Gene Ayres, Your Consumer Curmudgeon

I have long been about as far from the mainstream as a person can be when it comes to fashion awareness, or having the slightest interest in it. But things can change when you have a young daughter (step-daughter in my case) who is closing in on puberty at an alarming pace, whose first female idol was Barbie (this, a girl who was born and raised in China), whose subsequent favored role model is Reese Witherspoon as Elle Woods, fromLegally Blonde, and whose idea of education is to learn the latest girls’ popular cultural raves (is that an allowable word for a 6th grader?) or rages.

She’s a very smart girl, mind you, but a ready target of so much media marketing it’s really almost impossible for her to avoid these social, media and cultural pressures to be in style, in fashion, be cool, have the right look, wear the “right” brands, and so on. Meanwhile it’s impossible for a concerned parent to head it all off at the pass, or anywhere else. We limit TV to a couple shows a week (we allow PBS for kids, and don’t get Disney Channel, thankfully, but her friends all do). Internet means Disney.com pretty much period, and even there I was alarmed to hear the latest pop hit song about a girl proud to be a Barbie girl, who sang: “You can undress me anywhere.” Do eleven and twelve year old girls really need to hear this stuff, or am I sounding like an old grump (or curmudgeon, maybe?).

One writer of fashion news, Jasmine G. on Care2 wrote: “Green is the new black.” I like that. You have to be at least a little bit savvy to get the importance of this statement. But even though I almost never wear black myself, other than my Hard Rock Cafe London baseball cap and my black rain jacket, I know that all the really elite wear nothing but, or did, at least until now. I still don’t expect them to all start dressing up like Robin Hood either any time soon.

But the point is “green” really is in style now. We all know about green food, and are still waiting for those green jobs, and reducing our carbon footprint (leaving a green one?) and so on. One moneysaving green decision I made years ago was to quit dry cleaning anything. If I can’t throw it in the washing machine, or at least wash it in Woolite, forget it. I have taught this to my wife and daughter, who totally get it. Who needs to spend $10-$50 a week to wear clean clothes?

The idea of “green fashions” is deceptive, like most other professed movements (e.g. those “Smart Choice” junk food items). Organically grown cotton might be a righteous material to use, and even insist on, but the lack of any viable certification for these products, as yet, means that it could still be picked by a fume-spewing cotton gin, cut and processed in a factory by slave laborers, and shipped in an oil-spilling cargo ship that dumps trash the whole way across the Pacific. What will make such products important and viable, will be as and when garment makers (one example is Rogan Gregory’s “Rogan” collection) start efforts at every step and stage along the way to use, or at least encourage ethical and environmentally friendly processes in everything from design and marketing to growing, cutting and weaving and sewing. It’s a tall order, but it’s encouraging to see Gregory and others doing this.

Another way to approach this whole concept is the way I am trying to with my daughter. To teach her that name brands are not necessarily better at all, that if you must wear one, a previously owned one might be just fine, otherwise get a job! And just buy less, and make it last longer.

Then there’s this huge market of so-called beauty products. Most of them contain really toxic chemicals. I’ve written about that in the past and will devote a separate dispatch to this subject. Meanwhile, here’s what I tell my daughter: you are a beautiful girl, just like you are. You really don’t need to wipe black eye shadow all over your eyes in order to look like a hooker, or smear red lipstick, or eye liner, or eyelash lengthener, or face cream, or blush, or makeup or any of it, which will save her about a million dollars in her lifetime, because none of it enhances natural beauty. At best, it can only be a substitute, for those not blessed by nature, unlike she is.

Source: “Green Fashion: Is It More Than Marketing Hype?” Gloria Sin, Fast Company5/28/2008.