A search for the word denim on Amazon.com yields more than 26,000 books on the subject and most are either do-it-yourself manuals on how to style your own jeans or chronicles of the fabric’s American roots. But a new tome due out in December seeks to give consumers a different view of the impact the world’s most popular fabric has on our daily lives.
“Fugitive Denim,” by journalist Rachel Louise Snyder, examines the life cycle of denim pants, taking readers from the cotton fields of Azerbaijan to U.S. store shelves. Snyder weaves in history lessons on everything from cotton harvesters to the improbable discovery of indigo dye. The subtitle, “A Moving Story of People and Pants in the Borderless World of Global Trade,” lends the book to comparison with Pietra Rivoli’s “The Travels of a T-Shirt in the Global Economy,” which was published in 2005. In fact, Snyder said Rivoli’s book came out within days of having signed her contract with publisher W.W. Norton & Co. However, Snyder said that, unlike Rivoli, she is not an economist and her goal was to simplify the dizzying process of global garment manufacturing by putting the focus on those involved. Rivoli has even written a blurb for the book jacket.
“For me, it was all about the people and the narrative,” Snyder said. “I just stayed focused on the people. I think these books balance each other out pretty well, they fill in the blanks for each other.”
Snyder’s introduction to the textile industry came after moving to Cambodia, which was beginning to receive trade incentives to establish a sweatshop-free garment industry. In 2005, she started working on stories about the country’s textile and garment industry that have aired on “This American Life” radio show and been published on Salon.com. She picked denim as the subject for her first book because of its symbolic power.
“Fundamentally, denim has a cool factor and it lends itself a little bit to people talking about it in literary terms,” Snyder said. “It had this symbolic weight that I wanted, but it also captured globalization.”
In the book, Snyder writes, “No other fabric has held the symbolic fortitude of denim — the rebellion, the antiestablishment rhetoric, the edginess — and no other article of clothing than jeans has been the focus of more literature.”
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Despite the reverence among people who use and make denim, Snyder doesn’t shy away from discussing the environmental and social impact of the textile industry as a whole.
“Though cotton makes up only about 3 percent of our global agricultural land, it consumes nearly a quarter of the world’s insecticides and 10 percent of the world’s pesticides — more than any other crop — with cost estimates for the pesticides alone totaling $2.6 billion,” according to the book. “The average pair of jeans carries three-quarters of a pound of chemicals.”
The chemicals used in washing and finishing garments are equally as destructive.
“The half-dozen or so industry experts who would speak to me said the same thing: that dye chemicals were inherently toxic, that developing countries avoid wastewater treatment when no one is looking, that environmental safety and health controls are abysmal or nonexistent,” Snyder writes.
Many of these chemicals are carcinogens. Proving the connection between death and disease with those working in the textiles and apparel industry, whose workers are predominantly women, is difficult, particularly in developing countries where record keeping is poor.
Credit is given where credit is due, however. Gap Inc. readily allowed Snyder to accompany a team of its vendor compliance officers to visit one of the company’s model factories. Gap “was the only major brand that took great pains in scheduling me to go along on a factory audit,” she wrote. Later she notes that Gap canceled contracts with more than 70 factories in 2004 and more than 100 in 2003 for not meeting compliance requirements.
Snyder spent two-and-a-half years researching for the book. She found that consumers are all too familiar with the issue of sweatshops. The focus is now shifting to the environment. She also hopes the book will remind readers about the impact of globalization.
“The cost of clothing is significantly lower than it was in the Seventies, but I think as consumers we have very short memories,” Snyder said.