We’re all downstream from something

My ambition vs corporate power and inflation

Info I put in the back page of my book. It’s all out of date now.

Welcome to Ordinary Delusions, a newsletter searching for answers in the chaos of late capitalism. I rebranded a few weeks back and am exploring new directions in my work. Read more about that here. If you find my writing meaningful, please consider becoming a paid subscriber.

I am opening this new chapter with three stories about how technology and the economy shaped my 20s and 30s. Last week’s newsletter looked at how Big Tech killed my dream job. Next week, I’ll be writing about how I ended up living in Berlin for over a decade.

I was in Paris for fashion week when the Brexit vote happened. The morning after the news broke I was sitting at the Margiela show and cried (or almost cried, IDK it was a long time ago). Luke Leitch, one of Vogue’s menswear correspondents, mentioned something about the miserable atmosphere in his review and I assumed he was referencing me because I was sitting across the runway from him. This was June 2016, a few months before the first Trump election.

Brexit was the moment the world began turning in a different direction. After this, it became clear that all the other bad things were going to get worse too. I shouldn’t have been so surprised about Brexit, though. Before getting into fashion I’d spent seven years in Sheffield, an industrial city in the north of England that sunk into poverty after the great hollowing out of British manufacturing in the 90s and 00s (watch The Full Monty if you haven’t already). It was very clear even then that there were two Britains, and that I’d grown up in the one where life was easy.

Brexit turned up the volume on all the world’s miseries and in the years after it happened I found it harder and harder to ignore them. The homelessness in London and the refugees on the streets of Paris started to really etch themselves into the back of my mind. Around the same time, sustainability started to become a bigger topic in fashion. I got really into it. I was tired of the non-stop consumerism and this seemed like a bridge between that and the political backdrop of our times. It wasn’t the only reason I chose to leave my Highsnob job but it was definitely part of it (Big Tech had made my line of work kinda pointless by then anyway). I’ve always loved clothes but I was exploring a lot more in my life at that point, meditating every morning and binge-reading Alain De Botton.

This was 2017, 2018. Sustainability was not a big thing in menswear but there were a few smaller brands who were trying to figure it out. GmbH was doing some really nice jeans with recycled cotton, Alyx had a whole line of recycled tees, and Noah used their platform to talk about what was going on in the world more broadly. They were cool brands, and they cared!

I did not have much of a plan, but I figured I could piece together a career as a brand strategist, but working specifically in sustainability. I’d help brands navigate the ins and outs of sustainability while calling attention to the big issues on Instagram (I was posting a lot on Instagram under my old account future__dust back then). Most sustainability professionals work in the supply chain, which I definitely could not do, but there was a big need for someone to make the issue less wonky and more relatable. Nobody else was doing this and it seemed like the kind of thing the industry needed. The first Trump presidency had woken people up and I could see that many of my peers in the industry were thinking more critically about their role in the world. I had vague ideas of writing a book at some point but I never imagined it’d make money.

I didn’t think much more into it but I’d just turned 30, was happy with not much and living in a cheap apartment with rent control, so I figured I’d roll the dice on this idea and see where it went. It didn’t seem like I had any better options and I knew from my old job that there was almost no money in freelance writing.

I was not expecting corporate apparel manufacturers to save the planet, it was pretty clear already that a lot of the big companies were bullshitting and that sustainability wasn’t something that consumers were willing to pay for, but there was a general feeling that the industry would be a much better place if it took its impact on the planet seriously. It seemed like enough brands in the industry wanted to be sustainable, even if they weren’t going fast enough.

This is not how it turned out.

The first thing people need to understand about fashion is that it is just not a good way of making money. It costs a lot of money to produce a collection, you have to guess what people will want six months in advance, and there are so, so, so many brands out there that there is a very real chance that the world will simply forget you exist. The shitty economics of clothing production mean that the industry is highly consolidated, especially at the cheap and expensive ends. If you’re not a giant corporation, you’re gonna have a really hard time.

And the middle of the industry, where most of the smaller brands are, is squeezed the hardest. They can’t keep up with the fast fashion below them, and the luxury brands above them have almost unlimited marketing power. The brands I was expecting to be most open to sustainability have the least resources to actually do it. (Mara Hoffman had built probably the most convincing concept of a sustainable fashion brand: a deliberately small collection made with great fabrics that repeat season after season. Her brand closed down last year.)

The second thing is that brands don’t make their own clothes, they just pay factories to make them for them. But the biggest impact of the fashion industry is making clothes. If brands wanted to fuck up the planet less, they would need to be more responsible for how all their stuff is made. But if you are a giant corporate apparel maker there is basically zero incentive to do this. It costs more money, for a start, but it also creates legal liability. If you make your own clothes, then it’s your fault if the people making them aren’t paid properly or if chemicals are being dumped into a river. Big brands do not want this level of accountability. This is the most important thing to understand about fashion and its massive impact on the planet.

This is the fundamental tension at the heart of sustainability in fashion, and many other industries as well. It is an attempt to reconcile the damages of capitalism by working inside a system that has very few incentives to change. That’s not to say that it’s impossible to do good work within the industry — it definitely is. But you will always be fighting against the fact that the biggest and most powerful companies make too much money from things staying the same.

The geopolitical situation in the past few years has pushed sustainability even further down the agenda, even as the impacts of the climate emergency become more and more severe. When Putin invaded Ukraine, he set off a chain reaction of inflation that’s had a knock-on effect across the industry as teams get downsized and brands go under. And because sustainability doesn’t make a brand more profitable, it’s one of the first things to get cut.

And now Trump wants to kill “woke” capitalism. We can assume that Big Fashion has even less enthusiasm for sustainability now that the second Trump presidency is going after diversity initiatives and shutting down environmental programs across the board. It is a really, really tough time for people working in fashion, and I feel for the sustainability professionals especially.

The real fight for a better fashion industry is not about corporate sustainability anyway. It’s political. And it’s part of a much bigger picture. The reason it’s so difficult for fashion to clean up its own act — those disconnected supply chains — is the same reason places like Sheffield and Detroit have sunk so deep into poverty and social exclusion. Decades of neoliberal politics have abandoned millions of people in the rich world while giant corporations trash the planet and exploit workers on the other side of the globe. This is a big factor in the resurgence of right-wing politics. It’s all connected.

This is one reason I’ve decided to take my work into new directions (more about that decision here). My writing is at its strongest when it’s connecting elements of our everyday lives (like fashion!) into a much bigger story of why the world is the way it is. I am not the kind of writer who wants to go deeper and deeper into one issue, and there are already some excellent reporters on the front lines of the sustainable fashion conversation (like Sarah Kent at Business of Fashion, Bella Webb and Emily Chan at Vogue, and Brooke Roberts-Islam at Forbes).

When I left my old job, I wanted to do something that felt meaningful. This is where I ended up. I did not have a master plan, or a five-year strategy. I still don’t have one, beyond just writing more here, doing more books and maybe at some point a podcast. This is something I went into last week — you cannot have it all figured out in advance because on this timeline, everything is constantly changing. The big Substack / podcast / Youtube success stories could not plan it all out. There are many things we can do to push our lives forward, but we are all at the mercy of forces much bigger than our own imagination and abilities. My Highsnobiety job got killed by Big Tech. My ambitions in sustainability collided with corporate power and inflation. We’re all downstream from something.

This will be a storyline I’ll be returning to again and again — how the political and economic chaos of our times impacts ordinary lives, and what we can do to thrive in spite of them.