Take Five with Author Elizabeth L. Cline

It's 2019. Trends have never been cheaper or more accessible, yet we all still share a complicated, if not tortured, relationship with shopping and our closet. Evidence A of the ubiquitous unhealthy relationship linked to shopping: a few days ago, I saw the meme below, laughed with a friend, and would have forgotten it, but, to my surprise, the joke went deeper and struck a chord with many. On the popular meme account @mytherapistsays, it's racked up 150,000 likes as of the writing of this blog post with many laugh emoji responses but also many sad or shame-faced emojis posted as well. One of the sustainable fashion journalists on Instagram that I follow used the meme in her stories to conduct an impromptu poll and was shocked enough to try to start a conversation about our collective sadness on her page here.

As accessible as fashion has become these days, have you still ever felt dissatisfied with your closet? *Raises hand.* Do you tend to shop when you're sad and often feel like you have nothing to wear? *Raises other hand in a gesture of surrender.*

Joking aside, I used to feel that way ALL THE TIME. And now I still do, sure, but much less frequently, although I still do tend to browse or thrift when I'm feeling a little down. Scoring an Ulla Johnson dress for $50 or a pair of 3X1 denim jeans in my size secondhand is a quick pick-me-up. However, I've recently learned that it's just as satisfying (and MUCH better for my budget) to shop my own closet and put together new looks with old pieces. For the first time in my life, I finally really love what I already own. The big change for me was learning to fully embrace my passion for the art of fashion. That impulse was also born around the same time as the Fashion Revolution spurred by the tragedy of the Rana Plaza disaster. That was about six years ago now, and since then my relationship with fashion has changed not only my closet but my life. 

Those lessons were hard-learned over the past six years, so I wish I'd encountered a guidebook like Elizabeth L. Cline's The Conscious Closet to help me articulate and sum up the struggle earlier on. The Conscious Closet is not only a book that will teach you the ins and outs of sustainable fashion, it's also a handy guidebook for how to appreciate and care for what you have as well as a how to guide to help you curate a sustainable fashion closet that you actually enjoy. In the past six years, I've grown to love caring for my garments as much as wearing them, because they've become a collection of beautiful and useful things instead of a major source of frustration and even shame over my fast fashion habit. From new slow fashion brands to check out to new ways to help reduce my footprint to the names of the stitches that help make my Rouje garments so special that my tailor LITERALLY gasps in joy when he sees them-- seriously!-- Elizabeth's book enriched my understanding of why I find fashion so compelling.

Whether you are a sustainable fashionista yourself or you are feeling overwhelmed hearing terms like sustainable vs. slow vs. conscious fashion often used interchangeably, this is the book for you. Click to pre-order Elizabeth's latest book here or read on below for a fascinating glimpse behind the writing scenes! 

 1. I’d love to hear about your writing environment! What are the essentials you need around you, if any? A favorite place to write? How long did you spend writing “The Conscious Closet”? 

I love talking about the writing process! To write a book, I have to be able to concentrate without any distractions, meaning no sounds, emails or phone calls, and limited social engagements, which as you might imagine meant putting my life on hold and leaving New York City as often as possible. I tried to write in the City and couldn’t get a flow going. I was at my local co-working space in Brooklyn one day, trying to finish a chapter, and a children's party came in and started carving pumpkins while I was writing. A kid popped a balloon right by my face. My downstairs neighbors also liked to play dubstep when I was working. Eventually, I took off to my mom’s house in rural South Georgia to write. There, I can work at a table that looks out over a pond. It’s so quiet you can hear a pin drop. I also rented an AirBnB in an old house with a big yard and porch in Atlanta for a few weeks. I only had about eight months to write the book, which isn’t enough time, but I knew I needed to get the book out ASAP. I also read constantly when I write, as reading helps cultivate the ability to focus and think deeply. This time, I read a slew of how-to books on totally unrelated subjects, like Dale Carnegie’s 1948 bestseller How to Stop Worrying and Start Living. It gave me great ideas for how to structure The Conscious Closet. Unfortunately, it did not help me stop worrying about my book deadline.
 
 
2. I believe you’re originally from Georgia, but do you consider yourself a New Yorker now? Also, I loved how much travel featured in the book, too! Were you always interested in traveling as part of your writing process? What’s your favorite place you’ve visited for work or for fun?
 
I don’t consider myself a New Yorker most of the time, although I should after 17 years here. I’m very attached to the South, and to the rural place where I grew up. If you've seen Friday Night Lights, that was my childhood, but crossed with The Decline of Western Civilization. I did end up with a Southern partner. My boyfriend Joe is from Little Rock. Anyway, I’ve been lucky to travel to almost a dozen countries to research and promote sustainable and ethical fashion. I don’t have a favorite place, I just love getting to see behind the scenes and deep into the fashion supply chain. 

Traveling the world certainly shapes the way you craft a message or think about a social problem like sustainable and ethical fashion. I’ll give you a couple of examples. There is a lot of emphasis on innovation in sustainable fashion right now, where people seem to think we’re going to be wearing lab-grown textiles in a few years. But, I’ve also spent time in a lot of textile mills, including Italian textile mills, where they’re crafting wool and leather and other ancient materials, but in very high-tech, sustainable factories. What’s more, anyone who studies the petrochemical industry knows that the world is going to be wearing lots and lots of plastic-basic fabrics moving forward, not less, so as advocates we have to face that reality head on rather than pretend that it’s going to go away.
 
My on-the-ground experiences have changed how I think about innovation and what the future is going to look like. Secondly, my experiences in Nairobi, Kenya, researching the secondhand clothing industry, shaped so much of The Conscious Closet. Sustainable fashion is rushing forward with this message that recycling textiles is going to save us. But in my perspective, you can’t have that conversation without including the traders in Nairobi and across the global secondhand trade in the developing world. Garbage is political and so is donating clothes. Plus, if you look at the problems with the plastic recycling market, we know that recycling is no panacea.
 
 
3. How did the idea occur to you to write such a complete handbook on sustainable fashion? There’s definitely such confusion, even mystification around terms like slow fashion, conscious fashion, and sustainable fashion. I myself didn’t realize I’d been misusing the term “slow fashion” until I read the book. And I’ve read a lot of books on sustainable fashion. There’s definitely nothing else as comprehensive and helpful out there.


Thank you! Perhaps I’ve been misusing the term slow fashion, too? Ha! I definitely wanted to avoid sustainable fashion jargon with this book and just put everything under the umbrella of conscious fashion. I’m not advocating for “conscious fashion” being the word we use; I just needed one simple word to keep the book streamlined and focused, an umbrella to put our cause and all of this information under. The whole point of the book was to reach the widest possible audience, from the hardcore labor activists, of which I am one, to the minimalist dressers to those people who really love fashion and just don’t want to feel bad when they get dressed every day. That meant the book had to have some breadth.
 
​But, that said, I was shocked at how comprehensive the book ended up being. That wasn’t really the plan. The original idea was more about slow fashion, shopping for quality, and building a beautiful wardrobe, but that message only reaches so many people. If I’d stopped there, I’d leave out all the influencers whose livelihoods depend on wearing something different every day, for example. 

As a journalist, I found myself wanting to go further once I sat down to write. I want people to have all of the information they need at their fingertips. Not all of it is applicable to everyone, but there’s certainly something for everyone in that book. There’s so much to know and to learn about clothing, and currently that information is spread across the Internet or is hidden from consumers. I wanted to put it all in one place and back it up with sources. I found myself adding the chapters on toxic chemicals in fashion, the impact of different materials, and the importance of labor organizing to the future of ethical fashion without really planning to. Now I can’t imagine the book any other way!
 
 
4. What are some of your favorite sustainable brands for fashion or otherwise? I learned from your book that Patagonia is an even greater company than I’d realized, so I recently purchased  this guppybag from them for #PlasticFreeJuly. (FYI in the book, Elizabeth states that changing your laundry habits is the best way to change your fashion footprint!)

"If you are looking to change one single set of habits that will slash your fashion footprint and keep your clothes looking better longer, look no further than your laundry room."

-Elizabeth L. Cline

I can’t believe how much easier it is so find socially conscious brands nowadays. When I finished Overdressed*, sustainable and ethical fashion brands were obscure and hard to find. I try not to choose favorites. I felt comfortable and proud including Eileen Fisher and Reformation in the book because those brands really do go above and beyond to examine their practices and to be more sustainable. In my closet, I have jeans by Nudie and MUDJeans, both are sustainable denim brands. I have a fantastic pair of Tencel dress pants, made from sustainably sourced rayon, by Amour Vert, a West Coast based sustainable brand that was one of the first eco-brands I was ever introduced to. I’ve got a gorgeous organic cotton button-down shirt by Grammar NYC. My two newest bathing suits are both made of recycled nylon, AKA ecoNyl, and one is by Mara Hoffman and the other is SummerSalt. I’ve got several basics by Everlane, a brand leading the movement for transparency in fashion. And I have lots of secondhand Stella McCartney, a designer whose innovation and activism has transformed the luxury industry. One day, perhaps, I'll be able to buy her stuff new!
 
5. Besides your own book, which is an absolute sustainable fashion bible that everyone needs to read, what are three books about sustainability that you might recommend for further reading?

I love this question! There need to be more books and sustainable and ethical fashion. The food movement has dozens of books and documentaries on that industry, so we really do need more. But, that said, there are so many books on the fashion movement that I love. Lucy Siegle’s To Die For and Clare Press’s Wardrobe Crisis both lay out with clarity the fashion problem and what must be done about it. Of course, I’d like to say that Overdressed, my first book, is the founding text on how fast fashion warped our culture and economy. I also love Empire of Cotton by Sven Beckert, which looks at how cotton shaped modern capitalism and impoverished the places like Bangladesh that we now exploit for textile making. Teri Agins brilliant The End of Fashion talks about how corporate control of fashion pretty much ruined creativity in the industry. Fake Silk is a harrowing investigation into the toxic history of rayon manufacturing. And journalist Dana Thomas has a wonderful new book, Fashionopolis, that looks at the innovations the fashion industry is betting on to solve sustainability.  

Thanks so much for sharing your writing process, hilarious observations, and inspiration with my blog readers, Elizabeth! FYI Elizabeth is also the author of Overdressed: The Shockingly High Cost of Cheap Fashion. With over 200 4 and 5 star reviews on Amazon, it's a must-read as well. Find a copy here or pre-order a copy of The Conscious Closet, her latest sustainable fashion handbook, here.