Date: 02-24-2019
Response to Alice Payne’s “The life-cycle of the fashion garment and the role of Australian mass market designers.”
Payne employs a surprisingly organized structure and easily understandable phrasings in this article, elaborating briefly yet clearly about a life-cycle perspective to look at sustainability in fashion. Thanks to the subtitles, which help a lot to organize the article, I get to have some idea about the life-cycle of a piece of clothing, from the day it’s made to the day it’s thrown away, and also that each and every stage of the process has a lot to do with sustainability.
It gets me thinking about how garments, as products on the market, should be treated. According to Payne, “Fast fashion clothing is inexpensive to purchase and hence perceived by consumers as disposable.” I very much agree with her that the price of a product hugely affects how much we think of it. Things that cost more get treated with more respect and care; on the other hand, the shocking inexpensiveness of clothing, which mostly results from mass-production, leads people to overlooking all the effort and resources that one piece of clothing actually takes. Because they are cheap, we think less before throwing them away, hence its shorter life. So, what I’m trying to say here, is that maybe, clothes deserve to be a little bit pricier – now that you’re not just buying a T-shirt, but also paying for everything that it takes for it to go from across the globe to the retail store that you’re at. Actually there is much in a T-shirt that could have cost more – think about a possible new technology that could be implemented to make its fabrics more durable, or better working conditions for workers at the factory – all of these can, and should, result in a reasonable rise of clothing prices. As long as brands are taking the whole life-cycle thing into consideration and thinking further about the life of their products, I believe consumers will gradually understand and accept higher prices as the consumption model changes for the better.