In the 2006 film version of The Devil Wears Prada, Miranda Priestly, played by Meryl Streep, scold her unattractive assistant for imagining that high fashion doesn’t affect her.Priestly explains how the deep blue color of the assistant’s sweater descended over the years from fashion shows to department stores and to the bargain bin in which the poor girl doubtless found her garment.
This top-down conception of the fashion business couldn’t be more out of date or at odds with feverish world described in Overdressed, Elizabeth Cline’s three-year indictment of “fast fashion”.In the last decades or so, advances in technology have allowed mass-market labels such as Zara, H&M, and Uniqlo to react to trends more quickly and anticipate demand more precisely.Quckier turnrounds mean less wasted inventory, more frequent releases, and more profit.Those labels encourage style-conscious consumers to see clothes as disposal—— meant to last only a wash or two, although they don’t advertise that——and to renew their wardrobe every few weeks.By offering on-trend items at dirt-cheap prices, Cline argues, these brands have hijacked fashion cycles, shaking all industry long accustomed to a seasonal pace.
The victims of this revolution, of course, are not limited to designers.For H&M to offer a 5.95 knit miniskirt in all its 2300-plus stores around the world, it must rely on low-wage, overseas labor, order in volumes that strain natural resources, and use massive amount of harmful chemicals.
Overdressed is the fashion world’s answer to consumer activist bestsellers like Michael Pollan’s The Omnivore’s Dilemma.Mass-produced clothing, like fast food, fills a hunger and need, yet is non-durable, and wasteful,” Cline argues, Americans, she finds, buy roughly 20 billion garments a year——about 64 items per person——and no matter how much they give away, this excess leads to waste.
Towards the end of Overdressed, Cline introduced her ideal, a Brooklyn woman named SKB, who, since 2008 has make all of her own clothes——and beautifully.But as Cline is the first to note, it took Beaumont decades to perfect her craft; her example, can’t be knocked off.
Though several fast-fashion companies have made efforts to curb their impact on labor and the environment——including H&M, with its green Conscious Collection Line——Cline believes lasting-change can only be effected by the customer.She exhibits the idealism common to many advocates of sustainability, be it in food or in energy.Vanity is a constant; people will only start shopping more sustainably when they can’t afford to it.
A. It could be that we are evolving two communities of social scientists:one that is discipline-oriented and publishing in highly specialized journals,and one that is problem-oriented and publishing elsewhere,such as policy briefs.
B. However,the numbers are still small:in 2010,about 1,600 of the 100,000 social-sciences papers published globally included one of these Keywords.
C. the idea is to force social to integrate their work with other categories, including health and demographic change food security, marine research and the bio-economy, clear, efficient energy; and inclusive, innovative and secure societies.
D. the solution is to change the mindset of the academic community, and what it considers to be its main goal. Global challenges and social innovation ought to receive much more attention from scientists, especially the young ones.
E. These issues all have root causes in human behavior. . all require behavioral change and social innovations , as well as technological development . Stemming climate change , for example , is as much about changing consumption patterns and promoting
F. Despite these factors , many social scientists seem reluctant to tackle such problems . And in Europe , some are up in arms over a proposal to drop a specific funding category for social-science research and to integrate it withincross-cutting topic
G. During the late 1990s , national spending on social sciences and the humanities as a percentage of all research and development funds-including government, higher education, non-profit and corporate -varied from around 4% to 25%; in most European na
Analyses reveal that the number of papers including the keywords “environmental changed” or “climate change” have increased rapidly since 2004,(43)____ When social scientists do tackle practical issues ,their scope is often local