Consumed: The need for collective change; colonialism, climate change & consumerism

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Barber's book has faced considerable criticism from reviewers, and I, too, stumbled upon those reviews later on. I love that it’s written in a conversational way, like we’re talking to each other and having a discussion. To calculate the overall star rating and percentage breakdown by star, we don’t use a simple average. I will say this: the author does a good job at recognising the systematic problems and linkages between fashion and environmental disaster, however her critical abilities never go beyond that (especially in her “solutions” which amount to. The 103 third parties who use cookies on this service do so for their purposes of displaying and measuring personalized ads, generating audience insights, and developing and improving products.

She is passionate about racial justice and exposing endemic injustices in our consumer and fashion industries. But this book is little more than a strident collection of facts and examples that I was already very familiar with. In fact, one of her chapters is titled, “How Society Works,” a bold claim, since she doesn’t explicitly disclaim that she’s referring to society in the Global North. If you are aged between 13 and 16 years of age and are just learning about the unjust systems of wealth inequality, colonialism and the extractive and harmful practices of consumerism fuelled by late capitalism please you’re the audience I would recommend this book for. No references, blanket statements with a narrative voice that’s like a rant on Instagram, commentary that could have done with editing to avoid repetition all - for me - made it insufferable to read.

I think this is a great book for people like me — those who have used consumption to fill a void, who used to pride themselves in not wearing the same thing twice, who was led to believe that the more you have, the better you are. Maybe it was just me already being familiar with many of the topics discussed and how they relate to one another (as a lefty environmental studies grad student), but I felt like I didn't learn much from this book. Her commentary about class and how some people may underestimate their wealth made a lot of sense to me. It's too bad, considering the damage the fashion industry is doing, the problem deserves better than this.

The discussion on colonialism was also very disorganized and chaotic purely because it didn't use case studies in a very productive way in my opinion. While some books can make someone walk away from a subject, I feel that Barber’s book entices the reader to learn more.This book is full of common sense, compassion and humanity, gives you plenty to reflect on, and will surely lead to welcome change. The other half passionately advocates for solutions, aiming to inspire positive change in the way the industry operates.

I will also reveal how we spend our money and whose pockets it goes into and whose it doesn't (clue: the people who do the actual work) and will tell my story of how I came to learn the truth.And how these oppressive systems have bled into the fashion industry and its lack of diversity and equality.

I liked the illustrations and the physical book is beautiful, but also felt like the structure was a little disjointed, and although the personal anecdotes were helpful in some places, I thought they were way overdone. Regardless, Consumed misses the mark, as its shortcomings eclipse some of the most important discussions in the book: the impact of textile waste in Ghana's Kantamanto Market, Anannya Bhattacharjee’s take on labor rights for garment workers in Asia, and Aja’s tips on how to get off the hedonistic capitalist treadmill as a Global North consumer.In the second 'unlearning' half of the book, I will help you to understand the uncomfortable truth behind why you consume the way you do. Aja tries to squeeze as many of her thoughts as possible into this book, but this method does not work in her favor. These cookies help provide information on metrics the number of visitors, bounce rate, traffic source, etc. On the flip side, I enjoyed her “Ways to Learn Actively” section on page 184-187, which serves as a template of how the whole book could have been organized, providing concrete, easy-to-follow tips on how to become a more conscious consumer.