11 minute read
Following the Thread
Maxine Kaye Bédat’s book "Unraveled" sheds light on shady sustainability claims and labor practices across the fashion industry. Now, her nonprofit New Standard Institute is successfully navigating politics to pass policies that could dramatically lessen the harmful impacts of the global apparel business.
COVER STORY
FOLLOWING THE THREAD
Written by Joel Hoekstra
It’s early November, and Maxine Bédat is visiting the Mall of America on a weekend afternoon. North America’s largest indoor marketplace is teeming with teens and tourists. Long lines snake from the registers and fitting rooms, including those at fast-fashion retailer H&M, where display tables are heaped with piles of fuzzy hats, knit scarves, buttoned vests, fur-trimmed coats, embossed belts and embroidered tops—all for sale at surprisingly cheap prices. Happy shoppers scoop up deals by the armful.
Bédat unfurls a pair of jeans and frowns. “Look at that,” she says, pointing at the tag. The material is a blend: 99 percent recycled cotton and 1 percent elastane. But only single-material fabrics can be recycled; clothing made from blends ultimately goes into a landfill or is burned. “These are made of recycled material, which is great,” Bédat notes, “but they can’t be recycled.”
She returns the jeans to their pile and picks up a black sequined dress made of polyester. Manufactured in China, it was undoubtedly assembled on an industrial production line, Bédat says, passed among roughly 20 workers (mostly women) who cut the fabric, sewed each seam and attached the sequins, zippers and tags in a series of steps carefully analyzed by managers to maximize daily production.
Despite the number of hands that have touched the dress, the quality is questionable. “You can tell it’s just really fast construction,” Bédat says. “And feel that. There’s nothing about this that would make me want to wear it all night, or more than once.”
Nothing at H&M earns Bédat’s approval, but it’s not because she only wears Prada or prefers hand-stitched garments made from organic hemp. Today, she’s wearing jeans and a crisp white shirt with the collar popped. At Blake, her classmates voted her Best Dressed. She likes clothes. In high school, the highlight of one family trip to New York City was the chance to visit the very first H&M store in America.
But a sojourn in Africa, a stint as an entrepreneur and conversations with dozens of people around the globe ultimately led Bédat to look beyond the glitzy surface of fashion. Her recent book, "Unraveled," examines what the New York Times called the “dark underbelly” of the clothing industry, spotlighting the environmental problems and unfair labor practices that have mushroomed as the industry has grown. The New Standard Institute (NSI), which she founded in 2019, has made a name for itself in policy circles with significant legislation in the pipeline that could transform the apparel business. Increasingly, she is invited to speak at fashion industry events and sought out as a trusted unbiased source by journalists writing about sustainability in fashion.
“She’s a forceful voice,” says Eric Dayton ʼ99, who got to know Bédat during his own adventures running the Minneapolis menswear retailer Askov Finlayson. “She’s not afraid to call out the underperformers whose claims don’t match up with reality. She’s a critical player in this moment where everyone in fashion is trying to figure out how to make actual change.”
Snagging Questions
One of three daughters born to South African immigrants, Bédat grew up in Medicine Lake and eventually moved to New York City to enroll at Columbia University. After earning a bachelor’s in political science and economics, she entered law school, graduating in 2012.
Law suited her (“It was about facts, thinking clearly”), but firm life was not in her future. She spent one summer during school in Arusha, Tanzania working at the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda for the United Nations. The work consumed her days, but she often meandered through the city’s markets during her downtime, stopping to buy gifts for friends and talk to artisans. The conversations made her realize the close connections between global trade, development and environmental issues.
The experience sparked an idea. In 2013, she and Soraya Darabi ʼ01 launched Zady, an online fashion company dedicated to sourcing ethically produced items made from sustainable materials. The brand was featured in Fast Company and became known as “The Whole Foods of Fashion.” But tracing the origins of many products—essential to Zady’s mission—proved challenging. “We could figure out, for example, where an apparel item was cut and sewn, but there wasn’t any information before that.” Where did the material come from? Who grew the cotton that went into a pair of jeans? What chemicals were used in the manufacturing? “There were gaps in the story we wanted to tell,” Bédat says.
Bédat sensed she wasn’t the only one who wanted answers. Consumers cared, and apparel industry execs were beginning to follow their lead, labeling products as “eco friendly” and “climate conscious.” But transparency in the supply chain was lacking, and answers from manufacturers were vague. In 2018, Bédat and Darabi closed Zady, and the next year Bédat launched NSI, a nonprofit that uses “data and the power of citizens to turn the fashion industry into a force for good." The organization collects industry research and advocates for policy changes related to its mission. "But starting a nonprofit wasn’t enough. Bédat still lacked answers to many of the sourcing questions that had bedeviled her before. In 2018, she embarked on a fact-finding tour that would lead to a book, "Unraveled: The Life and Death of a Garment." The book’s narrative traces the path of a pair of jeans from inception to disposal. The research would take Bédat across the United States and around the world.
Maxine Kaye Bédat '01
Photo by Bogdana Ferguson
Traveling Pants
In a 2021 review of "Unraveled," New York Times writer Vanessa Friedman wrote, “The book is the latest in a growing genre of nonfiction: the consumption horror story. It’s as scary as any adult tale Roald Dahl ever wrote.”
Most shocking, perhaps, is that "Unraveled’s" revelations about the apparel industry aren’t fictional. Bédat fills her books with hard facts and figures. She goes in search of real people and relates their actual experiences—as well as her own. The tone is accessible and personal, at times even funny. "I really tried not to be preachy," she says. "I was learning along with everybody else."
Bédat begins her exploration with a visit to a cotton farm near Lubbock, Texas. Most jeans are made of cotton (or cotton blends), and Texas produces nearly half of America’s cotton. Cotton has a complicated history. For nearly a century, U.S. production hinged on slave labor, and nowadays cotton crops depend heavily on extensive pesticide use, which can pollute water, degrade the environment and affect human health. To produce the cotton used in a single pair of jeans requires nearly a pound of chemicals, according to the Natural Resources Defense Council.
In "Unraveled’s" opening chapter, Bédat visits farmer Carl Pepper, who started farming cotton organically in 1992. Pepper went organic after his father, who spent decades applying chemicals to his own cotton fields, died of cancer. Pepper knows pesticide-free farming also improves soil health, but doing the right thing for human health and the environment isn’t always easy, he admits: “I am a numbers guy, and the numbers have to work.”
Most U.S. cotton, once harvested and ginned, is packed into huge bales and shipped to China, so tracing the path of cotton from a single farm is almost impossible. But Bédat tries her best, flying to Shaoxing, near Shanghai, to tour a factory where cotton is cleaned, spun, woven, dyed and finished into textiles. The operation is almost fully mechanized.
“Production in China is cheap,” Bédat writes, “because they use cheap energy” in the form of coal. China isn’t the only country that uses fossil fuels to generate power, but global fashion’s reliance on Chinese-made textiles means the impact is magnified dramatically.
Most Americans never see the direct environmental impacts that have come with moving manufacturing work from the United States and other places to China, but Bédat glimpses the problems firsthand when she hires a fixer to gain access to a less reputable factory in Guangdong. “Something told me this place wasn’t regularly inspected,” she writes, after encountering piles of jeans that “certainly would have been in violation of any fire code” and pipes leaking chemicals into an adjacent river.
Months later, Bédat touches down in Bangladesh to see how clothing is stitched together. As the apparel industry has sought to keep labor costs low, production has quickly migrated from China, where the middle class is growing and wages are rising, to countries like Bangladesh, Sri Lanka, Vietnam, Myanmar, Cambodia and Ethiopia. Factories in these places now provide jobs for thousands of women like Rima, a 36-year-old garment worker who lives with her family in a Dhaka slum. Rima spends eight to 10 hours a day executing “machinelike maneuvers” and feels constant pressure to keep up with the speed of production at her job. Rima says she has great hopes for her child’s future, but she feels depressed and unhappy about her own life and work. “The factory feels like a cage,” she tells Bédat through an interpreter.
Illustrations by Owen Davey—Folio Art
"Unraveled" explores the channels that drive distribution and the forces that fuel consumption in the apparel industry. And just when Bédat thinks she can lay her story to rest by donating her representative jeans to a second-hand shop or sending them to a recycling facility, she makes a discovery that would give any of us pause: most of our clothing ends up in a landfill on another continent. In Ghana, Bédat tries not to breathe the smoke as discarded clothing burns in a dump outside of Accra.
"Unraveled" ends on a happy note—of sorts. This is a system we built, Bédat reminds readers, and we can unbuild it. “Whether we admit it to ourselves or not, the clothing we choose to purchase has an impact,” she writes, “so it’s up to us to demand that the industry behind what we wear and our government, which sets the rules of trade, get out of the way in allowing the planet and its people to thrive.”
Fashion Forward
Bédat enjoyed writing "Unraveled" but has no immediate plans for a second book. “I loved the whole writing process: the research, meeting people, putting things together,” she says. “But I’m not primarily an author. I’m trying to do things that will create change, and policy is the ultimate way to make change.”
Many of the changes Bédat would like to see are embodied in the Fashion Sustainability and Social Accountability Act, introduced in the New York legislature in January 2022. Bédat’s NSI has taken a lead in shaping the bill and lobbying for its passage. The legislation would essentially require all global apparel and footwear companies doing business in New York with more than $100 million in yearly revenues to significantly reduce their harmful environmental and labor impact, including requiring companies to reduce the climate emissions in their operations to be in line with the Paris Agreement.
“I’ve never seen a piece of regulation that would lift the floor this far,” says Kenneth Pucker, a retired Timberland executive and NSI advisor. “Over the last 20 years, we’ve seen the industry making lots of claims about sustainability while the damage is going up right alongside it. The bill has the ability to bend the curve down, at least on carbon emissions.”
Pucker applauds Bédat for bringing companies like Eileen Fisher and Reformation, as well as nonprofits like the Sierra Club and the National Resources Defense Council, to the table. Because the NSI is funded by individual donations, not by the industry, the information and ideas it provides can’t be dismissed as part of any particular corporate agenda.
"Unraveled" and the Fashion Act have given her a higher profile, but Bédat is careful not to portray herself as a model of sustainability. She doesn’t promote particular brands or endorse individual companies. “My journey has changed the way I consume things,” she says, “but I’m not a perfectly sustainable consumer. I’m a woman who wants to fit in like anyone else. Just being more aware of what goes into something, though, it makes you more thoughtful.”
Awareness, Bédat hopes, will also spur others to take action. “Nobody is there to solve the problem. It is us,” she says. “I don’t like being called an environmentalist or a labor activist. I’m just someone who saw these things and reacted like a normal person.”
Joel Hoekstra is a Minneapolis-based writer and editor.
