Back in the 1960s, about 95% of the clothes were manufactured in the United States. In 2015, the US only produced 3% of their clothes. In the meantime, the global fashion industry was already worth more than 3 trillion dollars. Fast Fashion is moving ruthlessly toward a way of producing that only looks after the corporation's interest, its profits.
The True Cost is an eye opener on America’s clothing gluttony. Released in 2015, the “True Cost” is a documentary by Andrew Morgan on the social and environmental impact of the fashion industry. The documentary reveals the true cost of a 5$ t-shirt, the true cost of the fast fashion scheme: exploited garment workers, drenched farmers, degraded soils, polluted waters,…
Indeed, the documentary shows first the severe human cost of our cheap clothing. In 2015, one in every six people in the world work in the fashion industry, it is one of most labor dependent industries. In the “True Cost” we find ourselves in the middle of Bangladesh, a city filled with sweatshops and underpaid garment workers. The competition in India for clothes production is harsh, there is an enormous pressure from brands on manufacturers to decrease their prices. As a consequence, the garment workers are paid close to nothing and work in despicable and dangerous conditions. One of the biggest tragedies of the world of fashion occurred in Bangladesh, when the Rana Plaza collapsed and killed more than 940 people. The managers knew the building was unsafe, ignored an order to evacuate and forced the garment workers to keep working.
The garment workers are not the only victim of the fashion industry, the inhabitants of villages and the lands nearby the factories have to suffer the consequences as well. All through the documentary, we keep observing polluted lakes, decimated lands and overexploited soils. Ganga, known as the holiest river in India, is heavily polluted by the wastewaters of the leather factories. Indeed, Kanpur, a nearby city, is known as the capital of the leather production. Every day, factories in Kanpur dump more than 50 million liters of toxic wastewater into local farming soils, which eventually makes its way into local drinkable water. The regions nearby have known an exponential rise of cancers, skin diseases and liver failures.
Finally, another indirect victim of the fashion industry frenzies is us, the consumers. Through aggressive advertisements, we get convinced that the more we buy, the happier we will be. Every year, people buy more than 80 billion new clothing items in the US. It is 400% more than the amount they bought two decades ago. The documentary makes us realize the foolishness of our countless consumption by contrasting the Black Friday frenzies with desperate garment workers and devastated lands.
Although the topics are at times heavy and provoking, the overall tone of the documentary is not in a judgmental tone. It is informative and here to question our spending habits.
The “True Cost” calls out the biggest players of the fashion industry environmental disaster, such as H&M, the second largest clothing producers in history, and Monsanto, the biggest producer of pesticides (used for cotton crops). They are asked to take actions and to make a proper change. Though, the only ones capable of making that change happen globally are the customers. We can make a difference by consuming more responsibly and by refusing to turn a blind eye on the lives of those behind our clothes. As Lucy Siegle, a British environmental journalist, brilliantly frames it in the documentary: “We communicate who we are through our clothing”. And watching the “True Cost”, which reveals the dirty secret of fast fashion, is the first step to consuming responsibly and knowingly.
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