“I always encourage people to think about the fact that we have to change the world and not just our wardrobes.” From the interview with the journalist Tansy Hoskins.
“I was able to write this book because I truly believe fashion is stunning and fascinating but terrible at the same time” says Tansy Hoskins, author and journalist, labor rights and fashion industry politics expert, in her book, she takes aim at capitalism
The Anti-Capitalist Book of Fashion — translated into Italian by Il Saggiatore as “Il libro della moda anticapitalista“.
The author uncovers the hidden truth behind our clothes, even the “designer” ones. The book transcends the idea of individual responsibility: it’s the system that needs a change. We live in a world that encourages us to consume more and more, manipulating us, while garment workers earn poverty-level wages in life-threatening conditions.
The opening pages of Hoskins’ book are dedicated, purposefully, to the Rana Plaza tragedy, in Bangladesh, in 2013, where over thousand people lost their lives in a collapsing factory. The high number of casualties was not only due to a lack of safety measures, but also due to low wages and the lack of labour unions.
“We can all change our light bulbs to make them more sustainable, or shop secondhand, but this is really not going to cut it.” Hoskins explained in the interview with TeleAmbiente.
“We’re not going to keep warming below 1.5 degrees without a really big change. So I always encourage people to think about the fact that we have to change the world and not just our wardrobes.”
How can we fight capitalism, overproduction, and fast fashion?
“I think fixing the fashion industry is part of fixing the whole of society. – Hoskins explains – The fashion industry makes about 100 billion bits of clothing every year, the footwear industry makes this 24 billion pairs of shoes, no matter which way you look at it, this is not an industry that is based upon need and I think it’s really important that we tackle the fashion industry to get it to be something that is producing based on need and not on greed, which is what we have at the moment.”
She adds: ”It’s a very big systemic problem that we have, but I also think it’s really important that people understand that the fashion industry is going to change,one way or the other. Either it changes because of the climate crisis, and because all of the supply chains just implode and the production on this scale just becomes impossible and we all end up living in like a giant waste dump, picking through the rubbish looking for shoes and clothes.
Or we change it to make it sustainable, and to bring it back within planetary boundaries and to have the people who are making fashion treated fairly and paid really well. So the fashion industry will change, and we are the people who, at this point in history, decide how it changes.”
Who Is Tansy Hoskins?
Tansy E. Hoskins was born in London in 1981. She is a journalist specialized in labor rights and fashion industry politics.
She writes for The Guardian, Al Jazeera, and i-D. She also produces documentaries on the injustices in the world of fashion.
Among her most notable books is Foot Work: “What Your Shoes Tell You About Globalisation”, translated into Italian as “Lavorare con i piedi. Ciò che le tue scarpe stanno facendo al mondo”. In this book, the author uses an everyday object—a pair of shoes—as a lens to explain our globalized, technological, polluting, and rapidly transforming world.
