For nearly a year, A-ya spent up to 10 hours a day at Trax Apparel in Phnom Penh, the capital of Cambodia, where she stitched sportswear for brands such as Adidas for $300 a month. Soon after Covid-19 hit the shores of the Southeast Asian country, the company’s once-humming production lines suddenly ground to a halt. In April 2020, she was sent home. Two months after she was furloughed, A-ya was dismissed.

A-ya, who asked that her last name be withheld for privacy reasons, received her final wages plus $80 in suspension support from the Cambodian government — but not the severance payment she was legally owed. Without savings to help cushion the fall, she has bounced from temp position to temp position, unable to send money to her family and barely making ends meet herself.

“I’ve had to reduce my food expenses and cut down on electricity use,” A-ya says through a translator, adding that she regularly misses meals and goes hungry. “I eat only rice with a little bit of other food, but no sweets or fruit.” Her elderly parents, who rely on her for support, now skip breakfast, eat less for lunch, and frequently forgo meat.

More than 10,000 miles away in Haiti, Marline has struggled to feed her three children, the youngest of whom is 2, since last summer, when she was fired from Sewing International (a clothing producer for brands such as Gildan) after protesting what she described as employer wage theft. The pandemic had already hit the Caribbean in full force by then, and Marline, whose last name is also being withheld for privacy reasons, saw her monthly salary plunge from 15,000 Haitian gourdes (around $205 in US dollars) to 5,000 gourdes ($68 USD) as the factory sharply curtailed work hours due to slashed orders.

Marline hasn’t been able to find another job, and she’s already burned through what little savings and government assistance she had. Milk is now a luxury, and meat and fish have proven challenging to procure. “We are living day to day to survive,” she says.

The garment industry employs 40 million people worldwide — 60 percent of whom are in the Asia-Pacific region, according to the International Labour Organization — and yet A-ya and Marline’s stories are far from unique. Though the pandemic has upended the fashion industry, it’s the workers who can least afford it who are bearing the brunt of the pain that began nearly a year ago, when the Covid-19 outbreak was first declared a pandemic and Western retailers suddenly pumped the brakes on thousands of in-progress or finished orders. The preemptive cost-cutting move, though ethically murky, was perfectly legal due to a “force majeure” contract clause that let brands skirt any liability: The pandemic was tantamount to an “act of God” and, therefore, beyond their control.

This strikes those on the side of garment workers as ridiculous. Despite the very real economic shock, however, several retailers are not only hanging in there but are actually prospering, especially as people trade in constricting “outside” clothes for stretchier indoor ones. Meanwhile, activists say suppliers are teetering on the edge of financial ruin through no fault of their own. No matter how it’s spun, the dichotomy has been difficult to square.

The damage in Bangladesh, the world’s second-largest exporter of clothing after China, was particularly acute as suppliers suddenly stared down $3.1 billion in nixed orders. Though it wasn’t the only manufacturing hub affected, the South Asian nation — where apparel accounted for 84 percent of the country’s export revenue in its 2019 fiscal year — quickly became the poster child for an industry in a state of emergency. Met with public outcry and adept campaigning by grassroots groups such as Remake, some brands, including H&M and Zara owner Inditex, later reversed course and committed to pay up in full for completed orders. Countless more, however, didn’t, leaving factories in the lurch and their workers in the cold.

To date, brands still owe their supplier factories some $22 billion, says Scott Nova, executive director of the Worker Rights Consortium (WRC), a labor rights advocacy group based in Washington, DC. This has resulted in a “cascading effect” throughout the supply chain, including layoffs and increased incentives for factory owners to illegally reduce payroll costs by, say, forgoing government-mandated benefits. “Some suppliers went out of business and some are struggling to survive,” Nova says.

The response from brands wasn’t entirely knee-jerk: Insolvency was a real risk for retailers, such as Topshop owner Arcadia Group and J.C. Penney, which were on the brink of bankruptcy even before the contagion reared its head. For the most part, though, and despite throttled foot traffic and dampened consumer enthusiasm for spending, the industry hasn’t imploded. What it has revealed, however, are its apparent priorities.

Kohl’s, one of the deadbeat buyers on the WRC’s “naughty list,” canceled millions of dollars worth of garment orders from Bangladesh and South Korea in mid-March yet was able to fork over $109 million in dividends to shareholders the following month. In the meantime, Nova says, garment workers, whose livelihoods were already precarious, are facing starvation and destitution with even less recourse than before.

In August and September of 2020, WRC surveyed both employed and recently unemployed garment workers from 158 factories in Bangladesh, Cambodia, El Salvador, Ethiopia, Haiti, India, Indonesia, Lesotho, and Myanmar. The survey, the results of which were published in November, found that 20 percent of respondents had grappled with hunger on a daily basis since the pandemic began, and another 34 percent had gone hungry at least once a week. Some 75 percent of workers surveyed reported they had borrowed money or taken on debt since the start of the pandemic just to afford food. Like A-ya and Marline, the vast majority of garment workers — 88 percent, to be precise — said they’ve had to eat less on their diminished incomes.

The situation is dire even for those who have held on to full-time employment. In August, the Clean Clothes Campaign, the apparel sector’s largest alliance of labor unions and nongovernmental organizations, calculated that garment workers worldwide — excluding China — were deprived of anywhere between $3.19 billion and $5.79 billion in wages in March, April, and May alone due to Covid-19 cutbacks. Workers in South and Southeast Asia, the organization estimated, received 38 percent less pay than usual during those three months, though the number sometimes exceeded 50 percent in certain regions of India. Activists say unscrupulous factory owners have also wielded the pandemic as an excuse to purge unionized workers from their ranks or otherwise crack down on labor rights, which could roll back years of hard-won progress.

Nova describes a “hangover effect” that will linger long after Covid-19 is a memory and apparel production starts to return to pre-pandemic levels. The stacks of debt and health problems caused by malnutrition, for instance, won’t magically disappear, nor will the collective intergenerational trauma of barely surviving what many have dubbed a “humanitarian crisis.” Legal action has taken suppliers only so far. After a group of 21 Bangladeshi factories filed a $40 million lawsuit against the parent company of Sears in June 2020, they received only a fraction of the amount they were owed. Meanwhile, the position of suppliers is “weakening further” as the pandemic continues to rage and the power imbalances that were always there are thrown into even sharper relief, Nova says.

“Some [companies] are doing better than others, but all of them are doing well enough that they should have prioritized paying their bills and not push the economic pain of the pandemic down the supply chain [onto] workers,” he adds. “As long as they still exist and are operating and taking in revenue, they should be directing it to fulfill their obligations.”

It’s true US apparel sales tumbled by 25.6 percent from 2019 to 2020, though the contraction has mostly been from physical stores, according to analytics firm GlobalData. Online spending, in the meantime, has boomed, providing a lifeline in a sea of red ink. The outlook isn’t completely hopeless, either, since some clothing categories are performing better than others. For instance, sportswear — think leggings, sweatshirts, and bra tops — climbed 2.7 percent.

“In a depressed apparel market, sportswear was an area of growth,” says Neil Saunders, managing director of retail at GlobalData. “Consumers looked for comfortable clothing to wear around the home, buying things like comfortable leggings and sweatpants. A focus on being healthy and exercising more outdoors also helped sales of performance wear.”

Athleisure was already gaining steam; shelter-in-place rules and #WFHLife only accelerated its ascent. Online, products designed for running or jogging have been selling out as exercise fiends hunkering down at home seek alternatives to the gym. Those looking for a bit more zen have retreated to yoga, fueling a boom for retailers such as Lululemon, whose e-commerce business in North America shored up its net revenue in the third quarter of fiscal year 2020 by 22 percent to a whopping $1.1 billion.

And the rest of us? We — and Anna Wintour — just want all-day wear to slouch on our couch with maximum ease. Global fashion shopping platform Lyst said in an interview that global searches for joggers ballooned 123 percent in April compared with the same period the previous year. Leggings ticked up 48 percent.

Savvy brands are reading the tea leaves. Denim giant Levi’s, for instance, is doubling down on sweatpants and sweatshirts it says represents a “significant opportunity” for the future. Abercrombie & Fitch, says Saunders, has placed more emphasis on comfy joggers, even introducing PJs with a sweatpant silhouette as a “response to changing customer demand and tastes.” Taking it a step further, Athleta rolled out its first sleepwear line to provide “comfort for recovery.” Target, which clocked a whopping $1 billion in sales from a line of activewear and home-gym equipment it launched a year ago, recently joked that its workout wear is also its customers’ favorite work wear. Fashion isn’t dead, it’s just pivoting in this new reality, just like the rest of us.

And yet the contrast between brand balance sheets and the workers whose labor underpins them remains painfully stark. A survey of 50 leading apparel brands, published in November by the Business & Human Rights Resource Centre (BHRRC), a London nonprofit, found that 29 companies have remained profitable, yet nine of those have still not yet committed to paying for suspended or canceled orders. Just one company — PVH Corp., which operates Calvin Klein and Tommy Hilfiger — had persuaded its suppliers to institute a “pandemic policy” to ensure vulnerable workers such as pregnant women and union members are not being disproportionately targeted for layoffs, though several brands said they had a preexisting policy that covered this.

Only three — Aldi Nord, Aldi Sud, and Lidl, all supermarkets that happen to sell clothes — made it a new policy not to ask factories for price reductions or discounts on similar items commissioned during the previous season. In other words, brands are now paying less for the same items of clothing than they did before the pandemic, even though the margins were already razor thin. (Some brands, like Levi’s, have refuted this, however, with a spokesperson from the denim giant noting in an email that the way it determines the cost of products with its suppliers “has not changed.”)

It’s a strategy that pits suppliers’ interrupted cash flows and desperation for work against them, says Thulsi Narayanasamy, senior labor rights lead at the BHRRC. “So while factories are struggling to stay open and to keep on all of their workforce, brands are suddenly finding themselves in a position where they can drive prices down even further than they were before the pandemic,” she says. Retailers may no longer be outright canceling orders during the second Covid-19 wave, but they’re continuing to squeeze margins in subtler, more insidious ways.

When the WRC and the Center for Global Workers’ Rights at Penn State University polled 75 factories across 15 countries last year, 65 percent of suppliers reported that buyers have demanded discounts on new orders steeper than the year-over-year reductions they usually solicit. More than half of respondents admitted accepting orders below cost, and the majority said they’ll probably end up capitulating to those demands in time. Suppliers also have to wait longer after they complete and ship orders before they’re compensated. While only 34 percent of buyers took longer than 60 days in the Before Times, one in four buyers currently imposes payment terms of 120 days or longer.

This means that workers, who were already chronically underpaid, now have to work twice or thrice as hard to drum up the same poverty wages they received before Covid-19 struck, Narayanasamy says. Or they might end up taking on more debt from predatory moneylenders.

For suppliers, the changing cadence has had just as much of an adverse impact as order cancellations, “since factories are not being able to have a forecast and plan their capacity,” says Rubana Huq, president of the Bangladesh Garment Manufacturers and Exporters Association, the country’s largest trade group of apparel factory owners.

Buyers are also following a “go slow” approach by placing an average of 30 percent fewer new orders than they usually do this time of year, according to 50 factories surveyed by the organization. Export in December alone declined by 9.7 percent on a year-over-year basis. “It’s getting worse day by day,” Huq says. “Buyers are following a different approach to manage their supply chain.”

Boohoo is among the brands that have pivoted to activewear with flying colors.

In a September earnings report, the UK-based digitally native retailer, which churns out $5 crop tops and $12 mini dresses designed to mimic pricier looks flaunted by A-listers like Kim Kardashian, Kylie Jenner, and Cardi B, credited the first wave of lockdowns for a surge in new customers who “migrated to the safety of online shopping” to sate their needs. The company reacted “quickly to the changes in demand from home working” by ramping up its offering of activewear, loungewear, and tops, to what it described as a great success.

The pivot was prescient. In January, the company, which also owns the PrettyLittleThing, Karen Millen, Nasty Gal, Oasis, and Warehouse brands, recorded a sales bump of 40 percent to £661 million ($903.4 million) in the four months leading up to December 31, outstripping analysts’ predictions of 29 percent growth as consumers continued to click “buy.” It told investors it anticipated revenues to rally by 36 percent to 38 percent for the financial year ending in February, exceeding its previous — and already upgraded — guidance of between 28 percent and 32 percent. A few weeks ago, Boohoo confirmed it was scooping up Debenhams — once known as Britain’s favorite department store — for £50 million ($68.5 million), along with Arcadia Group’s Burton, Dorothy Perkins, and Wallis for £25.2 million ($34.6 million).

Rival Asos announced this month that it will be snapping up Arcadia Group’s flagship Topshop, Topman, and Miss Selfridge brands for £265 million ($363.3 million), though it’s unclear if either it or Boohoo will be taking responsibility for the latter’s debts with suppliers. (Asos did not respond to a request for comment.) Business for the e-tailer, which sells more than 850 brands, including its own, has also boomed during lockdown. In a recent earnings report, Asos said revenue growth in the four months to December 31 surpassed expectations due to a “strong product performance” with a “dynamic reshaping of offer in the second half” to line up with customer demand in “lockdown categories” such as skincare and, yes, activewear.

What makes Boohoo’s story all the more remarkable, however, is the fact it had just weathered a storm of revelations about illegally low wages and unsafe conditions at its subcontractor factories in Leicester, England, a clothing manufacturing hub that sets aside as much as 80 percent of its output for the retailer. (Boohoo did not respond to a request for comment.) Even as the company rushed to disavow misbehaving suppliers, rolling out an initiative intended to improve corporate governance and raise standards across its supply chain, Boohoo stumbled into another imbroglio — this time involving workers in Pakistan allegedly making 29 pence an hour in factories stacked like tinderboxes and one stray spark away from tragedy.

In December, when UK ministers of parliament questioned Boohoo chair Mahmud Kaman about its “99 percent off” Black Friday sale, which was shredded by critics for selling dresses for as little as 8 pence, and called into question how much its workers were paid, Kaman was impassive. “The fact that we’re talking about it today means that that marketing worked,” he said.

But activists question the true cost of such low prices, which are almost always the result of worker exploitation. Last July, Leicester saw a localized spike in Covid-19 cases, which some blamed on Boohoo suppliers that continued to operate during Britain’s first lockdown. (Boohoo later said it had “terminated relationships” with those factories.) Similar outbreaks have been recorded at garment facilities across Los Angeles, including at distribution centers operated by fellow Instamous brand Fashion Nova, whose suppliers a 2019 Labor Department investigation found owed workers $3.8 million in back pay.

“The trifecta of order cancellations, delays in payment, and then these price cuts has meant that workers are increasingly in a more and more precarious situation,” says Ayesha Barenblat, founder and CEO of Remake, whose #PayUp campaign on social media helped unlock billions in owed debts to suppliers.

There’s also a tie-in to the racial injustice protests that erupted across the world last summer. “The pandemic winners happen to be billionaire white men [making a profit] predominantly on the labor of Black and brown women who are being pushed deeper and deeper into a cycle of poverty.” Women comprise roughly 80 percent of the garment sector workforce, according to the International Labour Organization (ILO).

While the governments of various garment-producing nations have rolled out stimulus programs to prop up their respective sectors, the aid hasn’t proven sufficient, labor groups say. They’re urging brands to establish some kind of “wage assurance fund” to ensure that all workers who make and handle clothing in their supply chains receive what they are owed in accordance with labor laws and international standards. Remake recently kicked off a #ShareYourProfits campaign to ask the 12 top-performing brands — Adidas, Amazon, Asos, Gap, H&M, Levi Strauss, Lululemon, Primark, Under Armour, Uniqlo owner Fast Retailing, Nike, and Inditex — to reserve 1 percent of their net revenue for garment worker relief and pay out 10 cents more per unit of apparel into a severance guarantee fund.

It’s not too much to ask, Barenblat says; the brands Remake is targeting raked in more than $1 billion in profits during 2020. “We know from looking at year-end earning statements that some brands have gone back to [the same] order volumes [from] 2019 — so this is a lot of athleisure brands because it seems people are still buying comfortable clothes at home,” she says.

Whenever this subject is raised, retailers typically say they’re already helping garment workers, citing their involvement in the ILO’s Call to Action, which secures financing to promote “income protection and business continuity” in the garment sectors of Bangladesh, Cambodia, Ethiopia, and Indonesia.

A spokesperson for H&M, one of the few brands that responded to Vox’s queries with more than a boilerplate statement, says that while the brand “is positive to all initiatives that can lead to an improved textile industry — and of course eager for this to happen quickly — we must simultaneously take actions that contribute to systemic change that will stand the test of time.”

“As advised by the ILO, and global trade unions that are the voice of the workers, we will continue our work to support social protection, freedom of association, and stable wage processes,” the spokesperson added in an email. “We will of course also continue to be a fair and responsible buyer, including committing to contractual agreements.”

The International Organization of Employers, International Trade Union Confederation, and IndustriAll Global Union, which are coordinating the ILO effort, said in an emailed joint statement that many brands are taking “additional action to support manufacturers and their workforce in the pandemic.”

“Brands and their suppliers have shown innovation and mutual understanding in finding solutions which are viable for the parties concerned,” they add. “However, the ability of brands is often limited by the extremely challenging situation they face due to the impact of continued or renewed lockdowns in important markets.”

Members of the American Apparel and Footwear Association, such as Carter’s and Walmart, might tout their support for the US Agency for International Development-led memorandum of understanding, which seeks to “alleviate hardships” faced by workers in Bangladesh, Cambodia, Sri Lanka, and Vietnam, though the agreement doesn’t provide financial support so much as serve as a vehicle for facilitating dialogue, a USAID spokesperson told Vox. (On the other hand, it’s just “one component” of USAID’s efforts to safeguard workers’ rights and respond to Covid-19, the spokesperson added.)

Labor advocates such as Barenblat insist that these initiatives are by and large toothless, providing brands with the appearance of taking responsibility despite nebulous actions and few to no financial stakes. “It really is just window dressing because there’s no money [from brands] attached,” she says.

To be fair, there are brands that have shelled out, including H&M, which donated $1.3 million to nonprofits like Save the Children and WaterAid to provide 76,000 Bangladeshi women and their families with emergency relief. Levi’s says it is disbursing $3 million in Covid-19 grants while ensuring that all  suppliers  have access to “working capital financing,” i.e. low-interest loans. Amazon told Vox it has “supported organizations who are providing critical assistance to factories and workers across the globe,” including a collaboration with the nonprofit Nest to distribute $500,000 in economic relief value to 57 businesses. The burning question is whether their respective largesses are commensurate to the scale of the problem or whether they’re papering over the cracks.

In the case of the Call to Action, not only has the funding to date proven insufficient, Barenblat says, but it’s also European taxpayers who are footing the bill, not brands. “Why should government taxpayer money be bailing out their supply chain workers when they themselves are sitting on cash?” she asks. “There just doesn’t seem to be a sense of urgency or empathy from any of these brands when it comes to protecting the dignity of the very people who have seen them through the pandemic.”

Because “time is of the essence,” she adds, Remake has set up a GoFundMe, with an initial goal of $10,000, to raise direct relief for garment workers. All proceeds will go to providing garment workers with emergency food and medical relief through front-line organizations such as Awaj Foundation in Bangladesh, Stand Up Movement Lanka in Sri Lanka, and the Garment Worker Center in Los Angeles. “We’re calling on citizens to do what brands are refusing to do,” Barenblat says.

Despite widespread job losses, Farhana has managed to hang on to her job at Zoom Sweaters in Bangladesh, where she sews garments for a brand called Blend; her husband did not. As many as 357,000 of Bangladesh’s 4.1 million garment workers — or more than six times the official figure of 56,372 — have become unemployed due to the pandemic, according to a recent survey by the Centre for Policy Dialogue. The factory’s management hasn’t paid out its workers’ annual leave benefits, which are required by law. To afford medicine for her father-in-law, Farhana, which is not her real name, has succumbed to loans with steep interest rates.

“The price of basic goods has increased, so we are generally just eating eggs and potatoes,” she says through a translator. “There were a few months during the pandemic when we couldn’t even afford potatoes. Before the pandemic, we could afford to eat chicken weekly, but nowadays we can only afford to eat it twice a month. We love beef but there is no way we can afford it these days.”

Narayanasamy from the BHRCC worries that with workers no longer receiving their full wages, discussions of a living wage that provides more adequate coverage for food, shelter, and other necessities could fall by the wayside. “What we’re looking into is, what would that situation have been for workers if they had originally been paid a living wage?” she says. “And what we’re really finding is that their position would have been so different. Economic precarity is hardwired into the fashion industry as a whole — it’s not just that exploitation or labor rights abuses are a symptom of the fashion industry, it’s that they are the fashion industry at this point.”

Last month, three workers’ rights groups — the Asia Floor Wage Alliance, the Clean Clothes Campaign, and the Worker-Driven Social Responsibility Network — proposed a legally binding agreement, similar to the Accord on Fire and Building Safety that emerged in the wake of the 2013 Rana Plaza collapse in Bangladesh, that would require brands to pay an additional “living wage contribution” on every order they place with their suppliers. Existing initiatives, such as ACT (Action, Collaboration, Transformation), which count H&M, Primark, and Inditex as members, are not legally enforceable and have not produced wage increases to date.

“It’s about time that a credible proposal is made in which brands are truly held accountable for the dreadful circumstances under which workers and their families have been living for decades while they, the brands, were making gigantic profits,” Anannya Bhattacharjee, president of the Garment and Allied Workers Union, said in a statement when the initiative was announced. “Brands’ [corporate social responsibility] reports are full of promises regarding wages. Now it’s time for them to put their money where their mouth is.”

There are other signs a reckoning is coming for the inequities that have long plagued the sector, not as a bug but a feature that serves brands to the exclusion of almost everything — and everyone — else. Earlier this year, nine trade organizations from Bangladesh, Cambodia, China, Myanmar, Pakistan, and Vietnam banded together to create the Sustainable Textile of the Asian Region — or STAR, for short — network to negotiate better purchasing practices with brands. More countries may be slated for inclusion.

One common excuse from fashion companies is that they don’t typically own the factories they source from, limiting the amount of oversight or control they have on labor conditions. But it’s precisely that — an excuse, Narayanasamy says. Most of the bigger brands have offices based in the countries they produce in, she says. And their relationship with suppliers is necessarily close because they have to monitor what goes on in the factories.

“Brands have the ability to dictate what clothes look like right down to the last stitch,” she adds. “Everything that we see when we buy clothes has been determined entirely by the brand, not by the supplier factory. If they’re able to do that, if they’re able to be continually sending orders to factories and get those clothes on time [and] in exactly the way that they determine, then they also have the power to determine what happens to those workers in their supply chain.”

At a Cost Plus World Market in Oakland, California, masked shoppers are filing in with their holiday near-misses. They’re not just bringing back Ikat dinnerware and burlap wall art that didn’t quite hit the gifting mark, however. The Happy Returns “bar” within accepts unwanted items from digitally native brands like Eloquii, Everlane, and Rothy’s, which it refunds with a scan of a QR code. 

Similar bars in malls, college campuses, and inside stores like World Market across the country are doing an equally brisk trade. Online return rates are three to four times higher than brick-and-mortar stores, David Sobie, the company’s co-founder and CEO, explains. And amid the pandemic, returns, like e-commerce, are surging like never before. 

As packages flood into homes, however, so does the packaging that keeps their contents intact. It’s something that people like Ayeshah Abuelhiga, founder of the Mason Dixie Biscuit Co. in Baltimore, constantly worries about. Packaging waste is a big part of why, save for a brief foray into online shopping in 2019, Abuelhiga has mostly resisted selling her frozen biscuits, scones, and rolls online. Shipping her products requires insulated containers, packed with dry ice and swaddled with bubble wrap, that are designed to keep the products from spoiling before they’re ready to pop into the oven. Another reason is the tacked-on costs of all that stuff made little financial sense. 

“It didn’t seem like a good value proposition,” she says. “Consumers were just paying for dry ice and packaging.” Then Covid-19 hit. Suddenly, Abuelhiga says, her customers were complaining that they were stuck at home or that the physical stores in their neighborhoods didn’t have the items in stock. So in July, the Mason Dixie Biscuit Co. threw the “shop online” button back up. In a matter of weeks, Abuelhiga was fielding thousands of orders. As the holidays crept up and people splurged on variety packs with names like “Treat Yo Self” and “Miss You a Waffle-Lot” as gifts or for self-care, sales skyrocketed to $200,000 per month. “We’re doing about 350 percent growth,” she says. To manage the deluge, the company has increased its staff by five times, with three dedicated to just packaging orders. 

Abuelhiga tries to minimize the amount of unsustainable packaging she uses. She employs space-efficient “eco liners” made with recyclable materials and encourages bundling to avoid the kind of ridiculously excessive “packaging fails” that are frequently memed on social media. But she admits all that waste keeps her up at night. “I don’t know how it doesn’t,” she says. 

Mason Dixie Biscuit Co. is far from the only company grappling with this problem. With millions of people turning to online shopping for everything from groceries to toilet paper to sweatsuits, the pandemic has fundamentally altered the way people shop. Digital sales ballooned 71 percent in the second quarter of 2020 and 55 percent in the third, according to Salesforce, creating a wave of packages — and packaging — that is ultimately destined for the landfill, incinerator, or the larger environment. 

Environmentalists were already bracing themselves for the glut of padded mailers, corrugated fiberboard, shrink wrap, and bouncy air pillows the rise in online shopping promised to leave in its wake. The pandemic has only accelerated the timeline. Corrugated box shipments have climbed since March, when they jumped 9 percent year over year, according to the Fiber Box Association. Technavio, a market research firm, estimates that demand for filled-air products is poised to swell by $1.16 billion between 2020 and 2024 because of the spike in online sales. 

While paper packaging isn’t entirely benign — some 3 billion trees are pulped every year to produce 241 million tons of shipping cartons, cardboard mailers, void-fill wrappers, and other paper-based packaging, according to forest conservation group Canopy — single-use plastics present the bigger concern for environmentalists because they can persist in the environment, sometimes for hundreds of years. And their recyclability is often oversold. Currently, less than 14 percent of the nearly 86 million tons of plastic packaging produced globally each year is recycled. The vast majority is landfilled, incinerated, or left to pollute waterways and poison wildlife.

“The film and wrap that goes into bubble mailers aren’t something that most curbside recycling programs accept,” says David Pinsky, senior plastics campaigner at Greenpeace. “There’s also the question of contamination. If one of those bubble mailers, say from Amazon, gets to a Material Recovery Facility, it’s going to disrupt the automated machines and take away valuable time and money that can be focused on plastics with viable markets.”

Greenpeace recently sued Walmart, in fact, for violating California consumer protection laws with “false and misleading” labels about the recyclability of the Big Box store’s disposable plastic products and packaging. Most consumers in California, it says, lack access to facilities that are capable of segregating these products from the general waste stream to be recycled. With the dearth of end markets for turning these plastics into new items — China struck a body blow to the industry when it severely curtailed imports of certain recyclables, including most plastics, in 2019 — such products are “destined to end up in landfills or the natural environment.”

That’s not to say packaging doesn’t serve a purpose. It’s there because it does a really good job at protecting things, says Adam Gendell, associate director of the Sustainable Packaging Coalition, whose members include companies like 3M, Dow, and Georgia-Pacific Packaging. 

There’s even a sustainability angle — sort of: The “embodied environmental investment” of a product, Gendell says, is usually several times greater than that of the package that surrounds it. In other words, replacing an Instant Pot because it arrives damaged is more expensive, environmentally speaking, than any attendant styrofoam or bubble wrap. For all its ills, plastic packaging is extremely lightweight, which cuts fuel consumption from transportation and ultimately reduces greenhouse-gas emissions, he says. It’s also ridiculously cheap. While sustainable packaging alternatives made from mushroom roots or cornstarch are well and good, they’re up against some steep competition without government intervention or significant buy-ins from boldface names.

Speaking of which, Amazon is a name that comes up frequently in the packaging discourse, and for good reason. It holds the largest share of US retail online sales at nearly 39 percent, according to eMarketer, with Walmart trailing at a distant No. 2 with 5.3 percent. 

A recent study by Oceana found that Amazon generated 465 million pounds of plastic packaging waste in 2019. The number of air pillows alone, it said, could circle the globe 500 times. The environmental group further estimated that up to 22.44 million pounds of Amazon’s plastic packaging ended up in the world’s freshwater and marine ecosystems as pollution in the same year, or “roughly equivalent to a delivery van’s worth of plastic being dumped into major rivers, lakes, and the oceans every 70 minutes.”

“The amount of plastic waste generated by the company is staggering and growing at a frightening rate,” Matt Littlejohn, senior vice president at Oceana, says in a statement. “Our study found that the plastic packaging and waste generated by Amazon’s packages is mostly destined, not for recycling, but for the landfill, the incinerator, or the environment including, unfortunately, our waterways and sea, where plastic can harm marine life. It’s time for Amazon to listen to its customers, who, according to recent surveys want plastic-free alternatives, and make real commitments to reduce its plastic footprint.”

An Amazon spokesperson tells Vox, however, that Oceana has “dramatically miscalculated” its use of plastic and “exaggerated” it by over 350 percent. “We use about a quarter of the plastic packaging estimated by Oceana’s report,” the spokesperson says, noting that the company has reduced the weight of its outbound packaging by more than a third since 2015 and has eliminated nearly 1 million tons of packaging material.

Whatever Amazon’s plastic footprint in 2019, however, it was likely higher in 2020. The pandemic created boom times for the company, which reported net sales of $96.2 billion in the third quarter of 2020, a 37 percent increase from 2019. During the holiday season, the online giant delivered 1.5 billion toys, home products, beauty and personal care products, and electronics worldwide for what it called a “record-breaking” season.

Online shopping’s upward trajectory isn’t likely to reverse course any time soon. Experts predict this behavior will remain sticky even after the pandemic is contained. A survey of 2,000 American adults conducted by McKinsey & Company in November, for example, found a 40 percent net increase in intent among respondents to spend online post-Covid-19.

Plus, the stream of packages doesn’t go one way. Even before Christmas, retailers were bracing themselves for twice as many returns as they fielded last year, and not always in their original packaging, which could mean even more plastic and paper. Return rates are higher for online shopping, Happy Returns’ Sobie says, because of a practice called “bracketing” where customers essentially buy to try. Because people who buy clothes or shoes online aren’t able to try them on, they might buy multiple sizes and then return the ones that don’t fit. They might buy multiple versions of the same piece of clothing if they’re iffy about which color looks best based on a picture on a phone, then return the ones that look least attractive in natural light. “A lot of e-commerce purchases end up having returns kind of built into them, just based on the way people shop,” he says. 

Rethinking the definition of packaging might be a way out of this morass, but current efforts remain niche and limited in their uptake. To reduce single-use materials, Happy Returns employs reusable containers to consolidate and bulk-ship box-free returns at its “return hubs” in California and Pennsylvania for sorting, processing, and routing to their final destinations. Startups like RePack and LimeLoop offer reusable shipping pouches for delivering online apparel orders. Asos, one of 400 businesses and governments that have pledged to reduce plastic waste as part of the Ellen MacArthur Foundation’s New Plastic Economy Global Commitment, will be trialing reusable mailing bags at the start of the year. 

Central pickup locations, such as Amazon lockers, could help curtail packaging waste, with the added advantage of reducing excess traffic on streets and double parking by trucks in residential areas, says Sarah M. Kaufman, associate director of the New York University Rudin Center for Transportation. Trucks tend to have visibility issues that make them less safe to operate in pedestrian-heavy environments, she says, noting the spiraling number of truck-related fatalities. “Because of Amazon, we’ve all expected shipping to be free everywhere we shop, but in fact the costs of shipping are quite high on a societal level,” Kaufman says. 

She says, however, that the guilt of online shipping shouldn’t be yoked on the shoulders of consumers, particularly since staying home and limiting contact with other people is the best way of limiting spread of the virus. “Yes, we need to make a lot of changes to our consumerism, but we also have to have empathy for who is shopping online and why,” Kaufman says.  

Indeed, with the proper investments and will to act, corporations can figure this out. 

Following India’s announcement that it would be phasing out single-use plastics, Amazon India managed to eliminate nonrecyclable plastic packaging from fulfillment centers in the country. In June, the company announced it had achieved a “100 percent successful transition” away from single-use plastics. Roughly 40 percent of Amazon’s orders in India, in fact, are shipped in their original boxes without an outer box or other packaging.

Amazon’s packaging and materials lab has also developed a lightweight paper mailer that could significantly reduce the company’s plastic footprint if used in place of plastic mailers, Oceana’s report noted.

The myth that plastic can be recycled or even effectively managed is just that — a myth, says Greenpeace’s Pinsky. “And of course we know that that’s not the case,” he says. “It’s intrinsically linked to the climate crisis. So we need to look for other options.”

About once a week, I slide open what I’ve taken to calling my “drawer of shame,” gaze at the plastic cutlery and wooden chopsticks that seem to multiply with each year, and then slam it shut with a sigh. You probably have one, too. Its contents (from takeout orders, from cross-country flights, from who knows where) do not spark joy, but I’m wracked with too much guilt to throw them away. They’ve survived a move from the city to the suburbs, which means I have plastic forks older than my daughter, who turns 11 at the end of the month. They’re a visual reminder of the plastics I have disposed of: Styrofoam clamshells, sushi trays, waxy paper pails, clear salad bowls, double-walled soup containers, sauce cups, and — deep heave — straws. And lids. So many lids.

Since plastic never truly goes away, you might say our entire planet is one giant drawer of shame. You can blame it on our obsession with convenience, and nowhere do we require convenience more than in the food and drink we order for takeaway and delivery. Take cups. Americans throw out 120 billion disposable cups every year, or 363 paper, plastic, and Styrofoam cups per person. Even the most prosaic coffee cups come with a sleeve, a stirrer, some sugar packets, and — you betcha — a lid.

“All this stuff for just one cup that will be thrown in the trash,” says Samantha Sommer, program manager of ReThink Disposable, a Clean Water Action initiative that transitions businesses from single-use products. “That’s insane.”

We’re inundating the planet with single-use plastic that isn’t being recycled

While we haven’t quantified how much of our plastic waste stems specifically from takeout, takeaway, or food delivery, we do know we’re drowning in it. In the United States, packaging as a whole — that is, for food, beverages, cosmetics, and medications — accounts for 30 percent of municipal solid waste. In 2017, this amounted to 80.1 million tons. 

The rise of app-based food-delivery services like DoorDash, Grubhub, and Uber Eats, which make it easier than ever to order in and chill, isn’t helping. At least one research firm posits that the US online food-delivery market will grow 6.5 percent year over year from $22 billion in 2019 to $28 billion by 2023. Grubhub alone (which also owns Seamless) racked up $5.1 billion in gross food sales — a 34 percent increase from $3.8 billion in 2017. The same year, Uber Eats ballooned 149 percent to $1.5 billion.

The problem is that recycling, as David Pinsky, an anti-plastics campaigner from Greenpeace tells me, isn’t the silver bullet the plastics industry has made it out to be. While the average American generates 234 pounds of plastic waste every year, no more than 9 percent is typically recycled. The number is even lower now that China, once the largest buyer of America’s waste, has declared all but the highest quality of plastics verboten. Another 12 percent of plastics is incinerated, which results in toxic fumes. But a staggering majority of the plastics we use every day are buried in landfills (a.k.a. greenhouse-gas monsters), polluting coastlines and oceans, or befouling our drinking water and food chain. 

This has everything to do with the way convenience packaging is designed and produced. Ketchup packets, for instance, aren’t recyclable because they comprise multiple layers of plastic and foil (same with Doritos bags or Capri Sun pouches), which are next to impossible to pull apart. Polystyrene clamshells and cutlery are easier and cheaper to make than reclaim, so recyclers don’t try. Even “technically recyclable” plastics can become landfill fodder if they harbor food residues that lower their quality and therefore value. 

Still, campaigns like Keep American Beautiful — which was, surprise, formed by food and beverage companies such as Coca-Cola and PepsiCo — have served only to promote what the author Finis Dunaway calls “eco-anxiety” by yoking the responsibility for trash on individual consumers, not corporate producers. “There’s been a strategic decision to focus on personal responsibility and accountability,” Pinsky says. In other words, we’ve been so laser-focused on recycling as a personal mandate (and fount of shame), we rarely ask ourselves if there’s a better alternative. 

Instead of bringing your own, try borrowing a reusable

In the United States, an entire cottage industry has sprung up around “zero waste,” complete with reusable cutlery, reusable straws, reusable lunch boxes, and reusable to-go cups. But living this lifestyle requires dedication and work. And for most people, eco-anxious or not, convenience trumps work any day.

Go Box is one company that wants to take the hassle out of reusables. It services some 100 restaurants and cafes in and around Portland and San Francisco and is launching a partnership with Dig Inn, a fast-casual chain in New York City. Eventually, Go Box hopes to integrate its technological backend with online delivery platforms. But for now, customers pay a monthly subscription of $3.95 for the use of a reusable container, which they can check out at a participating vendor using a mobile app. When they’re done eating, they can drop off their container at a designated site for Go Box to collect, wash, and redistribute to its vendors. 

Vendors pay a fee, as well: 25 cents for every container, which is made from food-safe polypropylene, one of the few plastics with a ready market. With 3,500 subscribers and counting, Jocelyn Quarrell, owner and CEO of Go Box, estimates the company has saved more than 225,000 single-use containers since 2011. “I think the fact consumers are paying in some and vendors are paying in some does a good job of communicating the value of the service,” she says. “It also brings to light how the true cost of single-use containers is often hidden to consumers.” 

Ozzi, which operates out of Rhode Island, is a similar system popular with cafeterias on military bases, corporate headquarters, and college campuses such as Rhode Island School of Design and the University of Wisconsin-Madison. It offers what Tom Wright, the company’s president, describes as a complete ecosystem, with a family of products that includes polypropylene clamshells, cups, and soup bowls. It uses a token system to encourage returns. Patrons use a token to “pay” for a reusable container. They get another token when they return their used container to a special machine, which houses the used foodware until it’s ready to be carted away by dining services for washing and drying. 

Ozzi is a decent enough compromise, Wright says, between individual needs and the greater good. People will do the right thing, but only if there’s no friction.“We’ve become a society whereby people want the convenience of enjoying a meal where they want it, when they want it, how they want it,” Wright says. 

Soon he hopes to be able to take retired containers and recycle them into new ones, creating a completely closed-loop system, but already the impact has been immediate. With 100 locations across the country — and world domination on the horizon — Ozzi has eliminated the use of 5 million single-use containers since 2014.

One product you’ll be hearing a lot more of is Vessel, a reusable cup service that piloted in New York City, rolled out in Boulder, Colorado, and is making its way to Berkeley in California. Like Go Box and Ozzi, Vessel is tech-enabled, which facilitates real-time inventory management. It’s free for customers to use. The only time they’re charged is if they don’t return the cup, which they check out from a cafeteria or coffeehouse by scanning a QR code “like you might a library book,” says Dagny Tucker, who co-founded Vessel in 2014.

Tucker, who used to teach systems thinking at Parsons School of Design, homed in on the cup because it’s “one of the most highly visible signs of disposability.” Vessel’s impact, too, is purposefully visible. Each time you use one of its stainless-steel mugs, a cartoon dolphin leaping out of a rainbow appears on your phone to thank you and tell you how much water, CO2, and waste you’ve saved. Using a Vessel cup 24 times, Tucker says, scores an environmental “win” over a paper cup. Even better, it can alter behavior. 

“We know, based on our research in New York City, that people who previously identified as not being sustainably minded rethought all their single-use disposable habits after using Vessel for three weeks,” Tucker says. “[There’s a] power in allowing people to see, ‘Oh, I am having an impact,’ because while collective action makes the big difference, you only get there through individual choices.”

Cities are fed up with plastic waste, too

Vessel has at least one prominent backer: the aforementioned Berkeley, which is currently piloting the service at its University of California campus and Telegraph Avenue area. The program stemmed from the passing of Berkeley’s Single-Use Disposable Foodware and Litter Reduction Ordinance, the first phase of which went into effect in March. Starting January 1, 2020, vendors must charge 25 cents for every disposable cup provided.

The fee is meant to incentivize customers to bring their own cups and nudge vendors to shift to reusables, says Miriam Gordon, program director at Upstream Solutions, one of the environmental nonprofits that helped create the ordinance. The law mimics California’s single-use plastic bag ban, which she says has reduced plastic-bag litter in the state’s waterways and beaches by up to 80 percent.

“Social behavior research shows customers are much more likely to change their behavior to avoid added cost than in response to a discount or some kind of loyalty incentive program,” Gordon says. “That’s why the Berkeley ordinance mandated visible charges for the cups: The consumer has to see the charge.”

The Berkeley ordinance goes beyond cups, of course. As of now, any accessory disposable foodware items must be provided only upon request. By January, all disposable foodware items must be certified compostable. And in July, all plates, bowls, and cutlery for on-site dining must be reusable. 

The city’s legislation is the first of its kind but similar bans on single-use plastics have since emerged elsewhere in the state. Several jurisdictions around the Bay Area are lining up to do the same, the most prominent of which is San Francisco, whose Single-Use Foodware Plastics, Toxics and Litter Reduction Ordinance, introduced in July, goes further by attaching an additional 25-cent charge to to-go food containers. 

All of this, says Lee Hepner, legislative aide to Aaron Peskin, the San Francisco supervisor who shepherded the legislation, is designed to “foster a market for reusable manufacturers to step in” with innovative alternatives to the disposable model. A formal ordinance also signals to politicians they need to begin developing outreach and education materials, along with financing options to “help the industry evolve.”

Cities aren’t passing these ordinances just to score environmental brownie points. Even in the best circumstances, up to 60 percent of so-called “recyclable” plastics are completely unmarketable and only suitable for landfill, says Martin Bourque, executive director of the Ecology Center, which handles curbside recycling for Berkeley and advocated for the ordinance. 

Recycling is costly, too. Berkley currently shells out $75 for every ton of plastic waste it sends to southern California for optical sorting — an automated process that uses a combination of cameras and laser sensors to accept or reject objects — because “there are so many pieces and it’s so lightweight,” he says. It’s also for this reason around a third of all plastics escape collection. With the San Francisco Bay Regional Water Quality Board pushing for zero stormwater-borne trash in the bay by 2022, local jurisdictions are scrambling to spend millions on storm-drain capture devices. Servicing those drains, in turn, requires more taxpayer dollars.  

Greening online delivery: possibility or pipe dream? 

It will only be a matter of time before these ordinances trickle down to online delivery services. Perhaps in anticipation, Uber Eats recently introduced a new feature that requires customers to opt in to receive single-use items such as utensils and straws. (Drawer-of-shame owners, rejoice!) It’s the first delivery service to do this worldwide. 

Outfits like Uber Eats are in a “unique place” because they don’t own the restaurants in their often diffuse networks, says Emilie Boman, head of public policy at Uber Eats. Neither do they prepare or package the foods they deliver. Yet promoting more mindful behavior could be as simple as changing the defaults on an interface. (Grubhub and DoorDash did not respond to requests for comment.) 

“We looked at opt-in versus opt-out,” Boman says. “And we found that opt-in was far more successful [during trials] because it nudges people to do the right thing and only opt-in to something when they need it.”

Utensils are only a first step for Uber Eats; Boman says the company is looking to leverage its clout to help restaurants access more affordable eco-packaging. For vendors that adopt biodegradable foodware, it may provide benefits such as discounts from suppliers or a special seal that indicates their “greener” status. 

Compostables can be iffy, according to experts. Just because something is compostable doesn’t guarantee it’ll actually be composted. Plastics made with corn starch or sugarcane and marketed as biodegradable require prolonged high temperatures under industrial conditions to break down, which means they’ll continue to clog up landfills, waterways, or streets if left to their own devices. Molded fiber bowls favored by fast-casual restaurants such as Chipotle and Sweetgreen may contain forever chemicals such as per- and polyfluoroalkyl substances — PFAS, for short — that add to the toxic burden of the soils they’re meant to improve. All of which to say, reusables are still humanity’s best bet to rein in the chaos and tackle climate change. 

For delivery services, the logistics of reusables are more difficult to wrangle, but not impossible. Before Seamless was a glint in someone’s eye, dabbawalas in India were delivering hundreds of thousands of home-cooked meals in metal tiffin carriers on foot or by bicycle. Whether this can be done at scale is the big question. 

One thing that is indisputable is, sustainability-wise, durable reusables will always outperform disposables after a number of uses, says Gordon of Upstream Solutions. And in the long run, they’re cheaper for governments, consumers, food businesses, and just about everyone short of the fossil-fuels industry. 

“For too long we have relied on the myth of recycling and increasingly on composting as a panacea for this problem,” she says. “But we need to recognize the problem is our addiction to the throwaway lifestyle. And that’s what needs to change.”

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When Disguise Costumes released a “sassy” — read: “sexy” — Ursula-style costume for The Little Mermaid fans in 2012, it only came in straight sizes — no plus sizes. Critics immediately fired back. Ursula, as they rightly noted, is a sea witch of substance. 

“It’s outrageously exclusionary,” a blogger named Tavie wrote at the time. “It basically tells fat women that we’re too fat to play a fat character; it also tells fat women that in order to be sexy, a character must be made skinny.” 

But sexy costumes for plus-size women are just the tip of the coral reef, so to speak. Most would have trouble picking up any kind of costume off the rack. 

Halloween in the United States is an $8.8 billion industry, and dressing up is a big part of it. According to the National Retail Federation, an estimated 67 percent of Americans will spend $3.2 billion on costumes this year, more than candy or decorations. But the costume industry isn’t kind to women who don’t conform to a certain size. This, despite the fact that 68 percent of American women wear a size 14 and above. 

A recent survey by HalloweenCostumes.com, which bills itself as the largest online-only retailer of Halloween costumes, bears out this disconnect, too. Nearly 70 percent of the 2,000 adults it polled said they didn’t believe there are enough plus-size costume options available for consumers. The language is admittedly imprecise — what does “believe” mean? Or “enough”? What that number tells us, however, is that people are noticing a sizable gap in the market that retailers aren’t filling.

“I’ve always made my own Halloween costumes just by putting stuff together,” says Alexis Krase, proprietor of Plus Bklyn, a plus-size specialty boutique in New York. “If I want to be a black cat, I’ll pull out all the black stuff from my wardrobe and draw on whiskers. That’s because I can’t find an out-of-the-box costume that fits me.”

Krase, who wears a size 26, knows she can go online and find something, but even garments marketed as plus have hit-or-miss fits. The reason, she says, is some manufacturers, to appear more inclusive, perform something called “scaled-up sizing,” where they essentially gin up measurements by adding numbers to a waistline or a sleeve length. While this may work for straight-size bodies, plus-size ones don’t scale the same way. And since Halloween is a once-a-year event, most companies don’t even bother. “It’s a costly endeavor to expand sizing,” Krase says. “You have to start from scratch, hire fit models, and find the right sizing for each piece. It takes a lot of work to do that.” 

Fit is complex, especially for women and even when body type isn’t part of the equation. (A size 14 “pear” doesn’t wear clothes the same way as a size 14 “hourglass” or a size 14 athlete’s build.) “A lot of times brands and manufacturers aren’t considering fit because it’s another level of quality,” says Jessica Couch, founder of Luxor and Finch, a fitting technology firm based in New York. “It’s almost a luxury to have all of these options for fit.”

Another mistake brands make is assuming plus-size women aren’t as fashion-forward as their thinner counterparts. “Historically, plus-size brands have offered ill-fitting options that conceal the body, rather than draw attention to it,” says Sarah Barnes, content marketing manager at Trendalytics, a New York merchandise-intelligence firm. “That is no longer the narrative in today’s world.” The top five items plus-size women search for, for example, hew closely to streetwear and athleisure trends. 

Men — plus-size men included — celebrate Halloween, too, of course, and many dress up, but the truth is men have more dedicated resources and less negative attention and stigma about their waistlines. Men’s costumes are also generally less sexualized and don’t require a precise fit: think block-shaped characters like Fred Flinstone or Sully from Monsters Inc. In other words, plus-size women have to deal with a whole other echelon of frustration. 

Despite the growing chatter about size inclusivity, thanks to brands such as Universal Standard and Fenty and spokesmodels like Tess Holliday and Ashley Graham, any shifts in the positive direction have been slight, if not negligible.

And because of their transient nature, Halloween costumes tend to take a few-sizes-fit-all approach to fit. The scale runs from extra-small to extra-large, and then, if you’re lucky, 1X, which corresponds to a women’s size 12 to 16, and 2X (20 to 22). If you’re extremely lucky, you might even find a 3X (24 to 26).

Spirit Halloween, which hosts costume pop-up shops around the country, for instance, had just one 3X-to-4X costume on its website at press time: Oktoberfest Gretchen — shoes, stockings, and beer mug purse sold separately. 

If you type “3X” into Party City’s search bar, you’ll turn up about 15 results. Several are Santa suits. Most of its culturally relevant plus-size costumes — Captain Marvel, say, or Sailor Moon — fall under the generic label of “Plus,” which confusingly varies in measurements according to style. (You have to click the chart to find out which range your potential purchase falls under, like a Kinder Egg surprise.)

Target, whose plus-size Halloween line is pretty much online-only, also uses the vague “Plus” moniker. But the retailer doesn’t always provide a measurement chart of these items, which is less helpful, and even its in-house Hyde & Eek styles only go up to an extra-large. Walmart has a couple of options that go up to 6X and 7X, but only if you fancy being a swashbuckling pirate or Mrs. Claus. 

Only 25 percent of Americans will buy their costumes on the internet, per the National Retail Federation. The vast majority of ensemble hunters will turn to grocer-retailers such as Target and Walmart or specialty stores like Party City or Spirit Halloween. (Neither Party City or Spirit Halloween responded to requests for an interview.)  Plus-size women, however, rarely have the luxury of finding something at a brick-and-mortar store. Extended sizes are typically available only online, which requires a level of access — Wi-Fi connection, an Internet-compatible device, and a credit card or digital bank account — that is far from a universal privilege. 

Because of this, the women I spoke to referred to something akin to a “fat tax” — one that goes beyond the markup retailers sometimes place on plus-size versions of the same style. (It’s getting better, if marginally.) Plus-size women who shop online also have to deal with the cost of shipping, and if the item doesn’t fit, returns.

“It is definitely an added burden for plus sizes, when stores don’t have physical outlets,” says Tanita Abrahamson, who works in financial services in Chicago and wears a size 18. “Why can’t I just be able to go in and try on a dress or a pair of pants, or find a pair of stockings?  You have to do so much more planning than other people.” 

Plus-size women might have an easier time at dedicated plus-size outlets like Torrid and Ashley Stewart, though some pieces might be more accurately described as Halloween-adjacent, like a Spider-Man hoodie or a T-shirt that reads “Creeping It Real” in bone-shaped letters. Fandom-oriented retailers like Her Universe and Hot Topic can also fulfill many “stealth cosplay” needs, with the added bonus of being wearable past Halloween, since disposable clothing is helping to ruin the planet.

For costume costumes, however, it’s digitally native brands, like HalloweenCostumes.com and Yandy that provide the most variety in sizes. 

Plus sizes make up 12 percent of the total assortment at Yandy, an e-tailer best known for offering seemingly random (or zeitgeisty) sexy costumes, imagined imitations of Sexy Mr. Rogers or Sexy White Claw. Last year, the company carried 120 plus-size costumes; this year, it’s up to 150, with the biggest size it sells a 5X. “We have a pretty wide plus selection compared to most retailers,” says Pilar Quintana-Williams, its vice president of merchandising. (Sexy Tater “Thot” and Sexy Buzz Lightyear, alas, only go up to extra-large.)

Yandy, which sometimes works with vendors to release exclusive styles, decides which costumes to size up based on demand. If a 3X style performs well one year, it might get a 5X upgrade the following year, though sales mostly come from the smaller side of the plus-size spectrum. Popular plus-size outfits over the years have included Egyptian goddesses, witches, and black cats, which more or less mirror the top-selling straight sizes.

HalloweenCostumes.com claims to have 300 percent more plus-size options than its competitors. It carries 500 plus-size styles up to 8X, which “no one else offers,” says CEO Tom Fallenstein, because it designs about half of them in-house, like its bestselling Grease Pink Ladies’ jacket or Dottie’s baseball outfit from A League of Our Own. Straight sizes, however, still outsell plus ones four to one, he says. 

Fallenstein says the company decides what costumes to make based on the search terms site visitors use, but it also seems that most costume retailers don’t quite have a bead on what plus-size women want, which — surprise! — is pretty much the same as what straight-size women want. The women I interviewed complained of too many stereotypical costumes like cops, pirates, and nurses, and too few in the way of au courant characters. 

Marie Denee, an Atlanta-based entrepreneur and publisher of the Curvy Fashionista, for instance, wanted to dress as one of the Dora Milaje women from Black Panther at the height of the movie’s success last year but was left disappointed. “That costume was everywhere, just not plus,” says Denee, who wears between a size 16 and 18. Emily Bastedo, a blogger who works in cybersecurity in Houston, wishes she could dress as Eleven from Stranger Things, but the officially licensed replica only goes up to a large.

Then there’s Jennifer Carver, a size-24 hotel manager in Louisville, Kentucky, who has trotted out the same costume for the past eight years — a giant whoopee cushion — because she lacks other options. Somewhere along the way she added a self-inflating whoopee cushion that made wet squelching noises. One year, she brought along a fart machine. “Each year it just escalated,” she says. “It became my thing.”

She also found the costume apt. “A round costume for a round person,” she said, wryly. Certainly one misconception plus-size women face is they don’t want to show some skin. Even after the Ursula kerfuffle, octo-lady ensembles in plus sizes remain far more covered up than their straight-size counterparts.  

“Don’t automatically assume we don’t want to be sexy on Halloween because we are fat,” says Danée Miller, a production scheduler for a manufacturing plant in Louisville, Kentucky, who wears between a size 18 and 20. “If we see an amazing costume on a thinner woman, you better believe we want that same exact costume — just make it bigger in the correct way for us.”  

For Krase, owner of Plus Bklyn, the paucity of plus-size costumes is just a microcosm of a much larger problem. 

“Halloween is more difficult, because it’s kind of like an event that happens once within a year, but all year long, plus size, women are still short of choices,” she says. “There really hasn’t been an effort that’s put behind it to create a space for plus-size women.”

At the very least, let curvy sea witches sea-witch in peace. 

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Plastic packaging can be both a blessing and a curse. It’s usually deployed to protect food, preserve freshness, and prevent spoilage and waste, which are all good things. At the same time, supermarkets can’t seem to help themselves from overpackaging items to the point of perversion, like a single banana — which already comes in its own Mother Nature-approved wrapper — plated on a Styrofoam tray and shrink-wrapped in even more plastic. Other forms of plastic appear completely gratuitous. Do pasta boxes really need tiny film windows for previewing the noodles?

Supermarkets aren’t the only source of packaging waste, but they’re a major contributor. They’re also where most people interact with brands like Nestlé, which sells more than 1 billion products a day, 98 percent of which come in throwaway formats. When the Break Free from Plastic initiative audited more than 187,000 pieces of trash from 42 countries across six continents last October, the names that reared their heads most frequently were Coca-Cola, PepsiCo, and — yes — Nestlé. Supermarkets have been promoting recycling as a way out of this morass, but it hasn’t been enough, according to environmentalists, who say that single-use plastic needs to be purged from the get-go. It’s a concept that a growing breed of “zero-waste” grocers are experimenting with, too. 

“If your bathtub was overflowing, you wouldn’t reach for a mop to clean it up; you would turn it off at the source,” says David Pinsky, an anti-plastics campaigner at Greenpeace. “And that’s what we need to do on plastics.”

The fact of the matter is we’re not doing a good enough job of recapturing plastics, which are made from nonrenewable resources such as crude oil and natural gas and contribute to climate change throughout their life cycle. Less than 14 percent of the nearly 86 million tons of plastic packaging produced globally each year is recycled, and of that, only 2 percent goes into high-value applications. The rest is landfilled, incinerated, or buffeted into the environment, where it clogs up the seas, the beaches, and the digestive tracts of sea life. 

Much of the trouble with recycling plastic is it’s “incredibly finicky,” says Darby Hoover, a senior resource specialist at the Natural Resources Defense Council. Different municipalities accept different types of plastic, and the little triangle with the number at the bottom of a plastic container — if you can even find it — refers to the type of resin and not if or how it can be recycled. Sometimes, despite a recycling facility’s best efforts, a plastics stream becomes contaminated, which impairs sellability. But even if a facility does get it right, there isn’t always a market to funnel all the different types of plastic.  

“What’s been happening with China, in particular, is that it was America’s No. 1 buyer of plastic and paper, but now it’s saying that the stuff we send to them needs a much lower contamination rate, and we can’t do that,” Hoover says. 

Complicating the matter is complex packaging such as Tetra Pak cartons — the type plant-based milks, soups, and broths come in — and Capri Sun-type juice pouches — which contain different layers of material fused together — are even more difficult to reclaim. 

“So they’ve got aluminum and different types of plastic, then a bunch of glue that holds it all together,” Hoover says. “It’s very, very hard to separate out all those materials and figure out how to recycle any of them.”

The problem isn’t going away anytime soon. Plastic packaging is a booming industry with a powerful lobbying presence that can block lawmakers from enacting bans on plastic bags, Styrofoam containers, and other landfill fodder. Fueled by growing demand for flexible and functional food and beverage packaging, the global plastic packaging market is expected to soar from a value of $344 billion today to $412 billion in 2024. We throw away most single-use plastics within minutes of use, yet they can persist in the environment for 1,000 years. 

“We do need to fundamentally rethink the way that we use plastics,” says Sara Wingstrand, project manager of the Ellen MacArthur Foundation’s New Plastics Economy initiative, which has rallied more than 350 businesses, governments, and other organizations, including Coca-Cola, PepsiCo, Unilever, Walmart, and Target, in 2018 to support the elimination of unnecessary plastic packaging and transition the rest to reusable, recyclable, and compostable versions by 2025. “Recycling is a part of the solution, but it’s becoming evident that there is no way that we can recycle our way out of the plastic pollution crisis.”

One key hurdle is that supermarkets are often blissfully unaware of how much plastic they’re employing. The material is relatively cheap and it makes up a fraction of a business’s operating expenses, Wingstrand says. And the thing is, you can’t reduce what you haven’t measured. 

Some supermarkets are trying, though. 

In South Africa, the supermarket chain Pick and Pay is trialing packaging-free “nude zones,” where customers can bring their own containers for fruits and vegetables that are laser-etched with the supplier code and sell-by date in lieu of plastic stickers. Similar “food in the nude” campaigns are taking place at grocers in New Zealand, which banned single-use plastic bags in July. This past April, Metro, a supermarket chain in Quebec, became Canada’s first major grocer to allow its customers to fill up their own reusable containers with meat, seafood, pastries, and ready-to-eat meals. 

The United Kingdom, where a “polluter’s tax” on any single-use packaging that doesn’t contain at least 30 percent recycled materials is poised to debut in April 2022, is also making strides. Its major supermarkets have committed to a UK Plastics Pact to design out “problematic or unnecessary” single-use packaging by 2025. Waitrose is piloting refill stations at select stores for pasta, wine and beer, and detergent, and Sainsbury’s plans to introduce refillable packaging “at scale.” As part of its pledge to use only reusable, recyclable, or compostable packaging by 2025, Aldi has banned black plastic trays, which near-infrared sensors at recycling centers have trouble picking out from a sorting belt. Tesco, Britain’s largest supermarket, has convened with its suppliers to examine solutions that may require a design or materials overhaul. It’s even mulling banishing brands that use “excessive or inappropriate” packaging. 

It should come as no surprise that supermarkets in the US — bolstered by America’s corporate-friendly policies — have lagged behind.

“Europe is probably more favorably predisposed to regulation and restrictions,” says Neil Saunders, managing director of retail at GlobalData, an international data-analytics consultancy. (Case in point? The European Union has a roadmap for making all plastic on the European market recyclable by 2030.) “Whereas the US is much more focused on freedoms of companies and individuals, and government is probably a lot more reluctant to legislate on certain things.”

That isn’t to say there has been zero progress. Target is working on ditching expanded polystyrene foam packaging from its own-brand packaging by 2022. Select products in its Everspring line of home essentials are packaged in containers with up to 100 percent post-consumer recycled plastic. Costco has eschewed PVC clamshell packaging, which is not recyclable and can leach toxic chemicals when it degrades, for recyclable PET or recycled PET made from water bottles. Straws and Styrofoam meat trays are now verboten at Whole Foods, which is also replacing its hard plastic rotisserie chicken containers with bags that use roughly 70 percent less plastic, a spokesperson says. Walmart, the world’s No.1 brick-and-mortar retailer, aims by 2025 to incorporate at least 20 percent post-consumer recycled content in its own-brand packaging, which will also be 100 percent recyclable, reusable, or industrially compostable. In terms of general merchandise packaging, Walmart says it will work with suppliers to nix PVC by 2020. 

But a June report by Greenpeace, which rated 20 leading US supermarkets on their efforts to eliminate single-use plastic, found a universal failure to “adequately address the plastic pollution crisis they are contributing to.” In fact, no supermarket scored more than 35 out of a possible 100 points. Even the American iteration of Aldi, which rose to No. 1 for setting out a plastics reduction target and plan, needs to ramp up its ambitions, according to Pinsky. Since 90 percent of the products on its shelves are private label, rather than from name-brand suppliers, Aldi has a bigger say in its packaging decisions.

“Aldi’s only committed by 2025 to reduce its plastic footprint by 15 percent,” he says. “So while some supermarkets are starting to take small steps in the right direction, none are acting with the urgency or the ambition that’s needed to truly tackle the plastic pollution crisis.”

Transparency, Pinsky says, is a sticking issue. No supermarket, for instance, publicly reports its plastic footprint, which makes it difficult for the public to evaluate progress year over year. Time-bound, comprehensive plans are still few and far between. And some grocers are merely substituting one single-use material for another, as in the case of Trader Joe’s, which drew plaudits earlier this year for plans to strip its stores of 1 million pounds of plastic by removing plastic bags from its checkout counters, switching to compostable produce bags, and replacing Styrofoam trays with recyclable alternatives. But plant-based bioplastics, which stores increasingly favor, can still contribute to microplastic pollution if released into the environment, Pinsky notes, and molded fiberboard could harbor cancer-causing chemicals.

“It’s clear that recycling or substituting materials is not going to solve this problem; we need to see a focused reduction of plastic production in the first place,” he adds. “We need to shift our culture back to more reuse systems.”

One result of the plastics backlash is the idea of the zero-waste supermarket. Brianne Miller, a marine biologist, was so sickened by the swaths of plastic that greeted her in different dive sites around the world — even the remote ones — that she left academia to co-found Nada, a zero-waste grocer that is not only the first of its kind in downtown Vancouver but in all of Canada. 

At Nada, everything, including fruits, vegetables, meats, grains, cheeses, nut butters, and sauces, is sold loose. Customers can load up their own jars, containers, and drawstring bags, or pick up cleaned and sanitized ones that are available for sale. Depending on what they need, they can pick up a barrel of crackers or just a handful. But customers are just one piece of Nada’s master plan; the store also works with its suppliers to deliver their products free of disposable packaging. 

“In many instances, suppliers are dropping off products every couple days or every week, so it’s quite easy, for example, to have things like coffee beans dropped off in a reusable Rubbermaid tote,” Miller says. “And then when the next shipment comes in, the container goes back to the supplier, and then it’s refilled and reused again, so we have this circular loop of containers that are coming and going from our store.” Nada sources as close to the store as possible, which helps with the minimalist approach, since products don’t have to be coddled across vast distances. “Instead of shipping cucumbers from across the country, we have the local farm, so that packaging isn’t necessary in the first place,” she says.

Zero-waste supermarkets, especially full-service ones like Nada, may seem like an answer to our plastic packaging problem, except they’re still a rarity. In.gredients, an East Austin business that billed itself as America’s first zero-waste grocery store, shuttered permanently in 2018. There is a smattering of others in London, Berlin, Amsterdam, Stockholm, and Hong Kong, but they are largely boutique outfits with narrow aisles and more hipster appeal than options. For the vast majority of people, single-use plastics are still an inescapable aspect of their shopping reality. 

One other solution is a return to the old “milkman delivery” model of yore. The brainchild of TerraCycle, a New Jersey-based “waste solution development” firm, Loop offers popular products — think Häagen-Dazs ice cream, Hidden Valley ranch dressing, Tropicana orange juice, and Quaker Oats oatmeal — in durable glass and aluminum tubs designed to be returned, cleaned, and refilled. Nestlé, Procter & Gamble, Unilever, PepsiCo, Coca-Cola, and Danone are just some of the marquee names that have thrown in their support. Loop has also roped in a number of retail partners, including Kroger and Walgreens in the United States, Tesco in the United Kingdom, and Carrefour in France.

“It’s super important to us to meet consumers where they’re already shopping,” says Heather Crawford, Loop’s vice president of marketing and e-commerce. Unlike with bulk or zero-waste supermarkets, customers don’t have to sling their own containers or wash them, which could help adoption. “People want a better, more sustainable option with less waste, but they’re not always willing to change their behaviors to get there,” she says. “Loop removes all of the friction from the systems that exist in the current zero-waste solution.”

Tory Gundelach, vice president of retail insights at the consulting agency Kantar, sees a growing desire from customers for forward-thinking efforts such as Loop. “Younger shoppers, particularly, are becoming more attuned to the effect of their actions on the environment or society as a whole,” she says. “Shoppers increasingly want to see the retailers and brands they engage reflect their own personal values.” Nearly two-thirds of millennials and Gen Z-ers say they prefer “brands that have a point of view and stand for something,” Kantar’s research has found.

And therein lies supermarkets’ business proposition. Reducing packaging through resource-efficient design or losing it altogether can save money on raw materials and shipping costs — always a plus for the bottom line — but it can also win over a demographic that is only going to grow into its spending power. 

“Shoppers are telling us, ‘I’m putting my dollars against the retailers and the brands that feel like they have values that line up with my values,’” Gundelach says. “And to do that, of course, brands and retailers have to put out what their values are that they stand for.”

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The fashion industry, if you haven’t already noticed, is a dreadful mess, and big-toe shoes and other go-home-fashion-you’re-drunk trends are the least of its problems. Apparel and footwear production currently accounts for 8.1 percent of global greenhouse gas emissions, or as much as the total climate impact of the entire European Union. Euromonitor analysts warn that the fashion market’s annual 5 percent growth risks “exerting an unprecedented strain on planetary resources” by raising annual production to more than 100 million tons by 2030. If no action is taken, emissions from textile manufacturing alone are projected to skyrocket by 60 percent, according to the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change. 

Dana Thomas, a veteran journalist who has written for the Washington Post, the New York Times, and the Wall Street Journal, among others, doesn’t mince statistics in the early chapters of Fashionopolis: The Prices of Fast Fashion and the Future of Clothes. “Fast fashion” — which is to say cheap, disposable clothing, made indiscriminately, imprudently, and often without consideration for environmental and labor conditions by companies like Zara, H&M, Forever 21, Nasty Gal, and Fashion Nova — is a disease, and both the planet and its people are paying the price. Zara alone churns out roughly 840 million garments every year for its 6,000 stores worldwide, often at sub-poverty wages for its workers. Once-thriving rivers in China, India, Bangladesh, wrecked by wastewater effluent from factories, have transformed into biologically dead zones replete with cancer-causing chemicals. Tiny plastic microfibers, shed by synthetic garments during laundry, are inundating our water supply and food chain. But how did we wind up here? Through her reporting, Thomas pulls together disparate geopolitical and anthropological threads to compose a gripping narrative of the complex world we live in, and how it’s changed the way we dress through the decades.  

Don’t worry, it’s not all doom and gloom. As the author makes clear, solutions are available. Thomas makes her own journey around the globe speaking to designers, scientists, and activists who are trying to right the ship before it’s too late, whether it’s through breakthroughs in fiber-recycling technology, cruelty-free lab-grown materials, hyperlocal manufacturing, or alternative retail platforms such as resale and rental, which can sate the Instagram generation’s desire for novelty without piling on fashion’s negative impacts. “This is a book about hope,” she tells me. What follows is our conversation, which has been condensed and lightly edited for clarity. 

Let’s talk about the name of your book, Fashionopolis. You wrote that it stems from both “Cottonopolis” in Manchester — the world’s first major manufacturing center during the first Industrial Revolution — and Fritz Lang’s dystopian film Metropolis. Both paint pretty sobering pictures. Is today’s fashion system equally an indictment of capitalism and greed writ large?

My husband, who is in finance, read the book, and he teased me and said, “You know, this book is a little bit Marxist.” And I don’t know if I think of myself as a Marxist, but I do think the book reflects what’s going on right now, which is the unbridled capitalism that we’ve had for the past 20 years with globalization and the digital age. That you can become the second-richest person in the world, like Amancio Ortega, who owns Inditex and thus Zara, by selling gobs of throwaway clothes and paying pennies to people to make them — that, to me, is the ultimate snapshot of wealth disparity that everyone’s complaining about. If a piece of clothing costs you $19.99, that means the person who made it was paid 19 cents.

I do think that this book is about fashion, but it’s also about society today. I see myself not only as a fashion journalist but also as a cultural social anthropologist. Clothes are easy to relate to because we all buy them, wear them, wash them, have them in our houses, and you don’t need an MBA or an engineering degree to understand what I’m talking about. And so I use clothes to talk about a bigger-picture story like globalization, the backlash to globalization, global warming, wage and income disparity, you know, capitalism — unbridled capitalism — and its impact on the planet and society as a whole. 

People ask me what this book is about. I say it’s about humanity. And they’re like, “What?” But it is, it’s about humanity and how it really hasn’t changed. It’s been this way since Richard Arkwright first launched his Water Frame spinning machine back in Manchester 250 years ago [to mechanically spin thread with minimal human labor]. He started something that we thought was great but in fact put us on the path to where we are today politically, socially, and economically.

It’s hard to believe that “fast fashion” only started really in the late 1980s — Zara gets a lot of the credit or blame for taking the idea of quick-response manufacturing and really running with it. Now it’s practically the norm. You mention in your book three main casualties of the business model: jobs in developed economies, human rights in developing nations, and the environment. How did we, as a civilization, become so inured to these levels of destruction? 

Because it all went offshore, so it’s not in our face. What was in our face was the economic disruption. We saw the fallout in places like Lowell, Massachusetts; Florence, Alabama; and the Carolinas, where we had manufacturing in America before it went offshore, but we didn’t see the rest of the destruction. We don’t see the landfills, we don’t see where all those clothes that we donate go, we don’t see the poor people and how miserable they are in the places where they’re sewing these clothes.

One of the women I spoke to for the book, Dilys Williams, who is the director of the Centre for Sustainable Fashion at the University of the Arts London, told me that in the old days — and not even in the old days but pre-offshoring — we always knew somebody who was in the garment industry, whether it was your cousin, a neighbor down the street, or someone at your church or at your school, so you had a person related to what you were wearing, and you thought about them. But once we removed that emotional investment from the equation, we cared less about our clothes. And so then we started treating them like fast food. 

Yes, the generations that came before, especially the “make do and menders” of the Second World War, had a much different relationship with their clothes. 

Exactly. We used to take Home Ec classes, so then you knew what it took to sew clothes. Once even that went away, there was a big change in our regard toward them.

You used the term “fashion bulimia,” which encapsulates the bingeing and purging that’s happening. This is learned behavior, though. 

It is. It is. Because we have been living in the land of plenty for so long; there hasn’t been a Depression or war where we’ve had to rip out our lawns and plant Victory Gardens. We can just get in the car and go drive down the road and buy vegetables. We’ve raised whole generations to put convenience and cost ahead of anything else. And so we want disposable and we want cheaper, cheaper, cheaper. 

But it’s what designer Maria Cornejo, who used to fly halfway across the world in business class to source a 30-cent sweater for other fashion companies, refers to in the book as a “false economy.” You think you’re saving money by giving everybody plastic cutlery that you can just toss, but the environmental impact of making and throwing away all that stuff is actually very costly to society in different ways. 

So that’s what I think I’m trying to talk about in this book, that we need to consume less, better. If I were to have hashtags besides #Fashionopolis, it would be #buylessbetter and #keepthingslonger and #makethingsbetter. We need to put integrity back into everything we do. We have to dial our consumption and disposal back because the world just isn’t big enough to hold it all. 

You note in your book that creative theft, greed, and a lack of regard for people and the environment have always been a part of fashion. Has technology like social media — and the influencer culture it has engendered — accelerated this?  

Yeah, definitely. And that whole Cinderella syndrome — where you wear it once, you post on Instagram, and then you get rid of it — is a disaster. And that there’s a whole culture that says if you’ve been seen in an outfit three times, you need to rid yourself of it. That’s why the study that said the average garment is worn seven times before it’s thrown away — and in China, it’s three times, as I was told by YCloset — is very disturbing. We’re not investing value into the clothes that we’re buying. And we need to start doing that. 

But my two favorite women on the planet right now are the Duchess of Cambridge and the Duchess of Sussex because they’re popularizing the “royal rewear.” These are the two most high-profile women on the planet today, the biggest of the biggest influencers. And they’re trotting out the same coats and dresses over and over for high-profile events and showing that you can wear that Alexander McQueen coat about 10 different ways and it always looks great. I love this. And I think they have decided to try to change this consumption monster, attach value to their purchases, and sort of put those Cinderella-syndrome influencers on Instagram to shame, which they should. Another hashtag: #royalrewear. Let’s just embrace it and do it. 

Forever 21 recently announced it is filing for bankruptcy; should we celebrate this or bemoan the fact that it’s being supplanted by digitally native faster-fashion players like Boohoo and Fashion Nova? 

Forever 21, as I learned when I was going around the sweatshops in LA, was one of the companies that was taking advantage of the underground workforce in Los Angeles. Yes, we have sweatshops in LA; I’ve seen them with my own eyes and it’s pretty dreadful. Not quite as grim as Bangladesh, but not far off and just up the street from some pretty posh offices and restaurants in downtown LA. So if that’s one less company sourcing from those places and will help shut them down, great. 

And it kind of proves that the fast-fashion model isn’t sustainable. If you’re turning out domestic made-in-sweatshop clothes for pennies instead of dollars an hour and you still can’t survive, then that model isn’t the right business model. H&M is in trouble. All these companies are sprinting. I think they’ve been sprinting for a long time, and they’re all gonna run out of gas pretty soon. 

I feel like the companies that are going to do really well in the future are the ones who are not following the economies of scale but instead producing only what they need, making to order, and producing near their markets. I don’t have an MBA, but for me, that makes sense, and it’s good business. 

There are other alternatives to the typical retail business model, too, like rental and resale, which are both catching on like gangbusters. Rent the Runway hit a $1 billion valuation, traditional retailers like Ann Taylor, Express, and Urban Outfitters have launched their own rental schemes, and even hallowed department stores like Macy’s and J.C. Penney are dipping into resale with ThredUp.  

People ask me how I’ve changed the way I dress since I started working on the book. I’ve got some nice clothes from Alabama Chanin, I’m going to buy some colored cotton from Sally Fox, who is a genius, genius person, and I’ve been renting for special events. When I had to go to a black-tie gala at the Cannes Film Festival I rented a Diane von Furstenberg gown that I probably would never have bought because it would have been too expensive and I’d be like, “How many times am I going to wear a gown like this?” But I felt like a princess, got a bazillion compliments, and then the next day packed it off to the people I rented it from. And I push my daughter, who’s 19, to do that. If there’s a prom or a wedding, let’s rent the dress, let’s rent the suit. Let’s look fantastic for a fraction of the price and then put the clothes back into circulation like taking a book from the library.

There are little tiny changes in behavior we can do, like washing our clothes less. When we do, wash them with cold water on a short cycle. They’ll still get clean but they’ll use less water and less energy and release fewer polluting microfibers. And our clothes will last longer. 

Resale is huge. I just did a huge Marie Kondo purge. I put some things on The RealReal and I put some things on the Vestiaire Collective and it was great. As my friend Cameron Silver says, they’re pre-loved — not used, not vintage: pre-loved. And most of what I put up sold and somebody else is loving them. 

One thing that’s been in the headlines is the G7 Fashion Pact led by Kering, which has 32 companies representing 150 brands pledging to tackle climate change, ocean protection, and biodiversity. But an argument several NGOs have put forth is that the time for voluntary commitments for corporations is over and what we need are legally binding commitments, like the Accord for Fire and Building in Safety in Bangladesh or government regulation, as recently suggested by the Environmental Audit Committee of the UK’s House of Commons. Where should the onus for fixing fashion lie? 

On brands, without question. Especially the super-mega ones run by people who have made billions; they will not change a thing unless they have to because they’re reaping so much profit. And it doesn’t have to be forced by law, it can also be forced by shame, or by just pressure from within. Look at what Stella McCartney did with Kering. I don’t think Kering would have necessarily embraced sustainability had she not been there poking executives with a stick. When she first started her company 20 years ago and said she wouldn’t use fur or leather, everybody thought she was out of her mind. And when she said no to PVC and got the whole group not to use PVC, sequin companies who used PVC said, “Ah, if we’re going to lose the whole Kering group, which buys sequins every year, we better come up with an alternative for them.” 

So for shifts to happen, it has to be really strong-minded changemakers like Stella McCartney poking people with a stick, it has to be economically viable, or it has to be put down in law. But it’s on the brands. And the poking can come from consumers; it can be something as simple as a boycott — “We’re not going to buy this stuff anymore, this stuff is terrible, change it up.” Look how quickly we got rid of plastic straws. It shows that consumers can push brand new companies and businesses to change very fast if we put our minds to it.

So here’s the $3 trillion question: What would a Fashionopolis that is equitable and just look like? 

That’s a good question. Well, I would not be visiting some of those sweatshops that I saw in Bangladesh and Vietnam, which were just appalling. And I wouldn’t be going to see dead rivers filled with runoff from jeans-washing factories in Ho Chi Minh that made me want to vomit. There would be fish in that stream. You wouldn’t have bedridden 26-year-olds who can’t have children because a factory collapsed on them. You wouldn’t have landfills full of clothes. You’d have more fields of indigo and organic cotton. 

Gosh, if we could just go back to organic cotton, I feel like most of our ills would be solved. We wouldn’t have fashion entrepreneurs who possess more wealth than many countries. And the divide between the people who make clothes and the people who are telling them to make the clothes would not be so vast. And there would be more accountability and fewer containers of clothes falling into seas because they wouldn’t be shipped all around the world. And ideally we would have sewing classes back in school so everybody knows how to sew on a button and repair a hem. And it’s good for you! It’s been proven that you can reach the same state of zen doing needlework as you can by doing yoga. 

I also feel like if people sewed more, they would have a more realistic idea of how much things should cost, rather than these artificially deflated prices. 

After the stock market crashed in 1929 and all the rich people lost their fortunes, Hattie Carnegie, the retailer, to stay in business, started an off-the-peg ready-to-wear collection for the middle market called Spectator Sports. Raymond Chandler referred to it in The Long Goodbye as the “secretary special.” And one of those suits or dresses from Spectator Sports cost $19.99 — and this was in the early ’30s. And that’s the same price you pay at H&M or Zara [despite inflation over the decades].

Is anything else we buy today the same price as it was at the height of the Depression? Of course not. Is anything we’re buying today the same price it was in 1928 before the crash? Of course it’s not. Eggs were, let’s say, 20 cents and now they’re $3. A pound of ground beef was less than 30 cents. Everything’s gone up 100 times but we’re still paying the same price for ready-to-wear, off-the-peg “secretary specials.” That for me was clarifying, no matter what the book was going to be about. How did we get to that point where we’re still paying the same price as we were during the Depression?

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