Have you heard about The True Cost Documentary that Andrew Morgan released this summer? It was released in selected theaters and Purse & Clutch petitioned to get it to come to Austin - successfully! And then I got sick and missed the viewing.
Imagine my delight to see that it is now streaming on Netflix!
So grab a coffee, hop on over and watch it - it's just an hour and a half - and then come back here and let us know what you think.
The film outlines the general life of a garment from the cotton industry to the garment workers to it's disposal. Here are a few concepts and quotes that caught my attention:
- What we wear is "our chosen skin ... fundamentally a part of what we wish to communicate about ourselves" - Orsola de Castro, Fashion Designer
- If you benchmark the price of a shirt over the years you'll notice that the price is either the same or less, but the cost to produce it has increased. "Something has to give, either prices have to go up, manufacturers have to cut costs or cut corners to make sure they don't shut down" - Orsola de Castro, Fashion Designer
- Fast Fashion: "Instead of two seasons a year, we practically have 52 seasons a year" - Lucy Siegle, Journalist
- People Tree's designs "start with the people group and design the collections around the existing skill sets of the workers" - Safia Minney, Founder & CEO of People Tree
- "Fair Trade is a citizen's response to correcting the social injustice in the international trading system that is largely dysfunctional where workers and farmers are not paid a living wage and where the environment is not considered at all to make the stuff that we buy every day" - Safia Minney, Founder & CEO of People Tree
- Central message of advertising: "The way to solve the problem in your life is through consumption" Tim Kasser, PhD, Physiology Professor at Knox College
- "Will we be satisfied with a system that makes us feel rich while leaving our world so desperately poor?" - Andrew Morgan, The True Cost Director