Designing woman

How my life changed when I realized my passion for clothing design was killing the planet.

By Kimberly Atkins Stohr

PART 1

IT WAS A STUNNING realization: My lifelong passion, something I’d devoted a part of my life to since I was a preteen, was contributing to climate injustice. For years, in addition to being a journalist, I designed custom bespoke women's wear. The seeds of my love of fashion were sown by my mother, a seamstress who handmade most of the beautiful garments many of my siblings and I wore growing up. She learned her craft from her mother, who in her younger years sang and danced in a musical revue, and designed and made the costumes for the act. I still have one of my grandmother’s sturdy, vintage sewing machines, which I used in constructing part of my wedding dress. Fashion is in my DNA.

Model Melissa Michelle wore a dress designed and made by Atkins Stohr on the beach in Cuba in 2017. (Tony Brown) UNDERLAY: Detail of fabric designed by Atkins Stohr.

ABOVE: My sister Lisa, my grandmother Lorraine Johnson, and me at my grandmother’s house in Detroit in the early 1990s. LEFT: I used one of my grandmother’s vintage sewing machines to construct part of my wedding dress.

When the COVID-19 pandemic hit, I paused my business, Kim Elleen, too unsure of the future and gripped by my own anxiety to think about fashion. As COVID’s grip on our lives began to loosen, I contemplated how to restart the venture in a way that was in line with another growing passion: socially responsible sustainability. It was clear to me that climate change was not only an existential threat but that its effects were already being felt the most by people around the globe who earn the least, are marginalized the most, and who are least responsible for its causes — greenhouse gas emissions, pollution from toxic dyes and microplastics, and freshwater waste.

But what I learned during lockdown is that there are already too many fabric textiles on the planet. In fact, there are already enough clothing textiles in existence to clothe every human on earth for generations. Clothing consumption has increased by 400 percent from just 20 years ago, driven in part by the rise of mass-produced products, which dropped the price of many clothing items but at the expense of quality, with more fabrics laden with toxic and nonbiodegradable components. And the boom in clothing production has also resulted in poor working conditions for those who make fast-fashion garments — clothing produced quickly, cheaply, and on a mass scale, which are often discarded as tastes and trends change. It’s not just high-profile disasters like the Rana Plaza factory collapse in Bangladesh a decade ago that killed over 1,100 people and injured twice as many more. “It’s ongoing,” said Christine Ekenga, an epidemiologist and assistant professor of environmental health at Emory University, who studied the environmental and occupational dangers of the fashion industry. Workers throughout the production chain usually toil for hours each day, often in overcrowded, poorly constructed buildings, and are exposed to toxins from synthetic fabrics and imperiled by heat, among other dangers.

“This isn’t just an environmental issue, this is a workplace hazard,” Ekenga said of the fast-fashion production chain. “You have a lot of low-income workers, mostly in the Global South, mostly poor women, working in these hazardous conditions to produce garments cheaply.” And less than 1 percent of used garments are recycled into new clothing when they are discarded. In fact, 85 percent of textile waste ends up in landfills. And in a perverse yet lucrative secondary trade, much of that waste is bundled and exported by vendors to the Global South, where a fraction is resold to be worn but most ends up rotting in piles and polluting the air, soil, and water of people on the other side of the world.

That the people with the least power within the industry are impacted the most negatively isn’t a new phenomenon. Most human rights violations, from the enslavement of people to human trafficking, stem from a desire to put financial enrichment above all other values. “The reason that the social injustice happened is because people wanted to commodify people and extract as much as they could from them economically,” said Ngozi Okaro an economic, environmental, and social justice activist who focuses on the impact of the fashion industry on marginalized communities. “Women in Bangladesh are paid low wages or are working in unsafe buildings not because somebody wanted to mistreat them but because this is how [employers] can get the most money out of people.”

BELOW: Textile waste disposal near Dar el Salaam in Tanzania. (Kevin McElvaney/Greenpeace)

Kimberly Atkins Stohr is a columnist for the Globe. She may be reached at kimberly.atkinsstohr@globe.com. Follow her @KimberlyEAtkins.

Editors: Marjorie Pritchard and Amy MacKinnon Designer/Photo Editor/Project Manager: Heather Hopp-Bruce Digital Editor: Rami Abou-Sabe Copy Editor: Jessie Tremmel Developer: Andrew Nguyen

A model with thick black braids cascading from the top of her head stands in shallow water at a beach, with gray clouds covering most of the sky. It is windy; the yellow dress with bold geometric black patterns she is wearing billows to her side.

A cutout of a Brother Boutique 751 vintage sewing machine that was owned by the author’s grandmother. The machine is mostly cream with red accents. It’s clean and well-used; the paint has worn off the dial that determines stitch length.

An older woman stands between her two grown but young granddaughters in this faded old Polaroid. The older woman, who is much shorter than her granddaughters, has her arms around their waists. All three are smiling broadly. In the background is a plaque on the wall that reads, “God is alive. I talked to him today.”

The model’s dark skin is a striking contrast to the off-shoulder red lace knee-length dress she is wearing.

Kimberly Atkins Stohr stands with four models wearing her designs at a runway show. The models are wearing complementary dresses in complicated black-and-white prints and yellow; two of the dresses have cutout shoulders.

ABOVE: Designs by Kimberly Atkins Stohr. (Photos by Derrel Todd)

Atkins Stohr stood with models during the Kim Elleen runway show at Crystal Couture in Arlington, Va., in 2013. (Jay Snap)

In a warehouse with low strips of fluorescent lights, dozens of workers, mostly women, sit and stand at rows of tables measuring and sewing white fabric. The workers in the foreground are all wearing yellow short-sleeved shirts; in the background is a section of workers in similar red shirts.

In this image of two floors taken from a higher level seemingly across a large space, workers in light blue shirts sit at individual desks sewing clothing. The desks are white and uniform; teal material is folded in piles near most workers’ machines.

Dozens of workers, mostly women and all wearing purple vests, sit in tight chaotic workspaces sewing and measuring black floral fabric. Thick extension cords drape from the ceiling to pipes on the tables to power the machines. Tinsel strands of varying colors loop decoratively around braces in the ceiling.

In this aerial view, a large concrete building, about five stories tall, has collapsed. Hundreds of people are crowded at the base of rubble and on the top of collapsed section.

BELOW: People gathered as rescuers looked for survivors and victims at the site of the Rana Plaza building that collapsed a day earlier, in Savar, near Dhaka, Bangladesh, in April 2013. At the time of its collapse, the building housed five garment factories that made clothing for international brands. The collapse killed 1,134 people; 2,500 were injured. Ten years later, survivors are still struggling and more than half are unemployed. (A.M. Ahad/AP)

BELOW: Textile waste near Gikomba market in Nairobi. (Kevin McElvaney/Greenpeace)

BELOW: A pile of secondhand apparel was found at a dump site in Sa Kaeo, about 30 miles from the Thai-Cambodian border. (Wason Wanichakorn/Greenpeace)

BELOW: Textile and plastic waste at Dandora dump site in Nairobi. (Kevin McElvaney/Greenpeace)

Eight women sit on low stools at sewing stations in a crowded, sparsely lit windowless room. Seemingly unorganized piles of white fabric, stack halfway to the ceiling, are on the floor in the room corners.

Kimberly Atkins Stohr stands with her side to the camera, wearing a silk and lace white wedding dress that she designed and made. She is holding a white bouquet of feathers and wears white flowers in her hair.

Click on a thumbnail

Workers labor in a textile workshop in Dongguan, Guangdong Province, China, in 2020. (Qilai Shen/Bloomberg)

Workers on the factory floor at Zuntex Apparel in Guatemala City, on Oct. 3, 2023. (Daniele Volpe/The New York Times)

Workers sew garments at the Prestige Clothing Ltd. textile factory, operated by The Foschini Group Ltd., in Cape Town, South Africa, in 2020. (Bloomberg)

Workers make clothes at the Sritex factory in Solo, Indonesia in 2019. (Dimas Ardian/Bloomberg)

85%

of textile waste ends up in landfills.

But I also discovered sources of hope: innovators in fashion design, education, and consumer advocacy are disrupting the way the fashion industry has operated for centuries — and showing how the future of fashion can walk the same path as climate justice. This series gives a few snapshots of some of the innovations, which are largely happening on a grass-roots level but which can be duplicated and scaled up in a way that can truly change the fashion industry. Think of them as the building blocks to a future of true fashion sustainability.

85%

of textile waste ends up in landfills.

I knew I could not in good conscience continue to contribute to that phenomenon, so I decided to leave my design business dormant until I could find a way to design clothing without harming the earth or further imperiling the people most deeply impacted by climate injustice. To my shock, there is no playbook for that. Though “sustainability” and “circular fashion” and other buzzwords are prevalent in fashion advertising and company statements, the truth is that the industry as a whole is failing our planet and all those who live on it. Though some companies and brands have made real commitments to being good climate citizens, greenwashing — the practice of claiming to be sustainable but in reality giving little more than lip service to the effort — is prevalent. After all, fashion is a $2.5 trillion-dollar industry. It’s hard to convince its biggest players to change when so much money is on the line.

Designing woman

From wardrobe to waste

Rags to runway

Reduce, repair, respect

A new sketchbook

+ What you can do

Not so fast, fashion

Series

+ What you can do

A new sketchbook

Rags to runway

Reduce, repair, respect

From wardrobe to waste

Not so fast, fashion

Editors: Marjorie Pritchard and Amy MacKinnon Designer/Photo Editor/Project Manager: Heather Hopp-Bruce Digital Editor: Rami Abou-Sabe Copy Editor: Jessie Tremmel Developer: Andrew Nguyen

Kimberly Atkins Stohr is a columnist for the Globe. She may be reached at kimberly.atkinsstohr@globe.com. Follow her @KimberlyEAtkins.

Designing woman

From wardrobe to waste

Rags to runway

Reduce, repair, respect

A new sketchbook

+ What you can do

Not so fast, fashion

Series

+ What you can do

A new sketchbook

Rags to runway

Reduce, repair, respect

From wardrobe to waste

Not so fast, fashion

By Kimberly Atkins Stohr

How my life changed when I realized my clothes were killing the planet.

Designing woman

PART 1 NOT SO FAST, FASHION

Join the conversation

Listen to Kimberly Atkins Stohr talk about fast fashion with Shirley Leung on the Say More podcast:

Previously, I’d designed custom colorful patterns that were printed on fabrics by a textile vendor for my garments. I already prioritized creating as little waste as possible, ordering fabric by the yard rather than by the bolt and using fabric scraps as interfacing and other foundational parts of the clothing items. I knew what I didn’t use would end up in a landfill, so I used as much existing product as I could. I thought I was being responsible.

On Boston Globe Today

Kimberly Atkins Stohr and host Segun Oduolowu discuss the project.