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    ALL THE RAGE

    Dec 15, 2019 9 minutes
    by JANE CLIFTON

    If the world stopped buying new clothes, that would do more to mitigate climate change than if we stopped all air travel and suspended shipping.

    Patently, this is not going to happen at Christmas and during summer, but fast fashion’s effect on greenhouse-gas emissions and environmental degradation is gradually dawning on consumers.

    Those anxious about throwaway fashion’s depredations have waited in vain for a David Attenborough albatross moment – a seabird filmed trying to feed its chick with a Prada sequin, or a fragment of last season’s Crocs choking a dolphin. Curiously, it was a trip by Melania Trump to Texas last year that came closest to a mind-focusing cut-through. It wasn’t a statement she intended to make, but her choice of a Zara-brand jacket emblazoned “I really don’t care, do U?” inadvertently proved a priceless conversation starter.

    The inexpensive jacket is nothing to a wealthy American president’s wife, but would have taken more than 3000 litres of water, a dollop of noxious chemicals, not to mention labour priced at well below anyone’s idea of a living wage, to reach the First Lady. It was one of 450 million similarly unsustainable garments Zara pumped out that year.

    Before anyone scoffs, “Hah! Those Trumps, eh?” it’s the same deal when any old Joe buys a cheap T-shirt. That’s 2700 litres of water, plus chemicals, for that scrap of cotton.

    As for the latest sensation, the €1 bikini, Paris-based apparel-industry writer Dana Thomas speculates, “Whoever physically sewed that bikini would be lucky to have been paid

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