BreakBread Spotlight with Claire Myree

In the Volume 1, Issue 2 Summer 2021 edition of BreakBread Magazine, printed alongside works of fiction, poetry, and visual art is Clare Myree’s nonfiction piece on today’s fast fashion market. “Girl, This is Fashionova” explores the life of a young woman in university with her friends as they grapple with the economic, environmental, and personal aspects of dressing to impress.

BreakBread reached out to Myree to discuss her work as a writer and experience submitting to the magazine. Myree said “[she] had been talking about sustainability and environmental issues in some of [her] other classes” which gave her the idea to write an essay exploring those themes. So when given a writing class assignment to write a personal experience that included research based approach, she created “Girl, This is Fashionova.”

Along with herself, she wrote in friends Ruby and Hailey, two devotees of fast fashion. They embark on a weeklong journey wherein Myree lets them dress her because she has not been dressing well enough. Myree writes that “I wanted to buy in, but I didn’t think that I was ready or good enough to do so because I wasn’t skinny enough or pretty enough to be able to buy in all the way and look the way in the clothing that advertisements indicated that I should.”

  Along the way, Myree discovers a rabbit-hole of companies like the titular Fashionova whose fast fashion business model is to continually release the latest ‘it’ piece and use some of the biggest stars as their models. Many of today’s most popular social media influencers, Myree points out, are brand ambassadors to some extent for these companies. The dresses they make are nice looking, inexpensive, and fairly accessible - all aspects pervading the fast fashion world which partly explain their popularity. 

But, as Myree descends into this world she is faced with the inescapable. In one scene she describes trying on a hotly awaited dress. She writes, “I looked at myself in the mirror [and] I marvelled at how the shiny black material cinched in at my waist. The dress matched perfectly with the black strappy heels I had paired them with, making my legs look shapely and womanly.” A key theme to her essay is that normal self-consciousness about one’s appearance is twisted by these companies through their influencers so that only certain items can actually satisfy the urge to feel attractive. These pieces, though, will go out of style in a matter of months causing a cycle of buying something and then forgetting you have it once it is no longer an ‘it’ piece. 

In our interview, Myree points out that though this is a reality, she is not trying to solve it as much as document it and its fallout. She says that her essay “is not about me finding the solution to the environmental fast-fashion crisis...I just wanted to capture a time in my life in which I was forced to confront both the consequences of my actions and the reasons behind why I was doing these actions.” 

The hidden consequence, borne out of Myree’s research, is that the items of clothing are often donated. The action provides a sort of catharsis where the guilt of our North American capitalism is succored by the act of charity. Except, as she points out, donations of clothing are often bought from places like the Salvation Army and then resold to businesses in poorer nations. She mentions specifically a film called T-Shirts Travels that discusses the Zambian textile market and how aid from Western countries essentially undercuts any local ability to produce cheap clothing. This is just one aspect of how overconsumption is a blight on the planet, another is that it takes 2000 gallons to make the jeans that are held up as a way to make young women feel confident. 

This essay focuses on the connection between the simple act of dressing to feel confident and the pollution and exploitative economic reality behind the t-shirts and dresses that come to our door in a matter of clicks. As Myree shows, there is always a high cost to convenient and cheap consumer goods, both to consumers and to the places where this endless supply of cheap stuff ends up. 

Written by Clayton Tomlinson