Dress for Excess: The Cost of Our Clothing Addiction

This holiday season, as in many past seasons, the No. 1 gift will be clothing. That's according to a recent Consumer Reports poll. Apparently, shoppers haven't heard about another of its surveys, which found clothes to be the "most disappointing gift" of last Christmas.

Wanted or not, clothes are a more attractive deal than ever. The apparel retail industry's current philosophy is best captured in a new slogan that Wal-Mart Stores rolled out for this fall's shopping season: "Save Money. Live Better."

But in the fields and factories that feed America's colossal clothing market, living things -- including humans -- aren't doing one bit better.

No closet big enough

The numbers are astonishing. Apparel is easily the second-biggest consumer sector after food. We're spending $282 billion on new clothes annually, up from $162 billion in 1992, based on U.S. Census figures.

Importantly, the steady upward march of clothing expenditures doesn't fully reflect the increase in the actual quantities being made and bought, because the same-size spending spree can bring in more garb with every year that goes by.

The government says apparel prices in the United States dropped by about 25 percent from 1992 to 2002, and we responded like the good consumers we are, increasing our buying by 75 percent. The population increased only 13 percent in that decade, so the average annual shopping haul, which stood at about 50 new articles of clothing per person per year in 1992, had grown to 75 or more items per person by 2002. It has only gone up since then.

And to clear out closet space for the new purchases, the average American discards 68 pounds of clothing and other textiles each year, according to the Environmental Protection Agency.

The lower prices can be attributed to lower domestic wages, greater mechanization and the Wal-Mart-led corporate drive for cheaper everything. But most crucial has been the deluge of cheap imports. No. 1 among the world's top 10 apparel importers, the United States brings in more than the other nine nations combined.

The U.S. Department of Agriculture says per-person consumption of textile fiber in the United States is double that of Spain, four times that of China, and almost seven times India's. Currently, Americans buy 40 T-shirts per household annually, 94 percent of them imported. In 2003, four new pairs of shoes were imported for each American.

You'd think that swelling sales year after year would put the industry in a festive mood. But cheap shirts and socks don't yield the satisfying profits that elegant or businesslike threads provide. Industry griping over the high-volume, low-price treadmill is only getting louder in this year's slow Christmas season.

Despite that, Americans' wardrobes keep growing, overwhelming our home storage space. Next to a small kitchen, inadequate closet space is regarded today as the biggest impediment to selling an older house. In newly built homes, a walk-in closet in every bedroom has become de rigeur. Time magazine reported earlier this year, "Master closets now average about 6 ft. by 8 ft., a size more typical of an extra bedroom 40 years ago."

Prices of the outfits that fill those closets rarely reflect the steep environmental costs of textile and apparel manufacturing. Meanwhile, the rapidly expanding organic-fiber clothing market continues losing ground to growth of conventional sales.

The worldwide annual market for organic wearables increased by $338 million from 2001 to 2005. That growth not only failed to displace the conventional market; the increase in American consumption of conventional clothing alone, just between 2003 and 2005, outstripped four years of global growth in organic wear -- 44 times over! And the gap in material bulk is even wider than the dollar gap, because organic clothes are more expensive.