Fast Fashion’s Dirty Laundry: Journalist Alden Wicker Exposes the Industry’s Secrets
Alden Wicker is not your average fashion journalist. While others swoon over the latest trends and glossy magazine spreads, Wicker delves into the underbelly of the industry, exposing the hidden costs of our insatiable appetite for cheap clothes. From environmental exploitation to worker abuse, she shines a light on the dark side of fast fashion, challenging the glitzy facade and urging consumers to rethink their relationship with clothing.
Wicker’s journey began in 2013 when she founded the blog EcoCult, a platform dedicated to exploring the intersection of fashion and sustainability. Through in-depth investigations, thought-provoking articles, and engaging social media campaigns, she quickly gained a loyal following of eco-conscious consumers. Her book, “To Dye For,” delves even deeper, exposing the harmful chemicals and toxins used in the production of cheap clothing, their impact on our health and the environment.
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Wicker’s work has exposed a number of disturbing truths about the fast fashion industry:
- Environmental Degradation: The industry is a major contributor to climate change, water pollution, and textile waste. The production of a single cotton t-shirt, for example, requires 2,700 liters of water.
- Exploitative Labor: Fast fashion thrives on cheap labor, often in developing countries with lax regulations. Workers, mostly women and children, are often subjected to dangerous working conditions, low wages, and long hours.
- Chemical Contamination: Many fast fashion garments are laden with harmful chemicals, from dyes and finishing agents to pesticides used in cotton production. These chemicals can irritate the skin, cause allergic reactions, and even disrupt hormones.
Her Book, To Dye For
Her book, To Dye For, asks readers to consider the impact that chemically treated fabrics and synthetic fibers can have on your health. Wicker spent two years interviewing flight attendants, garment workers, physicians, researchers, industry experts, US consumers, and workers in the places where we source our clothes. She describes a supply chain rife with toxic chemicals—like formaldehyde and chromium, which are both carcinogenic—and endocrine-disrupting polyfluoroalkyl substances (also known as PFAS), which are linked to infertility and other health issues. And despite the potential harm, she discovered that the government has done little to protect consumers from the clothes they wear.
“We’re allowing chemicals to be poured indiscriminately into the environment, but we’re also bringing them into our homes,” Wicker tells me. The effects of these chemicals on textile workers and their communities were well-documented, but Wicker worries that the issue remained abstract to US consumers. “This isn’t an ‘over-there’ problem.”
Wicker got the idea for the book in 2019, when a radio producer called to ask if she could comment on a lawsuit filed by Delta employees against Land’s End alleging that the company’s uniforms were making them sick. “I’d heard nothing about fashion or textiles being toxic enough to affect people’s health,” she tells me. In fact, flight attendants at several major airlines were complaining of rashes, hair loss, fatigue, brain fog, heart palpitations, and breathing problems. “Their bodies would start shutting down,” she says. “They couldn’t work, and in some cases that completely ruined their lives.”
Early in the book we meet John, an Alaska Airlines flight attendant who developed a litany of health problems, including trouble breathing and blistering on his arms, right after he received a new uniform. Researchers at Harvard University attributed the attendants’ reactions to the long time they spent in them—flight attendants sometimes wear their uniforms for up to 24 hours at a time. A combination of chemicals, like anti-wrinkle and anti-stain resins and disperse dyes, can leach into the skin through sweat.
The flight attendants are just an extreme case of clothes making people sick. Over the course of her reporting, she dug up lawsuits against the children’s-clothing brand Carter’s and Victoria’s Secret, where people said their clothes gave them severe rashes. It’s difficult to prove the toxicity of a piece of clothing, she says, because a single shirt may have passed through several factories and can contain an untold number of chemicals.
“There’s no ingredient list in fashion,” Wicker says. “If you’re allergic to nickel or disperse dyes or formaldehyde, you can avoid it in beauty products, cleaning products, food products—but not in fashion.” In the book, she speaks with researchers who connect declining fertility rates and the rise of autoimmune diagnoses in the United States with chemicals found in our clothes.
She spent time with a textile worker in Tirupur, in southern India, whose arms and legs were covered in blisters that only started to disappear after she quit her job. She interviewed a California marketing executive whose dye allergies had caused her to scratch herself until she bled in her sleep. After eventually identifying the chemicals she was allergic to, she got rid of the clothes that were causing her reaction.
She never met John, the flight attendant, because he died in 2021, at age 66, of a heart attack. Wicker spoke with his widower, who is certain the Alaska Airlines uniforms caused the health problems that led to John’s death. “You can draw a straight line from Leelavathi in India to this woman in California and their skin issues,” Wicker says. “The woman in California has more resources than the garment worker, and they live very different lives, but living in A
Wicker’s work has not gone unnoticed. She has been featured in major publications like The New York Times, The Guardian, and Vogue, and has received numerous awards for her advocacy work. Her efforts have also helped to spark a broader conversation about the ethics of fast fashion and the need for sustainable alternatives.
Wicker’s message is clear: we cannot continue to consume fast fashion at the expense of people and the planet. She urges consumers to be more mindful of their clothing choices, to buy less and buy better, to support sustainable brands, and to hold the industry accountable for its practices.
(Source: The Nation )