I’m surprised more horror stories aren’t written about clothing. Maybe because it looks so benign, hanging there in neat rows in a shop, arriving on your doorstep carefully wrapped, or sitting inert in your wardrobe. Or maybe it’s because we don’t like to scratch at fashion’s shiny facade. As well as horrifying tales of garment worker exploitation, there’s the environmental destruction to think about. After all, have you ever really considered what’s in your clothes?
We all think of cotton as a traditional, natural fibre. But cotton’s dark history of human exploitation and misery also started to include ecocide in the mid 20th century as DDT was sprayed onto cotton crops to kill the bollworm. Rachel Carson chronicled the devastating effect on wildlife in her book Silent Spring in the early 60s. Cotton is also an incredibly thirsty crop, and attempts to divert rivers to irrigate large cotton fields in Uzbekistan have transformed the Aral Sea, once the world’s largest inland sea and a thriving location for nature, fishing and tourism, into little more than a salty dust bowl.
A fact that really shocked me is the amount of water it takes to make one cotton garment, so much so that I had to emblazon it on one of my works of wearable art - 2700 Litres. On this shirt, every sequin represents one litre of water. That figure includes water for irrigating the cotton, processing the fibre, dyeing and finishing the garment, but that’s a lot of water. XR Hammersmith and Fulham also illustrated this beautifully during their Boycott Fashion event in Lyric Square - with nine rainbow-coloured bathtubs. Unfortunately I don’t have room for nine bathtubs in my hallway, so it had to be something small but visually arresting instead.
Since clothes started to be mass produced in the mid 19th Century, we haven’t managed to do a great job of dyeing them safely. Fortunately we’ve stopped using arsenic as a green dye, but research carried out by Greenpeace as part of their Detox Fashion campaign, published in 2012, showed that brands were using azo dyes that contain cancer-causing carcinogens. Other tests revealed nonylphenol ethoxylates or NPEs in water systems, which are widely used in cleaning and dyeing processes. These chemical compounds are toxic to aquatic life, persist in the environment and biomagnify. Commercial fabric dyes contain mercury, cadmium and lead, and in many textile manufacturing areas around the world, the rivers running past dye houses and tanneries are the only source of water for drinking and washing for local people.
Stories of dangerous dyes from days past inspired this horror-themed blog post a while back, and the creation of an arsenic-victim Halloween costume. But it’s a horror story that persists to this day and affects millions of people worldwide.
Polyester clothing now accounts for over 60% of garments made worldwide. What many of the owners of those garments might not know is that polyester is made from plastic, a product of the petrochemical industry. The carbon footprint of a piece of polyester clothing is more than twice that of a similar piece of cotton clothing. And polyester clothing is also creating a global water crisis of its own - microfibre pollution.
When we think of plastic in our oceans, we might be thinking of the images we’ve seen in Blue Planet 2 - plastic bottles and containers bobbing about, bags or fishing lines caught around sea birds and turtles, or the scraps of broken-down plastic in an unfortunate fish’s stomach. But there is another hidden problem - the microfibres that are shed from synthetic garments every time we wash them. Too small to be trapped by filter systems in water treatment plants, they end up in the oceans where they add to the plasticky soup being consumed by sea creatures and eventually, us too.
Again, the figures are mind-boggling, as emblazoned on my second piece, 700,000 Fibres. Individually, these microfibres are far too small to see. But when you start to think of the amount of polyester clothing each of us owns and how often we wash those clothes, it starts to become a global problem. Research by Friends of the Earth has shown that 83% of water contains microplastics. That includes bottled water and drinking water as well as rivers and oceans.
I wish I could tell you that there is a quick fix for all these problems - a perfect fabric with no environmental impact, a magical dye that leaves no chemical residue but is colourfast and never fades. Unfortunately we live in a complicated, messy world and there are no quick fixes. Sustainability-minded manufacturers are gradually starting to switch to fabrics, dyes and processing that have less of an impact on the environment, but once again we need to keep asking the big brands to change. If we all ask #whatsinmyclothes we’ll hopefully end up in a situation where no one has to worry if they are drinking the residue from some freshly-dyed fabric, or scraps of the yoga pants they washed a while back.
