How Clothes Impact Your Life: Re-examining Fashion.

Jennifer Millspaugh begins her Ted Talk by bringing to light the harmful gender norms that make up many perspectives of fashion, but reminds her audience that everyone partakes in fashion and consciously decides what to wear each day. She reminds us that fashion is a global economic process but also something we use for personal and cultural expression. Millspaugh wishes to change the fashion industry by educating consumers. She believes that intentful decisions in buying behavior can alter the method we go about fashion. She recognizes the quick and efficient ways fast fashion is able to be produced through our advancements thanks to globalization, but she believes it was a give and take process. We took from other areas of the supply chain and working conditions to get clothes cheaper and quicker even if it wasn’t ethically made. 

Her main focus is to find ways to rethink fashion so that we can have the best of both worlds: sustainable consumption, and proper identity and cultural expression through apparel. She recognizes our need to belong to a group and our expression of such through garmenting ourselves, yet our need for individuality. There is a common narrative that if you partake in shopping and fashion, you are seen as materialistic and snobby, but Millspaugh explains to us that there are ways to care about appearance and fashion without the negative implications it brings by consuming sustainably. She doesn’t want to ditch the progressive advancements globalization has achieved by going back to our historical modes of fashion, producing and consuming in-state or sometimes in-community. She understands that we have to make use of our impressive achievements of interconnectivity, but we need to do it in a way that is sustainable. 

This Ted Talk speaks to the central problem of sustainable fashion and identity. By rethinking the industry and the institutions involved, we can build a society of sustainable conscious consumers whilst maintaining our group and individual identities through expression of apparel. 

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