Sewing, once a life skill for American women and a pathway from poverty to the middle class for workers, is now a dead-end sweatshop job. She even explores how cheap fashion harms the charity thrift shops and textile recyclers where our masses of clothing castoffs end up. She travels to cheap-chic factories in China, follows the fashion industry as it chases even lower costs into Bangladesh, and looks at the impact (both here and abroad) of America’s drastic increase in imports. In Overdressed, Cline sets out to uncover the true nature of the cheap fashion juggernaut, tracing the rise of budget clothing chains, the death of middle-market and independent retailers, and the roots of our obsession with deals and steals. After all, we have little reason to keep wearing and repairing the clothes we already own when styles change so fast and it’s cheaper to just buy more.īut what are we doing with all these cheap clothes? And more important, what are they doing to us, our society, our environment, and our economic well-being? Retailers are producing clothes at enormous volumes in order to drive prices down and profits up, and they’ve turned clothing into a disposable good.

Stores ranging from discounters like Target to traditional chains like JCPenney now offer the newest trends at unprecedentedly low prices. When she found herself lugging home seven pairs of identical canvas flats from Kmart (a steal at $7 per pair, marked down from $15!), she realized that something was deeply wrong.Ĭheap fashion has fundamentally changed the way most Americans dress. She was buying a new item of clothing almost every week (the national average is sixty-four per year) but all she had to show for it was a closet and countless storage bins packed full of low-quality fads she barely wore-including the same sailor-stripe tops and fleece hoodies as a million other shoppers. Maxx, and cheap but trendy retailers like Forever 21, Target, and H&M. She’d grown accustomed to shopping at outlet malls, discount stores like T.J. Until recently, Elizabeth Cline was a typical American consumer.

Overdressed elizabeth cline