that massive?

Olivia: That is the perfect question, because Thomas starts the book with one of the most infamous jackets in recent memory. Do you remember when First Lady Melania Trump visited a migrant child detention center in Texas? Jackson: Oh, vaguely. It was a huge controversy, but the details are fuzzy. Olivia: The details are everything. She wore a $39 olive-drab jacket from the fast-fashion giant Zara. And scrawled on the back in big, white, graffiti-style letters were the words: "I REALLY DON'T CARE, DO U?" Jackson: Wait, I remember that now! It was an absolute media firestorm. People were trying to decode it for weeks. Was it a message to her husband? A shot at the media? A complete accident? Olivia: Her spokeswoman claimed there was "no hidden message," while the President tweeted it was a jab at the "Fake News Media." But the point Thomas makes is that the jacket itself—this cheap, disposable, provocative item—completely hijacked the narrative. It became the story. No one was talking about the children in the detention center anymore; everyone was talking about the jacket. Jackson: Wow. So a $39 piece of clothing created an international incident and completely overshadowed a humanitarian crisis. That’s... a wild amount of power for a piece of fabric. Olivia: And it’s a perfect microcosm of what Thomas calls "fast fashion." It's an industry built on producing trendy, attention-grabbing clothes at lightning speed and rock-bottom prices. The items aren't designed to last; they're designed to be worn a few times and then discarded for the next trend. Jackson: That explains the "five times more clothing" statistic you mentioned. The system is designed to make you feel like what you bought last month is already obsolete. I feel that pressure. You see something online, it's cheap, you click, and two days later a plastic package arrives. I've done it a dozen times without even thinking. Olivia: We all have. And that's the engine of the machine. Dilys Williams, the director of the Centre for Sustainable Fashion in London, is quoted in the book saying the whole point is to respond to "the constant noise that says, ‘Come buy something else.’" It’s a culture of mindless shopping. Jackson: But it feels so harmless, right? It's just a cheap t-shirt. What's the big deal? Olivia: The big deal is that the price on the tag is an illusion. The true cost is hidden. It's offloaded onto the environment and onto the people who make the clothes. For instance, the book points out that producing a single kilogram of conventional cotton—the stuff in most of our jeans and t-shirts—can take up to 2,600 gallons of water. Jackson: Two thousand six hundred gallons? For a kilo of cotton? That's insane. That’s more water than I drink in years. Olivia: And that's before you even get to the pesticides, the toxic dyes, the carbon emissions from shipping it all over the world. The book is filled with these mind-boggling numbers. Americans sent 10.5 million tons of textiles to landfills in just one year. It's a system that is fundamentally, mathematically unsustainable. Jackson: Okay, so the environmental cost is staggering. But you said the cost is also offloaded onto people. That sounds even darker.

Olivia: It is. And this is where the book moves from statistics to heartbreaking human stories. The pressure to make things that cheap and that fast has a cost. And it's not measured in dollars. It's measured in lives. Jackson: I think I know where this is going. We're talking about sweatshops. Olivia: Yes, but not just in the places you might expect. Thomas takes us inside the "white noise of Los Angeles," as one activist calls it. Right there, in the LA Fashion District, are buildings packed with sweatshops where undocumented workers, mostly women, are paid as little as four dollars an hour. Jackson: In Los Angeles? Not in some faraway country, but right here in the US? Olivia: Right here. An organizer named Mariela Martinez takes the author on a tour, and they see these poorly lit rooms, hear the constant hum of sewing machines behind locked doors. When the owners spot Martinez, doors slam shut. It’s an open secret. Brands subcontract to factories, who then subcontract to these smaller, illegal shops to meet the insane price and speed demands. It’s a system designed for plausible deniability. Jackson: So the big brands can just say, "Oh, we had no idea"? That's infuriating. It’s a deliberate system of looking the other way. Olivia: Precisely. But the most devastating story in the book, the one that really shook the entire global fashion industry, happened in Bangladesh in 2013. It was the collapse of the Rana Plaza factory building. Jackson: I remember the name, but not the details. Olivia: The details are chilling. Rana Plaza was an eight-story building that housed several garment factories making clothes for major Western brands. The day before the collapse, huge, visible cracks appeared in the walls. The shops and a bank on the lower floors immediately shut down. But the garment factory managers ordered their workers—thousands of them, mostly young women—to go back to work the next day. They were told if they didn't, they wouldn't be paid. Jackson: You have to be kidding me. They forced them back into a cracking building? That's not just a tragedy; that's criminal. Olivia: It is. The next morning, the power went out, the backup generators on the roof kicked in, and the vibrations from the generators were the final straw. The entire building pancaked, collapsing in on itself. Over 1,100 people were killed, and thousands more were injured, many trapped in the rubble for days. Rescuers digging through the debris kept finding the clothing labels: Benetton, Mango, Walmart. Jackson: Oh, man. That's the real price of a five-dollar t-shirt. It's the cost of a human life, weighed against a production deadline. It makes you look at your own closet completely differently. Olivia: It really does. And the book makes it clear that Rana Plaza wasn't a freak accident. It was the inevitable outcome of a system that relentlessly squeezes its suppliers for lower costs and faster turnarounds, pushing safety, dignity, and human life to the absolute bottom of the priority list. A worker in Honduras is quoted saying, "Really, you work just to eat. It’s impossible to save. You can’t buy anything. It’s just to survive... We are in a trap." Jackson: This is all so bleak. It feels completely overwhelming. Is there any hope? Or should we all just start sewing our own clothes from potato sacks?

Olivia: (laughs) I think Dana Thomas would say hold off on the potato sacks for now. Because the second half of the book is dedicated to the revolutionaries—the people who are looking at this broken system and saying, "We can do better." Jackson: Okay, I need to hear this. Who are these people? Olivia: They're a fascinating mix of back-to-the-land artisans and futuristic scientists. On one end of the spectrum, you have someone like Natalie Chanin in Florence, Alabama. Florence used to be the "T-shirt Capital of the World" until NAFTA sent all the jobs overseas and devastated the town. Jackson: A classic story of American manufacturing getting hollowed out. Olivia: Exactly. But Chanin came back home and started a company called Alabama Chanin. It's the definition of "slow fashion." She hires local women, many of whom are descendants of textile workers, and pays them a fair wage to hand-sew these incredibly beautiful, high-quality garments from organic cotton. It’s about reviving a community, preserving a craft, and creating clothes that are meant to be treasured for a lifetime, not a season. Jackson: That’s amazing. It’s like the complete opposite of the fast fashion model. It’s hyperlocal, it's ethical, it's built on human skill. Olivia: It is. But what's so cool about the book is that it shows the future isn't just one thing. On the complete other end of the spectrum, you have these brilliant, high-tech companies that sound like they're straight out of science fiction. Jackson: Okay, now you've got my attention. Science fiction fabrics? Olivia: Totally. There's a company called Bolt Threads that has figured out how to make spider silk in a lab—without any spiders. They study the DNA of spider silk, replicate it, and then use yeast in a fermentation process to produce the raw silk protein. It’s incredibly strong and sustainable. They've partnered with the designer Stella McCartney, who is a huge champion of sustainable fashion in the book. Jackson: Wait, lab-grown spider silk? That's incredible. What else? Olivia: There’s another company called Evrnu. They’ve developed a technology that can take a pile of old, discarded cotton clothing—like all that waste we talked about—and chemically break it down at the molecular level. They purify it, turn it back into a liquid cellulose, and then extrude it as a brand new, pristine fiber that's actually stronger than the original. Levi's has already made a pair of 501s using it. Jackson: So they're literally closing the loop. Taking old clothes and making new ones, creating a circular economy. That's the dream, isn't it? Olivia: It is. So you have this incredible contrast. The future of fashion could be a hand-sewn dress from Alabama, or it could be a pair of jeans made from recycled molecules, or a jacket made of lab-grown silk. The point is that there are alternatives. We don't have to be stuck in this destructive cycle. Jackson: So it's a fight on two fronts: going back to our roots with craftsmanship, and rocketing into the future with science. But I have to ask the practical question: Is any of this stuff actually affordable for a normal person, or is this just a new kind of luxury for the wealthy?

Olivia: That is the billion-dollar question, and Thomas is realistic about it. Right now, many of these innovations are expensive. A hand-sewn Alabama Chanin dress is an investment. But the technology for recycling and bio-fabrication is scaling up, and the costs are coming down. And some solutions aren't about buying new things at all. Jackson: Like what? Olivia: Like the rise of rental services like Rent the Runway, or high-end consignment shops like The RealReal. These models extend the life of a garment. Instead of one person wearing a dress twice, twenty people can wear it. It changes the whole equation from ownership to access. Jackson: That makes a lot of sense. You get the novelty without the waste. So, when you pull it all together, what's the big takeaway from Fashionopolis? Olivia: I think the core insight is that fashion isn't frivolous. We tend to dismiss it, but it's a $2.4-trillion global industry that employs one out of every six people on Earth. It touches everything: the environment, human rights, technology, culture. And because of that, our choices—what we buy, or more importantly, what we don't buy—are powerful votes for the kind of world we want to live in. Jackson: That's a heavy thought to have next time I'm browsing online. It reframes shopping from a simple transaction to a moral choice. So what's one simple thing a listener can do right now, without feeling completely overwhelmed? Olivia: The book doesn't offer a single magic bullet, but one of the most practical ideas I've seen, inspired by this kind of thinking, is the "30 Wears Test." Before you buy any piece of clothing, just ask yourself one question: "Will I wear this at least 30 times?" Jackson: Thirty wears. That's such a simple but powerful filter. It immediately rules out all the super-trendy, poor-quality stuff. You're not going to wear a neon green, feather-trimmed top 30 times. But a classic, well-made coat? Absolutely. Olivia: Exactly. It forces you to shift your mindset from disposable to durable. It’s not about deprivation; it’s about intentionality. It's about choosing joy and longevity over the fleeting rush of a cheap purchase. Jackson: I love that. The 30 Wears Test. It’s something everyone can do, starting today. Olivia: We'd love to hear your own rules for conscious shopping. What are the questions you ask yourself before you buy? Share them with the Aibrary community. Jackson: This is Aibrary, signing off.