Fashion industry suffers
filtercoffee.substack.comHas anyone ever seen the luxury fashion items and where they come from? You find Chinese cramped up in small home shops, churning out the produce like bags with violation of all safety codes and they simply bribe the police in Italy.
Then luxuries Italian brands stamp their logo on top of it and it's ready to be sold in big city showrooms.
Heck, a lot of Italian shoe brands are buying their leather shoes from Uttar Pardesh, India.
Maybe not all luxury fashion brand production looks like this, but atleast some part does.
Come to India and buy your leather quality handmade shoes for less than $100 and let me know if you find any quality difference between $700 shoes and $100 shoes without lable.
maybe it's not completely clear from your comment, but those chinese workers are actually living and manufacturing the bags in italy: https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2018/04/16/the-chinese-wo...
which has a very strange globalization / branding backwards logic to it. - chinese production costs low / high margins on branded good originating in italy, ok, we do chinese manufacturing but inside italy....
... so they can stamp 'Made it Italy' on the bags, which obfuscates the fact that they are actually Chinese made. For fashionistas, the made in Italy stamp is very important.
Additionally... it saves on shipping completed bags from China to Europe.
> Heck, a lot of Italian shoe brands are buying their leather shoes from Uttar Pardesh, India.
... any online stores giving a straight line to those Indian shoes? They cheaper than, say, Meermin? Asking for a friend^w^w myself.
Yeah, I like my (laced) leather moccasins (with a polymer sole on the underside, and not covering my ankles), but they tend to get a bit expensive. Last time I had to pay 140 EUR/pair, compared to regular prices in the 40-80 EUR range for normal non-designer shoes (I was forced to an upscale shoe store, as the normal stores had no suitable moccasins).
Maybe not UP but I think YC funded a Pakistani leather goods startup called Markhor
Alibaba
Maybe it's time to hit the brakes on selling overpriced sweatshop made clothes with a luxury brand slapped on top and a 2000x markup.
How? It's the same problem as with spam: As long as there remain enough... erm... special people who pay these scammers, the business will be profitable.
Fashion is one of the greatest symbols of unnecessary luxury, next to tourism. It being "hit" is not a surprise, but also really not worrisome. Individually, it's an issue for everyone working in fashion, but if the fashion industry went away and never returned, society wouldn't suffer.
Wow, what's going on lately with hackernews. I see these extreme opinions on everything, it's like we're trying to take out the entire fun and diversity from life so that we can all live forever in our apartments, work from there, order food from there and in the end die in our home having done nothing with our lives but work.
I don't think parent or people are against fashion. What they are against is probably brands violating many labour laws in other countries to sell you a non functional piece of "fashionable" cloth at a 10x-100x mark up price stuff.
Fashion can exist without harming the environment or society even if that society is not yours, there are still people suffering in third world. The argument that without these companies, they won't even have a job is plain bad because they have enough margins to justify paying more and investing in safety but they choose not to and consumers support that by purchasing it.
There is also difference between buying cheap produced out of slave labour vs buying expensive produced out of cheap labor. In former, you might not have enough money to be moralistic but in latter, you have a choice to and you didn't which imo makes you more responsible.
One of the big issues is transparency, and this applies across the entire price spectrum. If people knew that certain brands, luxury or not, were exploiting labour, would some people still be inclined to buy them? It’s easy to say that most people wouldn’t care, but the conversations shift. Look at School Strike for Climate Action as an example.
"Tourism and fashion are luxury things" != "You must not ever do that". If you're into fashion, by all means, spend your money on fashion items.
I like luxury things like eating out at restaurants. I don't believe that I need them to exist in a meaningful way, which maybe explains why I haven't had any problems not having access to them for a while.
Constant overabundance of luxuries makes them feel normal and even necessary, but they're really not. You can live without them, and you might even appreciate them more if you do for a while.
The last part of the message that I replied to literally goes "but if the fashion industry went away and never returned, society wouldn't suffer."
Coming from the other side, yes, society would suffer, same goes with tourism (which is also mentioned, next to fashion). There is a lot more to these industries than overpriced luxury items, cheap fast fashion, overcrowded popular tourist spots and carbon emissions from flying. Not everything is black and white to the extent of "this industry can die and nobody would suffer".
We disagree, I guess.
I don't see society suffering if the fashion industry disappears. Will it change society? Yes, slightly. Is that change bad? Probably not. Less status-symbol-fetishizing can be a good thing, if the luxury car industry or the cruise ship industry disappeared, I wouldn't shed tears either.
One of my favourite passages from Sapiens:
Even what people take to be their most personal desires are usually programmed by the imagined order. Let’s consider, for example, the popular desire to take a holiday abroad. There is nothing natural or obvious about this. A chimpanzee alpha male would never think of using his power in order to go on holiday into the territory of a neighbouring chimpanzee band. The elite of ancient Egypt spent their fortunes building pyramids and having their corpses mummified, but none of them thought of going shopping in Babylon or taking a skiing holiday in Phoenicia. People today spend a great deal of money on holidays abroad because they are true believers in the myths of romantic consumerism. Romanticism tells us that in order to make the most of our human potential we must have as many different experiences as we can. We must open ourselves to a wide spectrum of emotions; we must sample various kinds of relationships; we must try different cuisines; we must learn to appreciate different styles of music. One of the best ways to do all that is to break free from our daily routine, leave behind our familiar setting, and go travelling in distant lands, where we can ‘experience’ the culture, the smells, the tastes and the norms of other people. We hear again and again the romantic myths about ‘how a new experience opened my eyes and changed my life’. Consumerism tells us that in order to be happy we must consume as many products and services as possible. If we feel that something is missing or not quite right, then we probably need to buy a product (a car, new clothes, organic food) or a service (housekeeping, relationship therapy, yoga classes). Every television commercial is another little legend about how consuming some product or service will make life better.
Romanticism, which encourages variety, meshes perfectly with consumerism. Their marriage has given birth to the infinite ‘market of experiences’, on which the modern tourism industry is founded. The tourism industry does not sell flight tickets and hotel bedrooms. It sells experiences. Paris is not a city, nor India a country – they are both experiences, the consumption of which is supposed to widen our horizons, fulfil our human potential, and make us happier. Consequently, when the relationship between a millionaire and his wife is going through a rocky patch, he takes her on an expensive trip to Paris. The trip is not a reflection of some independent desire, but rather of an ardent belief in the myths of romantic consumerism. A wealthy man in ancient Egypt would never have dreamed of solving a relationship crisis by taking his wife on holiday to Babylon. Instead, he might have built for her the sumptuous tomb she had always wanted.
Treating travellers from afar with great curtesy has been part of most human civilizations since long before romanticism.
Why would we do that? Roughly speaking, simply because they could tell stories about far away places.
The leap from giving a meal or lending out a bed for a chance to hear about how life is abroad to actually wanting to go yourself is incredibly short.
The fact that apes or chimpanzees don't want to go travelling has nothing to do with us.
Thank you, that really resonated with me (and made me move Sapiens up a bit on my reading list).
How on Earth is tourism unnecessary? Maybe if you want people to be even more ignorant, sure.
For almost everyone, for almost all of our history as agricultural city-builders, traveling for pleasure has been a small or entirely absent feature of human lives. That's still true, today. Doesn't seem particularly necessary, given that.
Something to aspire to, that everyone can be a tourist more than very, very rarely in their lives? IDK, maybe. But remember that most in the US will pick Vegas or a Mexican all-inclusive beach resort or something like that over anything especially horizon-expanding, and people in the rest of the world probably aren't much different so far as that goes. So unless you're picking the destinations, I wouldn't count on most of a large increase in tourism-related travel to be especially ignorance-diminishing.
It strongly depends on your definition of necessary, and your linking of tourism to the reduction of ignorance.
No individual died from lack of tourism. One neither eats nor breathes tourism.
Yes, it was a large part of the world economy, so it is, or was, necessary to the status quo, and the status quo maintains many a lifestyle rich and poor, so it's specifically necessary to maintain the direction of the world as it was in late 2019.
But necessary like food, water, shelter, and healthcare? No, tourism is not necessary. Tourism is inaccessible to a percentage of the world populace, therefore it's not necessary.
Will governments define "necessary" after this? What mesh of dependence upon keeping their citizens alive will be determined? Will it even be considered in the rush to re-open?
Tourism is not education as evident by the fact that global tourism is at an all time high, yet people are extremely ignorant.
Teaching them to read again will be more fruitful than flying them around the globe if less ignorance is the goal.
I have a few counterpoints against your first sentence:
0. Tourism isn't a cure for ignorance, but it helps in widening worldview and experiencing how other people live and see. However, today it is mostly about having some time away from your residence/work.
1. Tourists are a small though non-negligible part of humanity as a whole
2. A large part of the people who have traveled as tourists have traveled to tourist spots, places that are developed to cater to the _tourists_ and hence aren't an authentic representation of the local population.
I do agree with your second sentence.
I don't disagree, but I believe that it's not the traveling that's widening horizons, it's the readiness of the traveler to have their horizons expanded. Imho, modern tourism isn't leading people astray, it's giving them what they want. It's a tiny subset that wants something else, maybe we need a different term for them.
Tourism can be educational, it's just destroyed by the modern life behavior e.g. social media addiction. Most people now compete on who has done the most trips in their lives, enjoyed the best cocktail in an exotic beach and posted the most perfect photo from the most iconic touristic destination. But you still can visit destinations to learn their history and blend with locals which no book can teach you.
I've been to DisneyWorld but I don't think that gives me much insight into the lives of ordinary Americans?
I've also lived in Spain and am constantly surprised how ignorant most people are about the country despite having been to far more 'tourist' hot-spots than I have?
Is fashion industry relevant? It's just producing garbage that's mean to be thrown out within a year, destroying the planet. That industry going under would be nothing but a positive.
Good take, but I wouldn't consider Naval to be one of the best thinkers of our generation, not even by a long shot...