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Ad tech is "an industry based off manipulating human psychology" but nobody would say all of the tech industry is represented by that. It's certainly untrue tha

Ad tech is "an industry based off manipulating human psychology" but nobody would say all of the tech industry is represented by that. It's certainly untrue that fashion is also entirely about manipulation. I, for one, enjoy having options for what I wear that let me look how I want rather than dressing in standardized, homogeneous garments.

JPKab 4y ago
The fashion industry is essentially devoted to planned obsolescence based on arbitrary whims produced by top down influence. Perfectly good functional clothes are suddenly deemed to be unwearable and in need of replacement. When you combine this with the fact that the industry is entirely based on exploiting cheap labor it is a deeply immoral industry. My niece works in the fashion industry doing extremely intricate embroidering and has worked for certain very dominant designers and has had her work featured in Vogue magazine. She's already burned out and leaving because it's such a predatory industry.
- barrysteve 4y ago
  Arbitrarily obsolete items controlled from the top down, shares conceptual similarity to a list of tech products. Games, digital currency purchases, kickstater projects, web apps.
  - peoplefromibiza 4y ago
    Nitpicking: they are not tangible items. So the effects are much less impactful on the environment. Take games, they are probably non-essential for humanity (even though I would not claim they are built with planned obsolescence in mind, I still play DOOM from time to time or Tetris or Wonder Boy and a myriad of other old games), but we could stop producing them and they would stop having an effect on the World we live in immediately (in terms of, for example, energy consumption) We can't say the same thing for the fashion industry. The damages have already been done and some are irreversible. - Every year the fashion industry uses 93 billion cubic meters of water — enough to meet the consumption needs of five million people. - Around 20 % of wastewater worldwide comes from fabric dyeing and treatment. - Of the total fiber input used for clothing, 87% is incinerated or disposed of in a landfill. - The fashion industry is responsible for 10% of annual global carbon emissions, more than all international flights and maritime shipping combined. At this pace, the fashion industry’s greenhouse gas emissions will surge more than 50% by 2030. - If demographic and lifestyle patterns continue as they are now, global consumption of apparel will rise from 62 million metric tons in 2019 to 102 million tons in 10 years. - Every year a half a million tons of plastic microfibers are dumped into the ocean, the equivalent of 50 billion plastic bottles. The danger? Microfibers cannot be extracted from the water and they can spread throughout the food chain.
    - barrysteve 4y ago
      Microplastics are a horrific nightmare, you got me there. But I will point out that Games rely on electricity, that is coal/nukes/ect in some countries. Not to mention whatever materials go into building the internet for multiplayer games. The cost of water is usually the cost of pumping it and the filters for desal, or aeration or whatever cleaning method is used. If people have adequate access to water, using it on fashion is not so morally terrible. Land-filling fibers, producing excess waste water and microplastics is "not so great" (to understate it), I agree.
peoplefromibiza 4y ago
> I, for one, enjoy having options for what I wear that let me look how I want rather than dressing in standardized, homogeneous garments. Not considering that environment would like to have a word about that, it's undeniable that what I personally enjoy "contributes nothing to humanity". Anyway it's a false dichotomy: you can have choices without the fashion industry. My grand-grand-grandfather was a tailor, my grand-grandfather was a tailor, my grandfather was a tailor, they all made mostly the same kind of dresses (mostly men suits, they were specialized in that), because the society needed durable, robust and standardized garments and despised frivolousness. The way you dressed projected who you were in society. The choice was very large though, you could customize the "standard" in a lot of different ways: you could wear a pocket watch, a monocle, a hat (one could write a series of books on the different kinds of hats), cufflinks, a pochette or a tie in a very bold color, a combination of them, or not. the reason why the "classic style" survived is because it rewards people that have an eye for a unique style, without punishing those that do not have it or do not have enough money to afford it. In a suit you will look good, anyway. "Express yourself" (by dressing cheap rags) was invented by the ad industry that fueled the fashion industry (that simply attached a premium price to the same rags) to sell more of the same to more people in waves - the 60s are back! no! the 70s are back! are you kidding? 2001 is back! - and so on. It would be exhilarating if it wasn't tragic. > Ad tech is "an industry based off manipulating human psychology" but nobody would say all of the tech industry Of course not, because the industry is Advertising. Everybody would say that all the ad industry is represented by that
- Gud 4y ago
  This eco-authoritarianism needs to be stopped. When the day comes when people aren’t allowed to dress beautifully I know at least I will revolt. Today men and women have the ability to dress(and to look and feel good) more or less anyway they want(more freedom to dress how you like seems to correlate strongly with societies that are liveable… go figure). I’d rather let the world burn than live in it without beauty and beautiful people. We’re not robots to run the machines for rich people. God bless those “cheap rags” I say.
  - peoplefromibiza 4y ago
GeoAtreides 4y ago
The parent comment didn't say anything about fashion being entirely about manipulation; they said luxury fashion is based off manipulating human psychology". "Luxury" and "based off" are key words and cannot be omitted. You also propose a false dilemma: either luxury fashion or standardized, homogeneous garments. Surely there are other myriad options, not just between extravagant luxury or dull conformity.
- version_five 4y ago
  This doesn't make any sense, it reads like taking issue with random words. The op's point was pretty clear even if he omitted "luxury" somewhere.
  - GeoAtreides 4y ago
    I disagree. "based off" means a completely different thing than "entirely": the former is not exhaustive, the latter is. "Luxury fashion" is a firmly delimited subset of fashion. The reason OP omitted "luxury" was to set up their false dilemma, which wouldn't have worked between "luxury fashion" and standardized garments (wouldn't have worked in the sense it would've been even more obvious it was a fallacy).

JPKab 4y ago

The fashion industry is essentially devoted to planned obsolescence based on arbitrary whims produced by top down influence. Perfectly good functional clothes are suddenly deemed to be unwearable and in need of replacement. When you combine this with the fact that the industry is entirely based on exploiting cheap labor it is a deeply immoral industry. My niece works in the fashion industry doing extremely intricate embroidering and has worked for certain very dominant designers and has had her work featured in Vogue magazine. She's already burned out and leaving because it's such a predatory industry.

barrysteve 4y ago
Arbitrarily obsolete items controlled from the top down, shares conceptual similarity to a list of tech products. Games, digital currency purchases, kickstater projects, web apps.
- peoplefromibiza 4y ago
  Nitpicking: they are not tangible items. So the effects are much less impactful on the environment. Take games, they are probably non-essential for humanity (even though I would not claim they are built with planned obsolescence in mind, I still play DOOM from time to time or Tetris or Wonder Boy and a myriad of other old games), but we could stop producing them and they would stop having an effect on the World we live in immediately (in terms of, for example, energy consumption) We can't say the same thing for the fashion industry. The damages have already been done and some are irreversible. - Every year the fashion industry uses 93 billion cubic meters of water — enough to meet the consumption needs of five million people. - Around 20 % of wastewater worldwide comes from fabric dyeing and treatment. - Of the total fiber input used for clothing, 87% is incinerated or disposed of in a landfill. - The fashion industry is responsible for 10% of annual global carbon emissions, more than all international flights and maritime shipping combined. At this pace, the fashion industry’s greenhouse gas emissions will surge more than 50% by 2030. - If demographic and lifestyle patterns continue as they are now, global consumption of apparel will rise from 62 million metric tons in 2019 to 102 million tons in 10 years. - Every year a half a million tons of plastic microfibers are dumped into the ocean, the equivalent of 50 billion plastic bottles. The danger? Microfibers cannot be extracted from the water and they can spread throughout the food chain.
  - barrysteve 4y ago
    Microplastics are a horrific nightmare, you got me there. But I will point out that Games rely on electricity, that is coal/nukes/ect in some countries. Not to mention whatever materials go into building the internet for multiplayer games. The cost of water is usually the cost of pumping it and the filters for desal, or aeration or whatever cleaning method is used. If people have adequate access to water, using it on fashion is not so morally terrible. Land-filling fibers, producing excess waste water and microplastics is "not so great" (to understate it), I agree.

peoplefromibiza 4y ago

> I, for one, enjoy having options for what I wear that let me look how I want rather than dressing in standardized, homogeneous garments. Not considering that environment would like to have a word about that, it's undeniable that what I personally enjoy "contributes nothing to humanity". Anyway it's a false dichotomy: you can have choices without the fashion industry. My grand-grand-grandfather was a tailor, my grand-grandfather was a tailor, my grandfather was a tailor, they all made mostly the same kind of dresses (mostly men suits, they were specialized in that), because the society needed durable, robust and standardized garments and despised frivolousness. The way you dressed projected who you were in society. The choice was very large though, you could customize the "standard" in a lot of different ways: you could wear a pocket watch, a monocle, a hat (one could write a series of books on the different kinds of hats), cufflinks, a pochette or a tie in a very bold color, a combination of them, or not. the reason why the "classic style" survived is because it rewards people that have an eye for a unique style, without punishing those that do not have it or do not have enough money to afford it. In a suit you will look good, anyway. "Express yourself" (by dressing cheap rags) was invented by the ad industry that fueled the fashion industry (that simply attached a premium price to the same rags) to sell more of the same to more people in waves - the 60s are back! no! the 70s are back! are you kidding? 2001 is back! - and so on. It would be exhilarating if it wasn't tragic. > Ad tech is "an industry based off manipulating human psychology" but nobody would say all of the tech industry Of course not, because the industry is Advertising. Everybody would say that all the ad industry is represented by that

Gud 4y ago
This eco-authoritarianism needs to be stopped. When the day comes when people aren’t allowed to dress beautifully I know at least I will revolt. Today men and women have the ability to dress(and to look and feel good) more or less anyway they want(more freedom to dress how you like seems to correlate strongly with societies that are liveable… go figure). I’d rather let the world burn than live in it without beauty and beautiful people. We’re not robots to run the machines for rich people. God bless those “cheap rags” I say.
- peoplefromibiza 4y ago

GeoAtreides 4y ago

The parent comment didn't say anything about fashion being entirely about manipulation; they said luxury fashion is based off manipulating human psychology". "Luxury" and "based off" are key words and cannot be omitted. You also propose a false dilemma: either luxury fashion or standardized, homogeneous garments. Surely there are other myriad options, not just between extravagant luxury or dull conformity.

version_five 4y ago
This doesn't make any sense, it reads like taking issue with random words. The op's point was pretty clear even if he omitted "luxury" somewhere.
- GeoAtreides 4y ago
  I disagree. "based off" means a completely different thing than "entirely": the former is not exhaustive, the latter is. "Luxury fashion" is a firmly delimited subset of fashion. The reason OP omitted "luxury" was to set up their false dilemma, which wouldn't have worked between "luxury fashion" and standardized garments (wouldn't have worked in the sense it would've been even more obvious it was a fallacy).