Hi friend,
Over on the socials, there's a debate raging about the merits and logistics of sustainable and ethical fashion, particularly around the apparel company Shein -- known for some very sketchy practices around art theft, labor and product quality.
Shein, however, is one of the few fast-fashion companies that serves (smaller) fat people.
This is the context in which I wrote the following for this week's letter.
I don't want to hear a single person lecturing fat people about where they shop for clothing until fat folks -- all fat folks! -- can reliably get a reasonable range of basic clothing needs, at achievable prices, filled in the first place.
"Doesn't that just mean you want to add more unethical clothing to the world?"
No, it means you need to stop holding fat folks to a standard no one else meets while also depriving us of basic necessities.
Look, Shein doesn't sell clothing in my size, so I've never given them a dime. But it's wild watching thin folks with thousands of options tell fat folks of their three whole options, "No, you don't want those, those are bad for you."
Sound familiar? It should: it's the same paternalism and control that tells thin people they get input on what fat people eat (or don't eat).
The sustainable clothing debate is extra fun because thin people have long decreed that fat ppl aren't allowed to have meaningful clothing options, y'all hire us less often and pay us less, and now y'all want us to feel bad about our minimal participation in a system you created?
Fat people finally got enough options that some of us (mostly smaller fat folks) started being able to develop a sense of personal style, and all of a sudden it became very important for thin folks to tell us how shamefully unethical our shopping is.
In fact, so thin people would like to believe (and for us to believe), it's fat people's shopping that's killing the planet. Just like it's our eating doing the same thing.
It's bigotry all the way down.
Yelling at marginalized people probably feels really good and righteous in the moment, but it just doesn't create meaningful change (and does increase oppression).