AOW Insider | Interview with Fashion Journalist Dana Thomas

This month, I’m delighted to feature an interview with Dana Thomas, fashion journalist and acclaimed nonfiction writer (Fashionopolis: The Price of Fast Fashion and the Future of Clothes, Gods and Kings: The Rise and Fall of Alexander McQueen and John Galliano and the New York Times bestseller Deluxe: How Luxury Lost Its Luster). Thomas began her career writing for the Style section of The Washington Post and for fifteen years she served as a cultural and fashion correspondent for Newsweek in Paris. She is currently Editor-at-Large for Vogue Business and a regular contributor to The New York Times Style section. She has written for The New York Times Magazine, The New Yorker, The Wall Street Journal, the Financial Times, Vogue, Harper’s Bazaar, T: The New York Times Style Magazine, and Architectural Digest.

For those who aren’t familiar, can you tell our readers why you first got into this line of work?

I knew as teenager that I wanted to be a reporter—but I can’t tell you why beyond a love of current events and writing. I do know that when I read Hunter S. Thompson’s Fear and Loathing on the Campaign Trail, and Tom Wicker’s On Press, I knew that’s what I wanted to do the rest of my life.

What drove you to write your latest book, Fashionopolis?

As a reporter I could see the backlash to globalization was coming, as was the rise of sustainability and human rights awareness in fashion. It was the time to write this book, so I did.

For me, artisan-made goods are the definition of luxury – in the way they are made, their significance, and the fact that they are often made of the finest materials. Meanwhile, traditional luxury brands are easily able to charge exorbitant prices for goods where just a piece of the product is handmade because of the way they are marketed. How do you see artisan-made goods in the context of luxury?

The problem is that fashion has become all about marketing. You aren’t paying high prices for luxury items because it’s well-crafted. You are buying it because of the image, the logo, what it represents, not what it actually is. This idea is the core argument for my first book, Deluxe: How Luxury Lost Its Luster. As Stella McCartney told me: if organic cotton is seen as a luxury, then why aren’t luxury brands only sourcing organic cotton? Because luxury isn’t about luxury.  

Artisan goods are indeed true luxury. And that’s how they should be marketed. For me, price doesn’t indicate whether something is a luxury item. Craftsmanship and rarity does.

What steps do you think brands can take to heighten the value around their handmade goods?

Clothes have never cost as little as they do today—the average price of clothes has actually gone down in the last 30 years—because of offshoring and squeezing sourcing prices at factories. That’s why workers in Bangladesh earn $95 a month—as much as the people signing those production contracts in New York spend on lunch. How can we rectify this? Well, that’s why I wrote the book. To get customers to understand that you get what you pay for.

At the same time, as I explain in the book, artisans who want to make a living by selling their own goods should skip wholesale and go direct-to-consumer. Cut out that middle man. It’s easy to do now, with e-tailing. Wholesale is dying anyway. Don’t get enmeshed in all that complication that eats up profit margins.

How do you think the pandemic is going to change the way people do business?

Ah, if I had a crystal ball, I would invest immediately in what those changes will be, and then retire.

I do think there will be more localization in the supply chain—more re-shoring. The pandemic broke the supply chain as it has existed for the last 30 years. That is going to be rethought in boardrooms, to be sure.

Where do you feel artisan producers fit best into the market today? Becoming their own brands, being a producer/export group, collaborating with large retailers?

I think all of the above. I think each artisan producer should adapt their business model to where they are and how they best see good practice unfolding. To succeed today, a company must be nimble. If something doesn’t work, change it.

I really enjoyed reading your other book, Deluxe. It's certainly a book that I reference again and again. I'm curious, what surprised you the most when researching for this book? 

What surprised me the most when I researched Deluxe was how horrific the counterfeit world was. Before I dug into it, I thought, like most consumers, that counterfeiting of luxury goods was a harmless, victimless crime. How wrong I was.

For Fashionopolis, I was shocked by how horrific the sweatshop system is. I knew it was bad—I’ve covered fashion for 30 years, and saw the nightmare that was the counterfeiting production in China. But sweatshops—in Bangladesh, AND in Los Angeles—were so much worse than I could ever imagine. And the children—the children there, making cheap jeans that we burn though without a thought. I think that’s it: sweatshops and our careless attitude toward the clothes we buy.

What topics are you most interested in exploring these days?

I would like to dive deeper into the subject of poor women in the fashion supply chain, and how our disregard toward them—through buying en masse such cheap fashion, thereby encouraging brands to demand more from these women for so little pay—affects society as a whole, and what it means about us sociologically. I think all the answers would be devastatingly bad. Really, the majority of today’s fashion supply chain is one very small step up from slavery—it’s a modern, capitalist version of colonialism that we all support. I think that once we understand this, we would be horrified and ashamed.

And maybe—just maybe—it would stop.

Humanity. That’s what drives me. Bettering humanity. 

For more info, visit: www.danathomas.com