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The end of cheap clothes is near
Jorn Madslien, BBC via Politics & Current Affairs
Food prices have shot up in response to a surge in crop prices. Now consumers should get ready for clothes prices to follow suit.

Garment makers are seeing demand shrink as consumers in the US and Europe are cutting back on spending.

US cotton consumption is set to fall 6.5% from last year to less than a million tonnes whilst EU consumption is expected to fall 11% to about 460,000 tonnes, the Economist Intelligence Unit (EIU) predicts.

At the same time, they are hit by more expensive raw materials and by soaring oil prices, which make their factories more expensive to operate and which pushes up the cost of shipping to foreign markets.

In India, the weaving industry is in crisis. In China, the textile sector is squeezed...
(April 2008)
As with cheap food, cheap clothing relies on cheap labor and cheap oil. Relocalization of clothing may run into even greater skills shortages than that of food.

Dressing Locally
Michelle Nijhuis, Orion Magazine
PAONIA, COLORADO — You’ve probably tried eating locally. What about dressing locally? In my small town in western Colorado, gardeners abound, but seamstresses and tailors are endangered species, made scarce by $9.99 imported t-shirts. Yet local clothes are still grown and raised in the town’s cavernous old livery, where my friend Elisabeth Delehaunty runs her sewing machine and hoards her vast coHow Coal ShortagJason SimpkinsChinJason Simpkinsa Will Spark akeovers of U.S. Assetstion of fabric. Shelves twelve feet high burst with stacks of folded tweeds and florals and stripes, a colorful profusion of thrift-store blankets, sweaters, jackets, t-shirts, and castoff yardage. (Will she ever run out? “It could happen,” she whispers in mock terror. “It could.")

Beth and her three employees make up Elisabethan, a company dedicated to both locally made and recycled fashion. Beth learned to sew from her mother, and in high school, she made most of her own clothes, including a prom dress. Years later, when she pieced soft scraps of old jeans into a hooded pullover, she realized that a few well-placed snips and stitches could give used clothes an entirely new life. “I made a conscious decision to try not to buy any more [new] fabric,” she says. “There’s just too much out there already swirling around.”...
(May/June 2008)

Waste management
Joanna Yarrow, BBC Online
Our throwaway culture has left landfill sites bulging at the seams. But savvy fashionistas and a whole host of companies are taking up the challenge by re-styling old clothes...

...In the UK we throw away a staggering 1 million tonnes of old clothes and textiles each year. Over 7.5 billion articles of clothing 9go into our dustbins every year, with most ending up in landfill. These underground rubbish dumps are not only in short supply, they cause huge environmental problems, too...
(31 July 2008)