Overdressed: The Shockingly High Cost of Cheap Fashion

in the industry quality is simply defined by customer satisfaction. If we do not return a garment to the store, it has met the quality standard.

“We didn’t know it, but that was the beginning of fast fashion becoming acceptable.”

Jonathan Van Meter wrote a prescient article for Vogue called “Fast Fashion: Americans Want Clothing That Is Quick and Easy” that hinted at this scene.

Designer or brand-name clothing has become a proxy for quality and style. We travel sixty miles round-trip on average and pay the attendant gas and tolls to get deep discounts on brand names at outlet malls.3 Some of us stand in line at Target, H&M, or Macy’s—overnight in some cases—to be the first to grab shoddy facsimiles of clothing by luxury fashion designers such as Versace and Missoni.

I started writing this book because chasing trends with one eye on the price tag didn’t get me any closer to liking my clothes. My wardrobe ultimately left me feeling slavish and passive. I definitely wasn’t any closer to being well dressed. I was devoting too much time and way too much space in my house to a habit I knew shamefully little about. Why would someone who knows nothing about clothes own so much clothing?

Many books about fashion begin with an argument for why we should take fashion seriously. I’m going to take a different approach and say that fashion largely deserves its bad reputation.

’ve seen guys in my local coffee shop working on $1,800 Apple laptops and wearing $10 Walmart shoes. Americans spend more money on eating out in restaurants every year than they do on clothes. It’s not that we can’t pay more money for fashion; we just don’t see any reason to.

Luxury handbags are one of the biggest scams in the retail world, and Thomas found they are marked up as much as ten to twelve times over the cost of production

“We blame companies. But at the end of the day we have to be responsible for our actions.”

Bereket strongly believes in consumer power and our ability to change the fashion industry through the way we shop. “If we decided we’re not going to support H&M, for example, oh my god, that would change everything,