Review:
‘The True Cost’ Investigates High Price of Fashion Bargains
The True Cost
By JEANNETTE
CATSOULISMAY
A distressing
overview of the consequences of our addiction to fast fashion, “The
True Cost” might suggest another exposé of corporate greed versus
environmental well-being. That is certainly in evidence, but under
the gentle, humane investigations of its director, Andrew Morgan,
what emerges most strongly is a portrait of exploitation that ought
to make us more nauseated than elated over those $20 jeans.
To learn who is
paying for our bargains, Mr. Morgan dives to the bottom of the supply
chain, to the garment factories of Cambodia and Bangladesh and the
cotton fields of India, where he links ecological and health
calamities to zealous pesticide use. Garment workers subsisting on
less than $3 a day recount beatings by bosses who resent unionization
and requests for higher wages. At the same time, a factory owner in
Bangladesh — where the 2013 collapse of the Rana Plaza building
caused more than 1,000 deaths — tells us candidly that when
retailers squeeze him, he must squeeze his employees.
“There are a lot
of worse things they could be doing,” a former sourcing manager for
the fashion brand Joe Fresh says about these unfortunates, echoing an
all-too-familiar justification. A visit to Haiti, however, where
millions of tons of our castoff clothing have clogged landfills and
destroyed the local clothing industry, makes us wonder how much worse
these people’s lives could become.
Offering few
solutions beyond a single fair-trade fashion company, “The True
Cost” — whose serene interludes compete with sickening recordings
of Black Friday shopping riots and so-called clothing haul videos —
stirs and saddens. Not least because it’s unlikely to reach the
young consumers most in need of its revelations.
“The True Cost”
is rated PG-13 (Parents strongly cautioned). Toxic chemicals and
obscene consumption.
‘The
True Cost,’ a Different Kind of Fashion Documentary
Vanessa Friedman
MAY 28, 2015 /
http://www.nytimes.com/2015/05/29/fashion/the-true-cost-a-different-kind-of-fashion-documentary.html?_r=0
I suppose it was
inevitable that after the spate of fashion brands embracing
documentaries (see Dior, Gucci, Chanel, Valentino, Gaultier), many of
which proved surprisingly effective pieces of industry propaganda, a
director would come along to put the whole thing in context.
Sort of.
That director is
Andrew Morgan, and his film is “The True Cost,” which probably
gives you some idea of the subject. It premiered in Cannes, complete
with a red carpet appearance by Livia and Colin Firth (Ms. Firth is
one of the film’s executive producers and also appears on screen,
as do — full disclosure — I, sitting next to her on a panel at a
Copenhagen Fashion Summit). It will be screened Thursday night at the
IFC Center in New York, with public showings beginning Friday, and
open later in London, Los Angeles and Tokyo. It will also be
available on iTunes and Netflix.
Viewers will get a
feature-length look at the human and environmental cost of fast
fashion, from workers in Bangladesh to cotton farmers in Texas, by
way of India, Cambodia and Fifth Avenue. It is affecting and
upsetting, and will probably make some consumers think twice about
where they buy clothes — though arguably the sort of moviegoers
attracted to a film like this already share its point of view.
Mr. Morgan, who also
provides the narration, comes at his subject with the naïveté and
enthusiasm of an amateur — he acknowledges that he didn’t think
much about his clothes beyond style and cost until he started the
film; he didn’t, that is, think about supply chain issues. This
viewpoint gives the film’s difficult and multidimensional subject
an easy-to-swallow accessibility.
But it also
oversimplifies it to an extreme and, it seems to me, undermining
degree.
Starting with the
fact that, either for brevity or impact, Mr. Morgan conflates “fast
fashion” with “fashion” writ large. And while he is condemning
the Main Street megaliths for producing in sweatshops, he slips in
photographs of high-end runway shows, implying that they also produce
in sweatshops. Yet fashion (the “almost $3 trillion industry,” as
he calls it) is not created equal, and fashion’s impacts are not
equal. Sports brands have different problems from premium brands,
many of which have their own factories, and premium brands have
different problems from mass brands.
This is not to say
that high-end fashion should not be taken to task for its failings,
but simply that to police a sector effectively, or call it out on its
shortcomings, you need to do it in an informed and realistic way.
Otherwise you create openings for companies to dismiss the charges as
irrelevant, which can taint the whole project.
(Not that any
companies, aside from those known to have an ethical agenda like
Stella McCartney and People Tree, appeared willing to speak to Mr.
Morgan, which suggests they have their own fears about this subject.
I think that was a big mistake. To begin to address the issues we
first have to know what they are, thorns and all.)
Similarly, though
lots of eye-popping statements are used, including that fashion is
the second-most-polluting industry on the planet, after oil, they are
unattributed. Because they are so powerful, this seems a surprising
omission.
I emailed Mr. Morgan
to ask about the pollution comment, and he wrote back that it came
from both the World Wide Fund for Nature and the Danish Fashion
Institute, and that the statement referred to the whole process used
by the fashion industry. “The chemical industry” — which I
mentioned in my query — “is now most often seen as being a part
of other key industries, fashion being key among them,” Mr. Morgan
wrote.
Still, “The True
Cost” would not have been hurt if Mr. Morgan had taken a slightly
more granular approach to his subject — had he, say, included the
sources of his statistics, or limited himself to the biggest, most
mass-market brands, as they touch the most people. He spent two years
making the film, visiting 13 countries, and it’s hard not to feel
in the end that he was overwhelmed by the scale of the problem. In
trying to do everything, he skirted a lot of things, including
acknowledging the shades of gray in this subject.
It’s too bad,
because doing less might actually have added up to more.
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