My Favourite Top – Has it Got Something to Hide?

Does my skeleton look big in this?

My favourite top is slash necked and bat-winged. Sounds like some vampire horror story of a garment I know, but I feel good when I wear it.  I love the sophisticatedness of the slash neck – not to be confused with a slashed neck, which is not at all sophisticated, or comfortable – and the relaxed yet elegant cut of the sleeves.  It is effortlessly stylish.  And yet, something has come between me and my top.  I’m beginning to suspect it may be hiding a skeleton in the closet.

I’ve no proof – just rumours.  But all the same it’s got me thinking, where had it been before we met on that clothes rack in Zara, the Knightsbridge branch, all those years ago?  Because, I don’t know if you know this, but cotton, which is mostly what my beloved top is made from, isn’t as soft and fluffy as we’re led to believe.  At least it doesn’t start out that way. 

I mean what would you think if you thought your top, could, in some small way, have contributed to an ecological catastrophe? The disappearance of a sea, no less. I couldn’t believe it.  I know, it’s hard to imagine an innocent, albeit subtly sexy, top could be mixed up in this sort of mess, but it seems the

Cotton - queen of the crops?

evidence is mounting against it.

So, ok, the story goes something like this: once upon a time the Aral Sea, which lies between Kazakhstan, in the north, and Uzbekistan, in the south, was the fourth largest lake in the world. For thousands of years, the local people made use of the Aral’s natural resources – for irrigating crops and fishing – until, under Soviet rule, Uzbekistan discovered the export potential of cotton. Ka-ching!  Jackpot! And so, began the slow draining of the Aral Sea, to irrigate what the present government affectionately term, ‘white gold’.  An apt nickname, considering it rakes in over $1 billion every year.

The thing is cotton’s a kinda thirsty old plant: according to Water Footprint, it takes around 2700 litres of

water to produce the cotton for one lil’ ol’ shirt.  It doesn’t take a genius to work out if Uzbekistan is one of the largest cotton exporters in the world then a whole lotta water is guzzled in the process. The result? On his visit there a couple of weeks ago, the UN and Secretary-General, Ban Ki-moon, said:

“…[H]e could not see anything except a “cemetery of ships marooned in the sand.” As a result of the disaster, people are getting sick, the land is poisoned, and storms blow dust and salt as far as the North Pole.”

Cotton is quite greedy, for a plant

I guess it’s not my top’s fault, but it turns out, the desertification of the Aral Sea is just the tip of the iceberg, or something like that. Cos Uzbekistan’s President, Islam Karimov, poetically described by Sting, the

dictator’s daughter’s fave famous person, as, “…hermetically sealed in his own medieval, tyrannical mindset.”  has, according to the UN and Amnesty International, lived up to this description:

Sting in the tail?

“…boiling his enemies, slaughtering his poverty-stricken people when they protest, and conscripting armies of children for slave labour.”.  Sounds like a grimmerer and grimmerer Grimm’s fairytale.

Hmmm? What’s that? Child slave labour?  I mean if slaughtering and boiling doesn’t capture the public’s attention, then animal or child cruelty surely will – just look at those doe eyes!  Well, according to the Environmental Justice Foundation, due to underinvestment and a shortage of agricultural machinery, 90% of Uzbek cotton is harvested by hand; and a lot of it by wee nippers, who miss up to 3 months of school, to pick the prickly crop – ouch!  The EJF’s Pick Your Cotton Carefully campaign has already encouraged many high street retailers to

Come along, kiddie-winkies!

commit to sourcing cotton elsewhere.  However, last month, fashion hotspots Zara and H&M found themselves in the hot seat, accused of buying Uzbek, and essentially supporting slavery. 

And so it goes on. There are many more tales to tell, from pesticide poisoning to sweat shop labour, but that’s for another day.  I’m not sure this is the end of the road for me and my fave top, maybe we can patch things up.  It just seems to me that it’s part of our responsibility to consider where our clothes – or anything we consume – have come from.  We can learn about each other that way – broaden our horizons.  And it’s a reminder, that although we may feel like our purchasing power is all just a drop in the ocean, even oceans can be finite, apparently.