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European wool, if priced appropriately for farmers, would be absurdly more expensive, as its price would pay for the higher labour costs of a society with a higher cost of living. So governments who seek to preserve sheep flocks, are forced to either massively subsidise the purchases of foreign companies or let the entire industry die. From an economic perspective this might all sound like reasonable market behaviour, but it is hard to overstate how abstruse this production pipeline is. In the midst of an ecological collapse that the fashion industry plays an immense hand in, rather than use the readily available natural fibres that emerge as a result of our sheep existing, it is somehow more ‘sound’ to burn those fibres and instead import nylon or polyester clothes, which have been loaded onto cargo ships an average of ten times between design and retail. In the process an entire industry and the people it employed are hollowed out, foreign workers are exploited, and the skills and traditions which have served as cultural touchstones and storytelling devices throughout the history of Spain are consigned to history. Such is the trade-off for the low prices of fast fashion: An externalisation of costs that corporations make society bare, creating an absurd system where the simple is more “expensive” than the needlessly complicated. In order to fully fix the roots of the Industry’s problems you’d, unfortunately, have to fix the affordability crisis first. But, as that is beyond our scope, what can we do?
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