What’s wrong with what we wear.

Reflections on choice, awareness, and compassion.

For the most part of my life, the question of why I chose certain products over the others seemed pretty straightforward. My decisions were based mainly on comfort, design, quality, and of course price. I considered myself a rational and thoughtful consumer, so delving into how things were made was deemed unnecessary. It was unquestionable; it was a given.

At the end of the day, who would ever think of a beautiful leather bag as an epitome of cruelty?

Quality has always mattered to me more than quantity. That was just how decisions were made in my family, and I adopted this principle in my adult life. I would pay extra for high-quality products knowing that they would last for years. Anything that wasn’t authentic, like faux leather, I disregarded with silent contempt. Why buy a fake alternative when you can get a real thing?

The smell of new leather, its buttery texture and elegant look, all of it gave a sense of affordable luxury. But the production process behind it has never crossed my mind. In other words, I was comfortably ignorant. Until curiosity and a casual conversation urged me to find out more about it. A Google search later, I got my answer, and what I discovered was horrifying.

As someone who’s been mostly a vegetarian for the past five years, the fact that this question hasn’t occurred to me before is surprising. I looked at being a vegetarian as a choice of food, and not as a way of life. I was a vegetarian from the inside, and a carnivore from the outside.

There is an interesting paradox between food and clothing. Today we are obsessing over the food we put in our bodies, but we are oblivious to what we put on them. We are scrutinizing the nutritional facts on the food labels, but we hardly ever question the nature of things we wear every day.

The more I was discovering about the treatment of animals in the leather industry, the more depressed I felt. Same things looked different to me now. I no longer saw beautifully crafted leather bag or leather shoes. Instead, I saw animal hides mummified and worn everywhere as if nothing at all were wrong.

The next stop in my search for the truth was wool. As someone who grew up in Ukraine, getting through the cold winter months wrapped up in wool and cashmere was a norm. But as I was learning more about the wool manufacturing, my cashmere sweater didn’t seem so warm anymore.

I recently came across this thought-provoking TED talk by Melanie Joy:

Carnism is one of the many violent ideologies that are an unfortunate part of the human legacy. And although the experience of each set of victims will always we somewhat unique, the ideologies themselves are similar, the mentality that enables such violence is the same. It’s the mentality that causes us to turn someone into something, to reduce a life to a unit of production.

As the world is becoming more and more transparent, how can we still be in the dark about the production of something we spend our entire life in — our clothes?

How can the irrationality and destruction of a widespread behavior be virtually invisible?

And then there’s an environment. The moment people hear this word they think — global warming, greenhouse gas, deforestation, air pollution. Yet leather production is highly unsustainable. It requires massive amounts of energy, water, and dangerous chemicals, many of them landing in water and land.

As a designer, I feel responsibility for the work that I do and how it will affect others. Dieter Rams’ Ten Principles of Good Design is the ultimate checklist for any designed product. One of them says:

Good design is environmentally-friendly. Design makes an important contribution to the preservation of the environment. It conserves resources and minimizes physical and visual pollution throughout the lifecycle of the product.

My perspective on things that I previously considered beautiful and well designed has shifted drastically. Aesthetics now follow ethics.

Looking back now I see that there was no excuse for my ignorance. And ignorance does not exempt from the responsibility. Mentality is a tough nut to crack. But hopefully, if we read beyond the label on that soft cashmere sweater and question the obvious, the mentality of violence might slowly begin to change.