Dana Thomas and Fashionopolis

For today’s blog post, I thought I would do something a little bit different. Rather than write about the current pandemic, I thought I’d devote some time to talking about an industry disruptor. By “disruptor,” I mean someone who is drastically altering or affecting the fashion industry. Be that positive or negative, these disruptors are making their names known within the fashion world.

Dana Thomas

When I first started doing research into the sustainable fashion landscape, Dana Thomas’s name popped up almost immediately. A former Style section writer for The Washington Post, as well as a cultural and fashion correspondent for Newsweek in Paris, Thomas never actually intended to devote her life’s work to fashion journalism (BOF Team, 2019). But upon working with some of the most renowned fashion editors and reporters in the world, Thomas quickly learned that the fashion industry plays just as vital a role in global conversation as politics and business. Now, Thomas uses fashion as a way to comment on “bigger picture” topics like sustainability (para. 3). In her latest book Fashionopolis: The Price of Fast Fashion and the Future of Clothes, Thomas dives into “the mammoth issue of the environment, (un)ethical consumption and the ‘unbridled capitalism’ that perpetuates the industry’s unsustainable growth” (para. 4). While these topics can feel heavy and overwhelmingly negative to the consumer, Thomas maintains the perspective that yes, there are serious issues with the fashion industry and how it operates, but there is hope in “smart technology” and the other industry disruptors who are tirelessly working towards a more sustainable future (para. 5).

The cover of Thomas’s latest book, Fashionopolis.

When reading Fashionopolis, the introduction particularly stood out in my mind. Thomas (2019) states, “Each day, we wake up and pose an elemental question: ‘What am I going to wear’” (p. 2)? I think this statement stands out to me because I have always found that many people consider clothing and fashion to be trivial, a shallow person’s interest. But with this introduction, Thomas points out that every single person asks themselves this question every single day, whether you recognize it or not. In the same way that we put careful consideration into the food we eat, we should put careful consideration into the clothing that we wear. We should consider where and how it is sourced. We should consider what is being used to create this clothing. We should consider the ways in which the people creating these clothes are being treated. We should consider the effects that the sourcing of this clothing has on the environment. For a question that each and every one of us asks ourselves every single day, you would think that we would all take a little more time to think about the clothing that makes up the answer.

Bye for now,

McGee

Check out this interview of Dana Thomas with PBS News Hours in 2019.