China’s garment industry operates on an intimidating scale. It’s several times bigger than any garment industry that’s happened anywhere in the world at any point in history. They have more than forty thousand clothing manufacturers and 15 million garment industry jobs. Compare that to the 1.45 million garment and textile industry jobs the United States had at peak employment some forty years ago.
China’s supersize garment industry has achieved a degree of specialization that is beyond belief. There is a coastal city near Shanghai in northern China that produces most of the world’s socks; nine billion pairs a year. Not too far away in Zhejiang Province is a city dedicated to children’s clothing, with around five thousand factories doing just that. There’s also a proverbial Sweater City and Underwear City, where huge volumes of each are churned out in highly concentrated areas. If you ever wonder how we went from living in a world of relative clothing scarcity to feeling like we’re swimming in the stuff, ponder no further than China.
In 1935 the founder of Filene’s department store claimed that the main economic conundrum facing the industrialized world was finding ways to distribute all the consumer goods we were able to produce. This was almost fifty years before China’s own industrial revolution blanketed the world with virtually every imaginable consumer product. On the ride to Dongguan, I started up a game of name-that-factory with Lily. We’d pass an austere compound and I’d ask, “What does that one make?” She’d rattle off “laptop,” “TV,” “cell phone,” and an occasional “garment!” One factory she didn’t know the word for and so she made a gesture toward an electronic spire on the top of a building. An antenna factory?
For decades, China solved the conundrum of how to distribute its inexhaustible supply of factory-made goods—by making things inexpensively. At most of the factories I visited, I could in theory buy a couple of thousand skirts for $5 apiece, sell them in the United States for $20 apiece (assuming I could sell them directly and pay minimal shipping costs) and make quite a nice profit. Importing goods is not that simple, but there’s an undeniable appeal to making money from China’s miraculous capacity to make cheap, attractive products.
For a half century, Americans have been the world’s leading consumers. We have been busy shopping while the developing world, and more recently China, has been busy making things for us to buy. We have been sucking up more than our fair share of the planet’s resources, but our consumption was somewhat offset by the fact that the developing world used very little. Our consumer habits are now spreading to China, which has more than four times our population and may soon have more than four times the buying power. Ponder this for a second: a population of 1.3 billion people consuming clothes with the furious intensity that Americans do.
This is embarrassing to admit now, but when I packed for my meetings with Chinese factories, I intentionally chose the blandest things I owned. Still imagining Communist-era austerity ruling the Chinese fashion winds, I didn’t want anyone to be overwhelmed by my New York fashion sensibility. But as I walked down the palm-tree-lined pedestrian plazas of Shenzhen in a pair of khakis, canvas slip-ons, and a plain black blouse, I was decidedly outdressed by sharply dressed twentysomethings in knee-high boots and chic leather messenger bags. Lily and Katy were both better dressed than I, in the latest styles for China’s college-educated up-and-comers.
A decade ago China’s fashion industry was almost nonexistent. Today, it’s on the verge of exploding and the country has the world’s fastest-growing fashion and luxury markets. China has had its own edition of Vogue since 2005, and the Shenzhen Garment Industry Association has organized a collective runway show for the city’s designers at London Fashion Week since 2010. High-end American designer Diane von Furstenberg has had a store in Shanghai since 2007.
Sal Giardina recalls that when he first traveled to China for work in 2005 very few people were driving nice cars or wearing fashionable clothes. Just a few years later, fashion had taken hold. In the factories I visited in the spring of 2011, most of the sewing-machine girls were wearing puffer jackets and bedazzled stretch denim, and the boys were in trendy tracksuits, their hair gelled into spiky points. Sewing-machine operators still make a pittance, but it’s obvious that many of them are spending their spare cash on trendy clothes. Giardina agrees. “They’re developing a taste level for better items.”
Initially, as the trappings of Communism fell away, the Chinese followed Western styles and sought out our brands, but this too is changing. Chinese fashion brands are beginning to challenge their foreign competitors for loyalty at home. And Chinese brands are also moving into the American market, such as contemporary women’s wear label JNBY, which has had a flagship store in SoHo since 2010.
China’s growing consumer class and incredible industrial output pose enormous sustainability issues for the global economy and the world’s resources. Giardina states, “If every man, woman, and child in China bought two pair of wool socks, there would be no more wool left in the world. Think about that. So, yes, there will be problems with scarcity of resources. And what’s going to happen is prices will go up.” The country’s growing clothing consumption is already putting upward pressure on the price of fibers, particularly cotton, as demand is outstripping supply. According to the Oerlikon fiber study, cotton production is already reaching its limitations as competition for arable land intensifies.
Many Americans have forgotten what industrial cities—polluted, inhuman, and deeply ugly—look like. When I was in Dongguan, I was constantly thinking that the planet has no other option but to buckle under all of this manufacturing and that it clearly already was. To see industry on a scale that looks like science fiction seems as if it would take an equally fictional solution to stop. Also deeply unsettling is the fact that fast fashion is gaining hold among Chinese consumers too. Inditex, Zara’s parent company, saw a 32 percent rise in profit in 2010, largely attributed to sales in China, and opened seventy-five stores there in 2010 alone. If China begins to consume clothing at disposable levels, which fast-fashion companies are angling for, the environmental and social problems of fashion are just going to increase exponentially from here.
~~Overdressed: The Shockingly High Cost of Cheap Fashion -by- Elizabeth L. Cline
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