I have always put some effort into the clothing that I wear. Like most people, I like looking good and being fashionable. Although I grew up watching shows like America’s Next Top Model and channels such as Fashion TV, I have never wanted to dress like a runway model. Instead, my mother and her aunt influenced much of my interest in fashion. Like many Black women in Apartheid South Africa, my mother’s aunt, Ivy, worked as an in-store tailor for a high-end boutique store in Hyde Park Corner owned by an Italian family. While Ivy has shared many stories about fashion and what was stylish in Apartheid South Africa, she has also shed light on the kind of oppressive treatment that she was subjected to by her white employers. Her experiences exemplify Frantz Fanon’s arguments in The Wretched of The Earth, where he states, “The colonial world is a compartmentalized world.” According to Fanon, what divides this world “is first and foremost what species, what race one belongs to.” In the context of Apartheid South Africa, race significantly determined one’s economic status in ways that attest to Fanon’s observations that “The cause is effect: You are rich because you are white, you are white because you are rich.” The unique aspect of the South African Apartheid situation lies in how economic realities, inequality, and vast disparities in lifestyle are systemic, permeating beyond merely the segregation of public spaces and extending into areas such as clothing. For example, two garments that have become associated with Black women in Apartheid South Africa and its afterlives are an apron and doek (the Afrikaans word for turban). These garments form the basic attire of uniform for domestic workers in South Africa, and as Gabeba Baderoon argues in her essay, “The Ghost in the House: Women, Race, and Domesticity in South Africa,” the word ‘domestic’ has always been associated with Black women. In this context, clothing served a particular social function: to create racialized, gendered, and classed controlling images. In the same manner, upward mobility is marked by the clothing that one wears. Telling of this is the South African slang for ‘Jewish,’ which meant dressing elegantly, as is referred to by Blake Modisane’s Blame Me on History in reference to the early predominance of Jews in the Johannesburg clothing trade and how they were often fashionably dressed. Beyond such stereotypes, clothing is entangled in vast systems of exploitation and environmental degradation.
To echo Amie Leigh Zimmer’s reflections in their “Fashion and Feminism” piece, “As a global capitalist industry, fashion is an exploitative system that manufactures and sells desire.” From a philosophical perspective, our choices of looking decent raise profound questions about responsibility, freedom, and the ethics of covering our flesh in the globalized world. Over the past decade, there has been a growing body of analysis on fast fashion and climate change. However, the focus tends to be on clothing as fashion (as a social system) versus clothing as a material garment to cover the body. While acknowledging the differences between clothing as functional and fast fashion as trendy clothing produced at a rapid rate and low cost, it would be a mistake to assume that the problem is only fast fashion and not just an overall overconsumption of clothing. In light of this, the essay focuses on clothing ethics in ways that parse out the complex and intersectional connections between clothing as it relates to climate injustice and systemic racism.
Yes, Climate Injustice
I recently watched The True Cost, a 2015 documentary directed by Andrew Morgan. The film explores the hidden costs of the global fashion industry. A central aspect of the global fashion industry is capitalism’s logic of infinite growth, which is fundamentally unsustainable from a human rights and ecological perspective. There is a commodification of nature (as environment and human), treating it as an inexhaustible resource that is rooted in colonial, extractivist, anthropocentric thinking. The True Cost challenges this mindset by exposing the fashion industry’s enormous ecological footprint—depleting water resources, polluting ecosystems, and accelerating climate change. The environmental devastation portrayed in the film highlights the ethical imperative for humanity to rethink its relationship with nature, not as something to dominate and exploit but as part of an interconnected web of life. Consider the following impacts of clothing production on the climate:
- Each year, 26 billion pounds of clothing and textiles are discarded in landfills, with 95% having the potential to be reused or repurposed.
- New clothes contribute 10% of annual global carbon emissions, surpassing the combined emissions from international flights and maritime shipping.
- Cotton, which constitutes approximately 33% of all textile fibers, is the most common natural fiber used in clothing. However, it is also a resource-intensive crop, requiring 2,700 liters of water—equivalent to the amount one person drinks over two and a half years—to produce a single cotton shirt. According to the World Resources Institute Report, “cotton farming accounts for 24% of the world’s insecticides and 11% of pesticides, despite utilizing just 3% of the world’s arable land.”
- Clothing production significantly contributes to water use and pollution, with about 20 percent of industrial water pollution stemming from garment manufacturing.
- Over 200 million trees are cut down to be transformed into textiles for clothing each year, most concerning fast fashion production.
- In Cambodia, garment factories were found to use at least 562 tons of forest wood daily, which is equivalent to 1,418 hectares (3,504 acres) to run garment-producing factories in Cambodia like H&M and GAP.
Ranging from the use of chemicals and dyes to the bulk of clothes that end up in landfills, the issue is not just the overproduction of clothing or its impacts on the environment but the fact that those who suffer the consequences are those located in the Global South, dare I say the so-called non-whites. Environmental degradation from textile waste-dumping in numerous African countries, Haiti and Chile’s Atacama Desert—these exemplify an ongoing disregard for the land and Blackened people, treating them as “disposable” resources in a modern capitalist system that continues to operate through unequal global power dynamics. An emphasis on the consequences for the environment, as important as they are, should be paired with a discussion on the impacts of the local communities where the clothing is manufactured and disposed of. Wearing a Fanonian lens on this topic highlights how the Global South is used as a resource for the benefit of colonial powers, only to be discarded when resources are exhausted or when the Western world seeks to offload its waste. The clothing industry offsets all costs and consequences to the Global South for the pleasure of the metropoles in the Global North—precisely what colonialism and empire did. The focus on the environment sheds light on the different styles of environmental racism, which disproportionately impacts communities already suffering from social and economic inequalities—communities that have often been subjected to histories of colonial rule.
Systemic Racism
The average customer who shops online or in large chain stores does not think about the labor practices behind the clothing they purchase. It is primarily women in the Global South whose exploitation and suffering are rendered invisible in the pursuit of covering our bare flesh and looking “presentable” for our audiences, whether it be teaching, attending class, or for functional tasks such as going to the gym, marathon running, and walking one’s dog. The workers become mere cogs in a system, estranged from the fruits of their labor, needs, and rights and from the consumer, who is likewise disconnected from the human costs of their purchase. To use Emmanuel Levinas’s language, there is an ethical failure to acknowledge the “face of the Other”—the real human suffering behind our purchasing choices. Such an ethical failure is a consequence of systemic racism, which, to borrow from Fanon’s observations elsewhere, “is a systematized negation of the other, a frenzied determination to deny the other any attribute of humanity” (The Wretched of The Earth). If the proposal of bestowing rights on nature is any indication, many would rather extend humanity to trees, rivers, dogs, and the environment as habitats above and before the humans that live and create in those spaces and with those resources. When examining the relationship between clothing and production under globalization, it is critical to examine the historical context of where the labor is outsourced. From a broader perspective, race and post-colonial power relations play a role in how workers in countries like Bangladesh are viewed and treated by global corporations. The legacy of colonialism, where Western countries exploited resources and labor in regions like South Asia, continues to inform international trade practices. Workers in these regions are often racialized and seen as a cheap, disposable labor force, perpetuating a dynamic in which their lives are considered less valuable than the profits generated by the industry and the environment that is being degraded.
The Rana Plaza disaster exposes the anti-Black sexist capitalist logic that underlies the fashion industry. On April 24, 2013, the collapse of Rana Plaza, an eight-story commercial building in Savar near Dhaka, Bangladesh, became a tragic symbol of our interconnected global economy. Within its walls, several garment factories produced clothing for renowned multinational brands. As the structure fell during working hours, over 1,100 lives were tragically lost, with more than 2,600 others suffering injuries. The workers of Rana Plaza exemplify the struggles of countless individuals caught in a relentless cycle of exploitation, often drawn from marginalized communities with scant bargaining power, forced to endure unsafe working conditions in a desperate bid to support their families. This dire reality prompts us to reflect on the moral implications of a system that prioritizes profit over human dignity, challenging us to consider our roles within this intricate web of global commerce. The global clothing industry operates within a framework of economic inequality between the Global North (wealthy, industrialized countries) and the Global South (low-to-middle countries). Corporations from wealthier nations outsource production to countries like Bangladesh to take advantage of lax labor laws, lower wages, and minimal safety regulations. The fact that Rana Plaza workers were producing clothing for major Western brands illustrates how global economic systems perpetuate exploitation across borders. The disaster also underscores how intersecting legal and institutional structures fail to protect groups that are marginalized: it is women and low-income workers who thread the needles.
The paradox?
Does this mean we stop wearing clothes or return to wearing robes, as did the Greek gods and goddesses? Should we boycott all major fashion brands and go back to sewing our clothes? Are there any clothing brands that are ethically produced? In most hyper-capitalist societies, the festive season is approaching. Black Friday sales are upon us; Christmas jerseys and new outfits are wanted for attending New Year’s Eve celebration. Shortly after that, Valentine’s Day lingerie will be bought, followed by Palm Sunday and Good Friday sales. Before we know it, there will be Summer/Winter 2025 deals—birthdays, weddings, conferences, funerals, etc. Clothing is a daily affair, and while one cannot prescribe a clothing ethic, we certainly ought to be more reflective about our purchasing power at the individual level. And yes, the issues are systemic, and effective responses are the kinds that do not shift the moral blame. The hope is that we will rethink our participation in systems of exploitation, our conceptions of freedom, and our responsibilities to each other and the planet. To echo Nancy Tuana’s words in her essay on “Climate Change Through the Lens of Feminist Philosophy”:
We must learn to be affected by uncertainty and develop ways of knowing and living attuned to it. We must learn to be moved by, animated by, attuned to the threads of inextricable interconnections between consumption practices and ice sheets, between agricultural practices and species flourishing, between ocean currents and energy choices, between the way we live with the earth and the earth’s becoming.
Acknowledgements:
Many thanks to Tiza Mfuni, Ben Davis, and Matthew Clemons for providing feedback on the initial draft of this piece.
Zinhle ka’Nobuhlaluse
Zinhle ka’Nobuhlaluse is an Assistant professor of Philosophy at Southwestern University. Her academic focus includes critical philosophy of race, feminism, and decolonial philosophies, particularly engaging with Black feminist and Apartheid Studies. ka’Nobuhlaluse develops an ‘existential standpoint’ theory through the lens of Apartheid-era Black women’s autobiographies in their research, offering insights into systemic racism, resilience, and resistance. They also moderate and coordinate the African Feminist Initiatives virtual dialogues and book talks at Penn State.
