Club Friday Q&A: Fashion Expert and Author Cora Harrington

 
 

By Stacy Lee Kong

Image: Tigz Rice

 
 

Every time one of Cora Harrington's tweets come across my timeline, I learn something new. If I have yelled to you about how all clothing is handmade, I learned that from Harrington. (Especially crochet, which she tweeted about the same summer that crochet tank tops haunted my Instagram ads, sigh.) Same if we've ever discussed fabric softener, dryer sheets and the difference between silk and satin. Harrington comes by this knowledge honestly; she ran blog-turned-media brand The Lingerie Addict for 14 years, a job that allowed her to learn a lot about the inner workers of the fashion industry, garment production and sustainability. Harrington closed TLA last year, but she's still writing about fashion in a column for the Miami Herald, planning a second book (her first, In Intimate Detail, was an illustrated guide to lingerie with a foreword by Dita Von Teese) and, of course, offering up her insights on Twitter, where she's been very effectively schooling the reluctant masses on the evils of Shein in recent months. We chatted about what clothes can tell us about the world we live in, why people should respect garment workers more and the one thing people should understand about sustainable fashion. 

How did you even become interested in fashion?

I remember being interested in fashion when I was in middle school and high school. I had dreams of being a fashion photographer all the way into college. But I was never really encouraged to pursue that as a career or a reasonable means of employment. I was essentially [told], I'm sure with the best of intentions, that I needed to pursue a more realistic career. So, I suppressed that desire for many years, and then it reemerged when I was in my mid 20s. I wanted to find something nice to wear for someone I was dating at the time, but I wasn't finding advice, recommendations, reviews or ideas for what to wear or what to buy. I eventually found a pair of peacock stockings from this brand called Falke, and all of a sudden, a light bulb went off. I thought, 'If I have never heard of these or seen these before, how many other beautiful things have I possibly missed?' So I started my blog, just to share stuff I found that I thought was pretty. I started building an organic following that way, and then when in my late 20s, I decided to start working on my site, which by then had been named The Lingerie Addict, full time. So, in a very roundabout way, I went from being interested in fashion, to discouraged from pursuing it, to working in the fashion industry as an adult.

And, the more I learned about fashion, the more I loved it, because what we wear, how we wear it and when we wear it really says so much about our culture, about the time we live in, about what's happening around us. And that's true for our time, but also for all past generations, which to me is a fascinating story. Because you can explain anything through the lens of fashion—globalization, economics, world markets, technology, gender roles—in a way that I find a lot more accessible than perhaps explaining in other mediums.

That's exactly how I feel about pop culture. I want to talk about a bigger, deeper, more complicated issue—I just want to do it in a way that you can easily understand and relate to.

I think people sometimes don't take fashion seriously, but there's depth there if you're just willing to think about it. That's what keeps me constantly interested in the fashion industry and in conversations about fashion, because I'm excited about it. I'm intrigued. I'm learning things and I want to share them with other people. I think a lot of folks hear the word fashion and they think it's frivolous. Or they think nothing about it applies to them, but if you're wearing clothes, then fashion is relevant to you. There's something in that conversation that applies to you. So, it's also about picking out the thread, no pun intended, that makes people feel like these stories are relevant to them. That's very exciting for me, especially when folks are like, 'Oh, I never knew this,' or 'I never realized this. I never thought about it that way.' When I see that excitement of discovery and learning, it feels like people are sharing that journey alongside me.

I only discovered The Lingerie Addict close to the end of when you were updating regularly, so I didn't get to follow along on the whole journey, but now having heard how you started and how much you love learning about fashion, I'm really curious about why you decide to stop.

The internet has changed so much from 2008, which is when I started my site, to today. Back then, you could write something and it would appear on Google. Search results weren't just large sites or major media corporations that could pay for advertising; it was genuinely the best result for the thing you search for, which surfaced a lot of niche site in a way that does not happen anymore. So, my site experienced exponential, dramatic growth for several years through organic search (and through social media). Then, Google transformed their search engine algorithm to really start prioritizing these larger sites and companies, and we started seeing social media companies depreciate lingerie-related content by calling it sex-related content. It got to the point that it was impossible to search for your content; essentially, the internet is all silos that are completely unsearchable. There's lots of Instagram accounts, but you can't get on Instagram and search for something you want, right? That whole era, it's just gone. I was very fortunate that I was able to transition to full-time, bring on columnists and diversify my content, but it reached the point where it felt like there was no further The Lingerie Addict could go. It just did not make sense to keep pumping money and time and energy into something that very clearly was not going to [continue growing]. I also wanted to see what else I could do. Not only had I taken the business of The Lingerie Addict as far as it could go, I felt like I had done as much as I could in this specific area of the fashion industry.

In your Twitter bio, you call yourself an aspiring fashion historian, and you just talked how much you enjoy understanding the past and the present through fashion. Why is the history of fashion so interesting to you?

My entry into this industry and into this world was through the back door; I don't have a degree in fashion, I never went to school for it. My progression really started with my site, which grew into its own thing, which has now led to me doing some of the work I'm doing now. So, I would say it was a very gradual build up from me saying, 'Oh, these stockings are really cute' to 'Oh, let's see what other types of lingerie there are' to 'Oh, let's talk to the people who are making these garments' to 'Wow, what's happening in the rest of the fashion industry?' So, it was a very gradual trajectory that happened in stages. The bigger this world gets for me, the more I have realized there's just so much I still don't know, there's so much that stretches beyond the aesthetics, which is a lot of fun.

What has been just the coolest, most interesting or most mind-expanding thing that you've learned about the history of fashion?

One of the things that I mention pretty frequently on Twitter, and that I also said on my site when I was updating regularly, is that everything you wear is handmade. There are no robots that make clothes. It's not machines; your clothing is not being made independently on a factory line the way cars are being made. Everything you wear was made with human hands. Somebody sat down in front of a sewing machine and put all those pattern pieces together, and then shipped them off to you. And I think a lot of people don't think of their clothes that way. I don't blame them, because this is knowledge that has been made deliberately opaque. Unless you are someone who works in fashion or you know somebody who works in fashion or who is doing research in this area, why would you know that? It's also tied to the general depreciation of garment workers and garment care. But that was a major moment for me, in terms of shifting the way I thought about the industry, because then clothes went from being like, 'Yeah, this is a shirt, this is a top. This is a pair of pants' to me thinking, 'Okay, somebody made this, and if somebody made this, then how does that relate to the price that I'm paying?' Because the simplest t-shirt takes the person to put together and sew just as much as the most complicated bra does; a human is involved no matter how simple or how complicated the garment. I think viewing clothing through that lens is revolutionary if you really sit with it.

 I learned that from you! And the fact that there's no machine that can actually crochet, so every crocheted tank top that I saw in the summer of 2021 had been made by hand. Every time that I've told people that, there's this intense disbelief. Which I get, because when I read it, I was like, 'No, that can't be true.' Because you're totally right—it feels like we're at this point where the reason things are so cheap must be because of technology and not because of exploitation. And then to find out like no, it actually is exploitation is so jarring.

And it's been made that way deliberately. We live in a society where we associate cost with better quality or more skill—the more skilled you are, the more money you’ll make, right? But this leads to people devaluing garment work and garment workers, because if it's so cheap, then it must be easy. They must not be very skilled. That's why you get people saying all kinds of things about garment workers on Twitter, when what's actually true is these are expert-level, highly trained, highly talented sewers, who are often being paid a pittance so we can have cheap clothing.

I've been following your recent posts on Shein and sustainability really closely, and as usual I'm learning a lot. When did you you started thinking about sustainability?

When I was running The Lingerie Addict, it had an e-commerce component, and even then I tried to make sure that I put a lot of focus on smaller, independent brands even as I mixed them up with larger brands, like Chantelle. So I've always had an eye to sustainable brands, even before I was using that language. But I think as the conversations about, and the availability of, fast fashion has become more dramatic, that has also shifted my focus. The price of clothing is just moving in the completely opposite direction from inflation—the price of everything is going up except for clothes, and Shein is all of that on steroids.

When everyone started talking about it because they could get three outfits for $1, or whatever they're doing over there, I narrowed in on this conversation because it ties together so much what I’ve talked about for so many years, which is that we should focus on the garment workers, their labour and how our clothes are made, and Shein is oppositional to all of that. Even compared to other fast fashion companies, Shein is the worst of the worst.

Seeing people defend it like it's their mom is wild to me because Shein is not paying your bills. They're not even like giving you free clothes. So why are you so passionate about them? The way people have gone from 'Fast fashion is terrible, we should do better,' to 'Fast fashion is awesome, everything should be this cheap,' has been an incredible transition to see in real time. One of the things I think about pretty often is how the internet has amnesia. People don't have [memories] going back like more than four or five years. It's almost they can't remember what they bought before they were buying Shein, so people say, 'Well what do you expect me to do?' Well, what were you buying before?

The thing I find most frustrating about the conversations I've seen play out on Twitter is when people who are from marginalized groups themselves use the language of social justice to justify their own consumption choices.

My contempt [for Shein defenders] is ever increasing because how do you call yourself a socialist, a communist, somebody who's in favour of equality, social justice, fair wages, all this other stuff, and then you're defending Shein? This constant focusing and re-centring of American priorities, American wants—not needs—and just completely ignoring, discarding and making invisible the people who make the clothing is such a Western thing. The same people who are talking about the right to fair wages, increasing minimum wage and why they should be paid more are perfectly happy to continue exploiting others. I've seen some of the most off-the-wall Shein defences; a few months ago, someone on TikTok said something like, 'I don’t understand being all upset about Shein when they didn't care when you were slaves.' I was like, what? How are these even related? What are you talking about? How did your brain arrive at that conclusion?

Or the poor people have no choice but to shop at Shein argument!

First of all, poor people aren't keeping Shein in business. I'm not going to argue with people who say they literally can't afford anywhere else because you know your situation. But you are not the people keeping Shien in business and straight up, Shein does not care about you. You are incidental to the Shein business model. The people that are keeping Shein in business, and the reason Shein has billions and billions and billions of dollars in valuation, is the people making haul videos. The issue isn't people who are buying one pair of pants every three months. It's people who are ordering a refrigerator box of clothes every single month. That is the problem. And yes, we should definitely judge those people.

Because when you're like, ‘Oh, I bought from Shein because I can get 20 outfits instead of one.’ Well, let's unpack that. Why do you need 25 outfits instead of one? What is wrong with just buying one outfit, like a normal person? Because in all of human history, clothes have never been this cheap or this accessible that you could buy so many pieces so frequently. There are benefits of living in a ready-to-wear world, of course. I'm not saying you should go back to Babylonian times or something. But there's a reason if you live in an older house, the closets are small. I think this goes back to acting like Shein is a necessity. Well, this way of shopping is actually very, very new. All we have to do is go back 10 years to see that people once shopped very differently.

What's the one thing you think the average person needs to know about sustainability and fashion?

When a lot of people hear the word sustainable, they immediately jump to, 'I can't afford sustainable brands.' But it's not about buying at all. It really gets to me how people can’t see outside the lens of consumerism, so they immediately jump to not being able to afford it. I didn't even say anything about buying from other brands! The conversation about sustainability honestly shouldn't start with buying stuff. The conversation about sustainability starts with things like, wear what you already have and take better care of it; wash it properly so you're not ruining it after a few wears; appreciate garment workers. I always want to come back to the fact that you don't have to buy anything at all to be a more sustainable fashion consumer. In fact, you almost certainly have enough clothes to wear, so you don't have to buy anything at all.

Correction: a previous version of this article referred to Chanel; the brand Harrington stocked on her e-commerce site was Chantelle.

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Club Friday Q&A, FashionStacy Lee KongCora Harrington