Want ‘Clean’ Clothes? Get Geopolitical Savvy

Sally Fox warned that the same thing could happen to me that has happened to her sisters. “They used to go shopping just to buy cute clothes. Now they have to go through all this grief.”

I learned quickly what she meant when we set out to discover how much the average shopper can learn from reading the postage-size labels inside most garments.

After all, how many more pop culture figures like Kathie Lee Gifford do we need bursting into tears - as she did when it was reported that her clothing line had once been made by foreign garment workers in semi-slavery - before we consider under what conditions our clothes are made?

For most of us, knowing whether we are buying so-called clean clothes is nearly impossible. Our stores are a smorgasbord of garments made around the world. But finding the nation of origin doesn’t tell you much unless you are as knowledgeable as Sally Fox about the geopolitics of fashion.

Fox of Wickenburg, Ariz., is a 40-year-old scientistfarmer known worldwide for developing colored cotton. She is also a folk hero in organic clothing circles, among people who value products not made in foreign and U.S. sweatshops and made without artificial pesticides, fertilizers or defoliants in the growing process or toxic materials - such as heavy dyes - in the manufacturing.

But don’t be too quick to write Fox off as an old granola. The warm, engaging woman bridges the traditional textile design and manufacturing world and the organic world. Her trademarked FoxFibre cotton, in soft shades of brown and green, is available in a wide variety of mainstream products - blankets and sheets made by Fieldcrest-Cannon, plus sweaters, upholstery and more, sold by L.L. Bean.

Not that her success has been easy. She is a David in the Goliath fashion world. When she is not planting cotton seeds from the back of her tractor, she is traveling nationally trying to talk designers and manufacturers into going the natural route.

That’s no easy task since some earlier attempts to sell natural clothing products failed because that first generation of clothes resembled potato sacks rather than fashion. But that is changing. On the day we went shopping, she wore a comfortable T-shirt made of her cotton and styled with flair by an Italian designer.

Fox gives a compelling reason why we should know as much as we can about our clothes’ origins. She was shocked on a recent world tour to find that some countries use chemicals in their fields that long ago were banned in the U.S. and Europe. That means when you buy a cotton skirt made in a country without environmental regulations (most Third World countries), you may be bringing pollution into your own home, she says. We don’t use DDT on our farm fields anymore, but that’s not true elsewhere. When you launder that skirt, the residue of that chemical may just go out with the wash and into our water supply.

Fox knows such things as: “If a cotton shirt is from India, it was grown there. If it is made in China, it could be Chinese or American cotton. If is made in Malaysia, it was probably U.S. cotton.”

But most shoppers don’t know such things. If a shirt is labeled “assembled in Honduras,” there is no way for certain to know the origin of the material. You’re safe with jeans because most of the cotton comes from Texas, where the fewest pesticides are used, Fox says.

But how much of your life can you spend in jeans?

“My first recommendation is to look for fabrics made from organically grown fibers, but if you don’t buy organic, look for garments made with linen or U.S.-grown cotton,” she says. Linen is made of flax and few pesticides are used in its production.

Fox apologized for sounding so xenophobic, but this shopping trip hit home to her how little information consumers can glean from most labels. You even have to question clothing labeled “natural,” she warned. Without more details, it could just mean “natural” in color.

We stopped at a rack of loose, flowing dresses by my favorite designer. “I always feel like Earth Girl when I wear one of her dresses,” I say. “Made of rayon - in Guatemala,” read the tag.

Long pause from Fox. “Two ways of making rayon. One is more harmful than the other. From this label it is hard to tell.” Another long pause. “We’re potentially talking destruction of the rain forest here.”

Feeling my guilt, Fox confessed that one of her own favorite dresses has a touch of rayon in it. Still didn’t help.

Once the awareness is there, you can’t go back.