Originally a long-winded digression on my previous post, which deserves to be its own entity.
Since I’ve deleted Facebook off my phone, I’ve been a much happier person, and I’ve been using Twitter a lot more. Twitter has made a lot of meaningful improvements to their platform, making it much easier to curate what you see, and because it doesn’t rely on your emotional feedback for engagement, the community tends to be much more reasonable. Not perfect. Nothing is ever really perfect. But better by miles than Facebook.
If you like what you see here and you’d like to see more shapeshifting alien dinosaurs, you can follow along (links open in new tab). I also post almost anything else that crosses my feed that feels relevant to me or to my universe (such as this amazing sound NASA captured of an actual black hole), and I complain about our fashion industry a lot.
Why fashion? Firstly because fashion among other things is literally destroying our planet, and not only in the ways you probably think (it took me days to get past my initial rage after I saw this, so … you’ve been warned). Seriously. (Links contained here and here to help the proactive consumer interested in choosing sustainable brands. No affiliates anywhere in this article. Just some helpful information.) Secondly, because I work in manufacturing industries, a lot of my time has become dedicated to finding durable plus-sized women’s workwear for industrial jobs that’s actually built like men’s workwear, because:
- a) I don’t care if my clothing is soft and stretchy because I just need it to withstand contact with potential workplace hazards. But I need it sized for my body. I’m a curvy gal. Also, some industries do not allow nylon/synthetic workwear because it melts at high temperatures, and many blue-collar workplaces also do not allow things like leggings or in some cases shorts, due to potential contact with sharp/abrasive objects.
- b) Also, after buying plastic-free bedding (including the wool mattress), organic cotton is one of the most amazing things ever to come into contact with my skin and I want that feeling every day, all the time.
- I cringed at the cost, but I was also looking at the cost of replacing my bedding with every other synthetic option on the market — and the question of how to dispose of that big plush pile of synthetic polymers when it inevitably wears out). I took a huge gamble on a mail-order product from the other side of the country that then required me to order a specific type of frame since there was no boxspring and it’s basically a futon mattress and I didn’t want to buy something that, according to Amazon reviewers, was going to break for no good reason — all of which was a huge 3mo fiasco earlier this year, while I had COVID, no less — and I’m never looking back.
- c) I like breaking in my clothes! I don’t want them pre-aged! I love the stiffness of new cotton jeans. I love the way they slowly soften and mold to the body as they age. It reminds me of the ones I wore as a kid. I don’t want or need manufacturers to pre-distress my jeans. I’m completely okay with doing it myself, and I definitely will! I also love the way pure cotton denim feels towards the end of its life. I still own a pair of 20yr-old jeans for this reason. They’re about as thin as a pillowcase, so I don’t trust them to hold up to my workplace or out to dinner after 20yrs, but I’ll probably use them to paint my house.
- I’ve heard linen and hemp age in a similar way, and I’m on a quest to find such things in my size. If your clothing is going to die anyway (and it will), let it die gracefully, threadbare and well-loved. Then, when you throw it away, the Earth can reclaim the material without claiming all the toxic BS. (Found out today that “heritage linen” is a thing in Europe. I can’t remember the last time I saw pure linen in the US. Wherever it is, I’m sure it’s marked up to be extremely expensive.)
- And if a clothing manufacturer ever sees this post: for the love of God, don’t make thinner jeans. I love mine, but I love them because they’re 20yrs old and well-loved, and still lovable, and full of positive memories of difficult times. I’ll throw them away reluctantly, laying them to rest like an old friend. You can’t replicate that in a factory, so don’t try.
- Also, I will never buy pre-ripped jeans. Because I’m going to mend my jeans when they rip. So they don’t become a hazard. Because jeans were invented for work. Some of us are still buying them for that purpose. Yes, women, too.
And on that note:
- d) I hate the way synthetics age. I love the added durability, but I hate the pilling, which I found out comes from the synthetic components. Some companies have fixed this, but even then I hate the texture of old synthetics. They don’t get softer and better with age — and if they do, then I have a list of environmental concerns akin to my existing ones (yet another post for another day). I hate the ugly way they lose their color, too.
- My favorite pair of knee-length cargo shorts has worn down to its nylon components, and I’m pretty upset about it (insult to injury: the company has stopped making them). They’re still functional for work, but they feel plastic-y and the color is off. Not faded, like cotton. Off.
- My choices consist of continuing to wear them for work despite this circumstance or sending them to a thrift store, where they will probably either be thrown away (where they will never degrade) or apparently shipped to another country (where they may ultimately end up thrown out, anyway? Also, for those interested, that particular link leads to an NPR article with some good advice on making your wardrobe choices a bit “greener.”).
- Props to Duluth for attempting to address all of these issues. Unfortunately, they are still new in the world of plus-sized workwear, so I’ve yet to test the long-term durability and wear of their clothes. So far, so good. But I do wish they’d offer the option of traditional 100% cotton denim. Bonus if the denim is made in the USA — yes, that’s a thing. Extremely rare, but it does exist.
Lastly: Women’s workwear very often isn’t made for big women, and this is even more true in my quest for natural materials. That kind of workwear is made for big men, but it appears to be broadly assumed by clothing manufacturers that industrial working women are trim and fit. Plus-sized clothing tends to be stretchy (containing synthetics) and organic clothing tends to be sized much like outdoor attire: for athletes. I know a lot of women in blue-collar occupations, and most of them are big girls. Typing “workwear” into Google will, in fact, automatically pull up pages upon pages of office attire for womenswear (mostly list articles), whereas menswear will take you to sites made for industrial hard-working men.
Yes, I have tried altering the search terms. Google is broken. The search algorithm gives preference to the “best matching results” based on popularity and SEO (Search Engine Optimization) tactics, so if you’re like me and you’re always searching for unpopular and often very specific things . . . then Google will betray you, every time, and leave you incredibly frustrated. This wasn’t always the case, but most people were unaware of the more powerful tricks and tools we used to have at our disposal, and Google has seen fit to eliminate such things. (The search has not been entirely fruitless, however. Just unreasonably long AF.)
Finally, I talk about it because I actually spend a lot of time thinking about what my characters wear.
No, really:
I remember when I was a kid (80s/90s), there was a bit of a comedic media trope where someone unfamiliar with our world would attempt to learn about it by watching TV, and then go about dressing and acting like an exaggeration of what they saw. If you go back further, I mean I guess we were still trying to comprehend the notion that an alien species might be most likely to contact our radio and TV airwaves before they ever found any other evidence of us. To be fair, if the first thing an alien ever encounters of humanity is an episode of Howdy Doody, that is pretty funny, if faintly terrifying.
But if you were a shapeshifter from another planet, living on Earth as a human in all seriousness, what would you wear? Would it matter to you what it was made of, and how much do you intend to blend in with humankind? How would you interpret proper dress for specific occasions? What sorts of styles would you want to choose to remind yourself of where you came from? And how would you react when you saw humans just throwing things away left and right, with no regard for where they end up or how long they’ll stay there?
If you’re on Twitter, I swear this isn’t the only thing I talk about, and I’d love to see you over there. But I’ll also be sure to keep this thing updated, because Patreon is coming. It’s coming.
Until next time,
A. Taladay
Taladay Arts 
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