Maxine Bédat, author of Unraveled: The Life and Death of a Garment, speaking as the Dyson Dean’s Distinguished Lecturer, Statler Auditorium, October 2 (Simon Wheeler/Cornell University)
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Maxine Bédat lays bare the fashion industry’s impacts and how we can change it
By Sherrie Negrea
The average American woman today owns seven pairs of jeans and consumers worldwide buy 1.25 billion pairs of them annually. But what impact does the demand for these ubiquitous garments have on the environment and on the lives of the workers who make them?
Maxine Bédat, cofounder of the fashion company Zady, set out to answer those questions by tracing the history of a single pair of jeans from a cotton farm in Texas to a landfill in Ghana. She described the journey in her book, Unraveled: The Life and Death of a Garment (Penguin, 2021), selected as the summer read for the Charles H. Dyson School of Applied Economics and Management.
Bédat, founder of the New Standard Institute, a think tank focused on the fashion industry, visited with faculty and students at the Dyson School on October 2 and shared what she discovered from her nearly two-year-long investigation of the life of a pair of jeans.
"I wanted to use the story of a pair of jeans to tell a much broader story of consumer consumption, its effects, and what we can do to change that impact," Bédat told about 200 students and faculty gathered at the Statler Auditorium when she spoke as the Dyson Dean’s Distinguished Lecturer. "The story of our jeans is really the story of our world more broadly."
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