The Wardrobe To Die For: Lucy Siegle at TEDxSalford (Transcript)

So, we’re slinging them away almost as quickly as we can buy them. Which points to a certain disposability, a certain throwaway culture, in fashion.

19 is the number of jeans that I found in my own wardrobe, when I did an inventory of my wardrobe. And I would recommend to anybody that you do an inventory of your wardrobe, because it’s really, really illuminating. Even if you think that you’re not a fashion addict, you’re not a fashion victim, you will be surprised at how many duplicates you have.

So, I have 19 pairs of jeans and that’s significant because — not because 19 is my lucky number, but it is, that’s not why I bought them — I didn’t realize I had 19, because I just kept consuming without realizing. And when I thought about it, the environmental footprint of fashion is absolutely enormous. So, for example, it takes between 11,000 and 20,000 litres of water to produce enough cotton for a single pair of jeans.

And then I started to look at the impact of fashion generally. Now, fashion is a full spectrum industry, and with the exception of the food industry, and perhaps the energy industry, it’s hard to think of any other sector that owes quite as much to the planet as fashion does.

We’re all a nation of fashion addicts, that’s how we’ve become, and that’s been enabled really over the last twenty years by a phenomenon known as fast fashion.

Now, sometimes, it’s quite difficult to imagine how people got dressed 20 years ago, before fast fashion really kicked in, but we know they did, but did they all just wear the same pair of Dralon flares? How did they actually manage it? Because what we’ve done is we’ve developed a whole new system of getting dressed, which revolves around very, very quick microtrends that can very quickly translate from the catwalk into our wardrobes and onto the high street.

And the UK is one of the world leaders in this trend. We have some of the biggest retailers, some of the biggest brands, and it has to be said, that we interpret fast fashion quite successfully.

So, we think about how fashion actually presents itself. What it doesn’t really do, is tell you how much it’s changed over the last 20 years. So, there will be people here who’ve never known anything else. Lucky them, because they’re nice and young, but, there has been a completely revolutionized system to the way apparel is produced and sold.

But we really don’t get this idea from the fashion weeks that we have. It presents a very traditional face. So, we have the two seasons, we have autumn/winter and spring/summer, and then these are when we trickle things down from the catwalk into store, and they set the trend of what we’re going to be wearing.

In actual fact, those seasons have got as much in common with the contemporary fashion industry as Gregorian plainsong has with the contemporary music industry. Absolutely nothing to do with it. What really happens is that we’re now looking at, rather than two or four seasons a year, we’re really looking at 52 seasons a year.

Every week there are new styles, there is new stock in shops, new stock online, and it’s become a very, very quick process. Some people would call it a churn.

Now, when I look at the bright young hopes of British fashion, and we see these brilliant designers have got something. Up here we’ve got Alice Temperley, we’ve got Jonathan Saunders, Roksanda Ilincic. So, these are great names, great hopes for the future.

And then we hear about the people who basically succeed to the big luxury conglomerates and take over those brands. And these are big, big names, going out there into this multi-billion pound sector and representing British style. But often I think, ‘Will they be OK?’ Because, actually, it’s not just fast fashion or high street fashion that’s become super fast, but also the luxury industry.

This is the way that we really, really shop; we shop in a mob, we shop in bulk and we buy very cheap. Now, one of the things I really like to do is to hang around outside shops, maybe not as crowded as this, and actually go through people’s bags, with their consent, as they come out — I do ask first — and it’s amazing how many people buy in bulk and buy duplicates these days.

And one of my favourite observations, although it does not say particularly good things, is that a colleague of mine was watching outside Primark one day, or just kind of loitering nearby, and a girl came out with four of these bags. Now, it could have happened in lots of different stores, but Primark use these paper bags, and it was raining, it was really, really raining, the bag got completely soaked, while she was waiting for a bus, or whatever, and it fell apart. And she just left these clothes, these brand new clothes, she just left them on the pavement and walked off.

Now, my contention is that if we produce, if we design for landfill, if we produce clothes that are effectively disposable, we will all start to treat them like litter.

Now, I’m not saying that this also happens for luxury goods, because I think if you’re spending a grand on a handbag, you’re probably going to be a little bit more careful, but the same cycle and the same churn is starting to happen throughout the fashion landscape.

So, effectively, these designers that we saw, those shiny-faced, hopeful, big prospects of British fashion and all round the world in fact, actually are in a similar churn. So, they’re not just doing the autumn/winter, the spring/summer, they’re also having to work on pre-fall/fall collections, resort-wear, yacht-wear, getting on a yacht, getting off a yacht, post-yacht, pre-yacht, who are all these people that they are designing for? Who has all these yachts?

So, let’s just unravel fast fashion just a little bit. So, there are some very good points about fast fashion by the way. First of all, it breathes life into a rather stagnant British high street. Those of you who are old enough to remember will remember there was a certain lack of choice, a certain sort of look that the high street had, maybe 20-25 years ago, which wasn’t that appealing, wasn’t that aspirational.

So, the high street brands have really democratized style, you’re able to get hold of it. I remember moving to London and coming back to the North West, and people used to come up to me and say, ‘Oh, did you get that in London?’ I mean that doesn’t happen now, it happens in the reverse. You know, that’s how democratize style has become.

So, 814 million garments a year, this is also an estimate, are produced by Zara/Inditex, the Spanish brand. That’s a lot of clothes. And they have 45,000 designs, so their designers are constantly coming up with trends, every single year. Not all of those will get into store, but a large proportion of them will, which shows you where this engine is coming from, all these micro-trends.

When Zara started in the UK, nobody understood it, because you’d go in there, and the consumer would say, ‘Well, this is nice, maybe a little bit expensive.’ And then they’ll say, ‘I’ll think about it, I’ll come back.’ They’ll come back and it wouldn’t be there, because shops these days don’t re-stock, they don’t need to, because they’ve moved on to the next trend. If you blink, you miss it.

Number 3 — I’m still doing the fashion in numbers thing. Number 3. This is the position of Amancio Ortega who owns Zara, on the international rich list. He’s the 3rd richest man in the world. There’s a lot of money in this fast fashion business.

Here’s Philip Green, maybe this is where all the resort yacht wear is going to, because he has a yacht. And this is the little picture of a village, somewhere in England, a whole village, that has been bought by Stefan Persson, who is the CEO of H&M. So, that gives you some idea of the riches that we’re talking about.

I mention that, not because it’s illegal to make money, because it’s not, but just to show you a little bit of disparity, because who is the real engine of this fashion churn, this fashion cycle? It happens in Bangladesh. It happens in other countries too, but Bangladesh, 80% of the GDP is constituted by the ready-made garment industry, and that’s the equivalent of $20 billion.

So, when we talk about problems there, it is not feasible for companies to cut and run, because, as you can see, that economy is dependent on this trade.

Now, I put this in, because there was a recent power list of fashion, and I counted 4 muses in the top 30. Now, I’m not really sure what a muse does, but there were four muses and there was no mention of the people that actually make the clothes, which I thought was really, really interesting, and I think this really shines a light on a problem in the whole industry.

So, there’s 101 processes to making a garment. Just 6 to 8 of those are done in factories like the ones in Bangladesh. And these are basically what the cut, make and trim army do, And by conservative estimate, there’s 3 million, mainly young women, who work in this cut, make and trim army, and these are the core part of the supply chain, when they’re actually putting the piece together.

These are vast factories, vast, vast production lines. Now, 48.5 seconds is the time that it’s estimated it should take one of the people on this production stage to actually sew a seam. It’s relentless, relentless work.

This is a quote from Ali Hewson, who set up the EDUN brand, ‘We carry the story of the people who make our clothes around with us.’ And we do, but we don’t acknowledge it, which is why I showed that picture of the muse and I point to that power list. These are the unseen, the hidden people in the supply chain.

5,600 — that’s the number of garment factories that Bangladesh has, mainly centred around Dhaka. At last count, when this report came out, there were less than 200 inspectors — I think that should be fewer, but I’m just being pedantic.

Now, in 1911 we have the biggest tragedy in the garment sector to date. And that was the Triangle Shirtwaist Fire; and that was in New York’s garment district. 146 people died in 18 minutes, and this was the worst disaster that we’d ever seen in this sector.

And that prompted, not a revolution, but a lot of picketing, a big labour movement, and it’s still acknowledged. Every year on the anniversary, people will go and acknowledge, the trade unions will acknowledge, that that disaster happened. And what really struck me was that we never acknowledge. There were lots and lots of factory deaths and fire deaths and stampedes in factories, lots of fatalities, that were happening in the supply chain. Probably one or two a month that we learn about through our era, and we never really said anything about it. But this number, we can’t really make it go away, and we can’t ignore.

This is 1,133 — which is the number of people who died on the 24th April at Rana Plaza. Rana Plaza basically collapsed like a house of cards. There were 2,000 people working in it, it was a mixed-use complex, but, it was the garment workers that died, because the garment workers were the only workers that were sent back in, and unfortunately that is a common story, the garment workers are always in there.

These images are probably not unfamiliar, because they were broadcast around the world, and, for the first time, we had news agencies actually interviewing these garment workers, and actually getting their testimonies. The difference was that they were actually under rubble.

So, they’re the statistics, well, the bold statistics, 2,500 injured, 700 children left, and the Rana Plaza battle for compensation continues. But it did make a stink. Who makes our clothes? Where do they come from? It’s not the only thing in the supply chain. This is just about Uzbekistan’s cotton industry; 1.5 million children, who are alleged to be involved in the harvest. And this happens every year. They’re sent out into the fields around September time, and they will pick the harvest, which is then sold in the international market.

And this is Gulnara, this is the dictator’s daughter, and I put this in, because this is her at fashion week showing her own collection. So, you see this terrible dichotomy, of how we’re hiding this kind of slave labour in the fashion industry.

Can we do it better? Yes, we can. Now, I think the whole sustainable style movement has been slightly typified, and held back, because people fear tie-dye. They fear that we’re going to have to wear this kind of knit-your-own tofu hat aesthetic, and they’re really, really not up for it. So, what I did was get together with some friends, and we launched something, we didn’t call it granola chic, we called it the Green Carpet Challenge.

Now, we’re just trying to play around with some ideas. I love this. This is a photograph by a seminal fashion photographer called Lillian Bassman. And she didn’t mean anything sustainable when she did it, but I love the idea of more fashion mileage per dress.

So, here’s another figure I’d love you to remember, which is 30. Don’t buy anything unless you can guarantee to yourself that you’re going to wear it 30 times. That’s a really good marker.

So, we started the Green Carpet Challenge, and we charged designers with making us something sustainable. This is an Armani dress. And 40, that’s the number of A-Listers that we’ve sent down red carpets from the Oscars, to the Globes, to the whatever all in these sustainable outfits. We wanted to prove to the fashion industry, to the editors, to everybody watching, that it could be done, and it could be desirable. There’s more of them.

And we wanted to work in the supply chain, so, we started looking at things like the leather chain. 11 billion pairs of shoes are made every year. 60% of the leather goes to shoes.

Now, when you see a shoe and it says made in Italy, you think, ‘OK, great.’ And then you ask the people in the shop, and they say, ‘Yeah, the leather’s Italian.’ It can’t be, because if it were, the whole of Italy would be covered in cows. There’d be cows round the Trevi Fountain, it can’t be. No, they’re often from Brazil or China, and in Brazil, deforestation is being driven by the meat and leather industry. So, we wanted to make a market for clean leather. Leather that we could prove was zero deforestation.

So, we went to Gucci, who came up with this little bag, and I don’t think this looks sustainable at all. It’s not made of hemp, it’s not very granola, it just looks like a bag.

100+ companies have now signed the Bangladesh Fire Safety Accord. Now, I’m not going to explain why, because I’m running out of time, but it is, I think, a very, very important marker, and I think, given time, it could make a real, real difference.

What I would urge you to do is keep an eye, just keep abreast of what’s happening in fashion, and where you buy and who signed what; it’s really, really important.

2p, add that onto a £6 T-shirt, that would double the wages of a garment worker in Bangladesh. Now, I think that’s a cost that we can probably absorb. 24th April, that’s the other date I want you to remember 24, remember that number, it’s the anniversary of Rana Plaza, and it’s Fashion Revolution Day.

Thank you.

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