The Life and Death of Your Jeans

A new book enters that category known as “fashion horror stories.” Something to consider before you shop.

Early on in “Unraveled,” a new book about the dark underbelly of fashion, the author, Maxine Bédat, describes walking through a factory in Guangdong, China, that specializes in acid-washing jeans, picking her way over dark puddles of “iridescent, bubbling content” that had spilled from industrial washing machines and was sloshing around on the floor. This is a hundred pages or so before she is warned not to wear makeup to a landfill in Kpone, an area in Ghana where 2.8 million items of castoff clothing are added per week, because “the chemicals in the landfill would make mascara congeal on my eyelashes.” The book is the latest entry in a growing genre of nonfiction: the consumption horror story. It’s as scary as any adult tale Roald Dahl ever wrote. (Indeed, if he were alive today, he might well imagine a fashionista who got swallowed by a mountain of discarded finery.)