Seeing Interconnected Cycles

Being a conscientious fashion consumer today has become a tremendously difficult exercise. While the offerings are abundant at every price point, the consumer is not getting quality at every price point. The “best product at the best price” is an oxymoron. This purchasing inequity both impacts and exacerbates the broader context of the climate crisis. While making fashion accessible at low price points is lauded as desirable so everyone can participate, the execution of this “promise” comes at a steep cost: unacknowledged in the prevailing accounting practices and propelled by a chain of accountability lapses. This is fuelling a surplus of cheap and toxic products, which create environmental and economic Superfund problems, and a betrayal for the next generation of customers, who, without choice or say, must step into this forward-projected debt. In our information society the consumer has vastly more information than ever before. S/he is not just wallet conscious, but also broadly informed about overproduction, plastic pollution, waste offshoring and garment labour practices, as interconnectedness becomes more visible every day. Connecting the dots from producing fashionable items without safeguards, to the purchaser who shops them, traps them in a dilemma where it is no longer possible to dissociate the product from its production process.