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Yahoo
17-07-2025
- Entertainment
- Yahoo
PBS Docuseries Unravels Fashion's Final Destination
If fashion sales maintain the modern-day throwaway-culture momentum, estimates anticipate that the global fashion industry will create 148 million tons of textile waste each year by 2030, according to academic publisher Taylor & Francis. That projection is up 60 percent compared to the textile waste generated in 2015. The crisis is about to be front and center—on television sets, at least—as the popular PBS show 'Human Footprint' returns to explore the global impact of Earth's most ingenious, destructive and adaptable species: Humans. More from Sourcing Journal Podcast: Inside the Material Innovation State of the Industry Report 2025 Material World: Sparxell Spills Ink, Modern Meadow Moves Mercedes Zalando Drops First Collection with Circ Lyocell 'We try to meet audiences where they're at with what they're understanding and then you sort pull back the veneer a little bit. You're like, 'OK, actually, that's not what this is.' It flips it on its head,' Nathan Dappen, producer and director of Human Footprint, told Sourcing Journal. 'Personally, filming with someone like Frederick Anderson—an artist who puts everything he has into something really special for everyone involved—and then juxtaposing that with this place where people don't give a damn, it's just replicas thrown away in the desert—to me, that's powerful. I think it makes both [sides] feel more impactful because you can see how we've been manipulated to participate and be complicit in this problem.' Hosted by Princeton University professor and American evolutionary biologist Shane Campbell-Staton, the Emmy-nominated docuseries is part science, part travel and entirely introspective. 'This human obsession, transforming nature into clothing and accessories, has helped us thrive in every habitat. But we don't just dress for the weather. Our desires—to fit in, to stand out and to express ourselves—are woven into our DNA,' Staton says at the top of the episode. 'As humans conquered the globe, fashion created the fabric of our civilization. But what's the cost of eight billion people looking so fly?' The cost, it turns out, is complicated. 'If you allow for these kinds of labor abuses, if you create loopholes in waste management, people are simply going to want to participate. They want to have that thing the rich person has, or what their friend has, and I don't think they're a bad person for wanting that,' Dappen said. 'I'm not an economist, but I do know that the world would be a better place if we were not allowed to buy five $10 T-shirts.' The second season's ninth episode, 'Dressed to Kill,' begins in Wyoming's Rocky Mountains. Ryan Jordan, a material scientist, discussed the performance of wool in extreme conditions, highlighting the fiber's natural properties. 'We can't replicate wool,' said Jordan, a gear-tester as well as founder and publisher of Backpacking Light. 'We have not cracked that code.' That code considers the fiber's structure: an elastic core, a textured surface and a waxy coating called lanolin. 'And so, what you end up with is this fiber that interacts with water and heat in a way that keeps you warm if it's cool and cool when it's warm,' Jordan said. 'This is what gives wool its technological edge in terms of comfort when you're pushing it to the limits in an outdoor environment.' What sets humans apart isn't just the ability to turn nature into clothing, per Jordan, but the inability to stop tinkering. 'Wool is a biotechnology that we've developed over hundreds of years,' he said. 'I always think there's performance increases to be had. We're always pushing those limits.' The team then travels to Edinburgh to explore the historical significance of wool in Scotland—because 'there's no better place to witness our obsession with wool than the Golden Shears World Sheep Shearing Championships,' Staton said. The competitors can hawk about a sheep a minute, though the shearing competition is just one aspect of the Royal Highland Show, Scotland's biggest agricultural event. 'I think looking to the past and how people made clothes in the past, the relationship with the raw material can tell you so much about the past society,' said Sally Tuckett, fashion historian and professor at the University of Glasgow. But there's also a social element to clothing: status. 'Sometimes you just want to strut,' said Orlando Palacio, master craftsman and proprietor behind Manhattan's Worth & Worth—one of the last remaining custom hat makers in the United States. 'And there's nothing wrong with strutting, right? I mean, a peacock is a peacock.' And those struts have tribes, fashion designer and philanthropist Frederick Anderson said on camera, noting that tribalism is a basic human function. But what happens when those tribes start to travel at the speed of social media? For the FGI's 2022 Rising Star Award for Womenswear recipient, it's fast fashion: what ultimately boils down to 'how quickly can we get it in your hand and how quickly can you throw it away so you can buy something else.' 'I think people put a label on fashion itself as being wasteful; high-end is not wasteful. We actually can't afford to be wasteful,' Anderson told SJ. 'These are complex conversations. There's not a turnkey idea of 'this is bad, this is good.' Not everyone is everything; there are different stories to be told.' Anderson observed that dichotomic mentality play out, in real time, during a screening of the episode late last month. A handful of attendees walked out after realizing the gathering was for critical thinking, not carousel content. While the situation was amusingly bleak, Anderson applauded PBS and Days Edge for the eerily apt timeliness of the series. 'I think the people who walk out, who don't want to look in that sort of internal mirror, that's a source of the problem,' Dappen responded, noting that regulation is one of the simpler solutions available; just look to speed limits. 'I think that the world has made it too easy to have things that cost other people a lot,' he continued. 'Most of us are detached enough that if something happens on the other side of the world, it's just like, I know, but I'm trying to get there faster.' For Clare Sauro, a fashion historian and curator at Drexel University, 'knowing the difference between clothing and fashion' can help mitigate the cheapening of not just garments, but the value awarded to textile production. 'A lot of mass-produced fashion today is only made to be worn about seven times before it starts, pretty much, falling apart,' Sauro said. 'I mean, you can just wear the same clothes over and over again and just replace them when they wear out.' Virginia Postrel, author of 'The Fabric of Civilization: How Textiles Made the World,' agreed. The journalist said that garments are likely taken for granted because the Industrial Revolution made fashion less laborious—ergo no longer exclusive to the elite. 'As soon as there's available resources, we start doing things that really make no sense,' Sauro said. 'History has shown we do things without thinking about the future.' After the 'very real arms race' of World War II, Staton said, another began—this time in middle-class America, by way of synthetic textiles. Think big crinoline skirts and colorful lingerie and 'all of these things that would have been out of reach for most people,' Sauro said. 'Things are brightly colored. You can buy multiples. It's not so serious, it's fun.' This abundance of fun, inexpensive fabrics that brought fashion to the masses ultimately led to the documentary's next stop: Iquique, Chile. 'You're not just seeing a current problem. You're seeing a future problem,' John Bartlett said. 'And people know they're not supposed to do this, which is why they've been burning the clothes—getting rid of the evidence.' Bartlett, a Chilean cricketer and journalist, captured those consequences for National Geographic in April 2023, exploring where clothing goes to die: the Atacama Desert. With no import tax or duties for American businesses, the region became a dumping ground for the United States to ship unwanted clothes. While every country has its own 'sort of receptacle country where a lot of this clothing ends up,' per Bartlett, it's usually 'the poorer and developing countries' who foot the bill. 'The fact that [clothing] is such a basic need makes it inherently manipulable,' Bartlett said. 'Corporations have taken full advantage; you can make people dress basically in any way you want with all of the tools that marketing people have nowadays.' The episode closes in San Diego, where Staton pondered how one can reconcile the human desire to express oneself with clothing with the cost accrued, including the millions of metric tons of plastic entering marine environments annually. Estimates suggest that 92 percent of the 5.25 trillion plastic particles on the ocean surface are microplastics, according to a 2020 case study published by Science Direct. 'Not only do we know that [microplastics] are found all over the planet, but they're found in all organisms,' said Michael Burkart, biochemist at the University of California, San Diego. 'They've found microplastics in every organ of our body. That's kind of scary.' Burkart researches sustainable alternatives to plastics and polyester, such as green algae, not unlike the efforts of Algenesis Labs. Co-founded by Bukart and funded by the Department of Energy to work on biofuels, the company brings algae-based polymers out of the lab and into production. There's an abundance of opportunities for such pivots, he continued, as there's plenty of technology available to make fashion more sustainable. The transition needs more than tech, per Staton, however, to incorporate the human element. 'When Ford started pumping out cars, there were a bunch of people that were like, 'I have a horse.' But over 20 years, it was like, 'No, I don't have a horse anymore, that would be silly,'' Mayfield said. 'Eventually, that's what will happen with our polymers. But it will take 20 years, we know that.' While this episode of 'Human Footprint' explored the industry's top-down issues—challenges in sustainability and sourcing and consumer manipulation—against the race to the bottom mentality of corporations, Dappen considers a bottom upside. 'We've been trained to become satisfied with the relationship of not cherishing anything in our lives,' he said, using the analogy of having 200 acquaintances over two solid, true-blue friends. 'That relationship of cherishing the things in our lives—whether its people or the things we wear or that we eat—has been completely lost in our world nowadays. And because of that, it's shielded us from the terrible things that happen downstream in the supply chain.' Anderson nodded. 'Value systems—it's all value systems,' he said. 'One-hundred percent.' 'Buried in Style: Dressed to Kill' premieres July 9 on PBS. Solve the daily Crossword
Forbes
12-07-2025
- Entertainment
- Forbes
Dressed To Kill: PBS's Human Footprint Examines Apparel And Evolution
Host Shane Campbell-Staton interviews American fashion designer Frederick Anderson for 'Dressed to Kill.' Courtesy of Day's Edge Productions Dressed to Kill , the third episode of Season Two of PBS 's Human Footprint, explores apparel and its impact on our planet. Literally. Because the ways that we make what we wear, the practices, habits and infrastructure, it can alter the land that we live on. Earlier this week I met with Dr. Nate Dappen and Dr. Neil Losin, directors and producers of the docuseries, to talk about this fascinating episode. Dr. Losin and Dr. Dappen were quick to tell me that they're not really fashion people, but it wasn't defensive, they were showing me how they found an entry point into apparel. 'I learned a ton about fashion,' Dr. Dappen said when I asked about the personal effect of making this episode. 'I don't think I'd ever really thought about it quite as deeply as this episode forced us to think about it. It became clear working on this, not only that we're a species that has spent time and effort and energy and resources into crafting materials that clothe our bodies, but clothing really is the thing that's allowed us to take over the whole planet, it's allowed us to move everywhere. That practical side is great, but I think the other side, about fitting into groups, is so critical. Maybe I didn't appreciate it as much until I read Virginia Postrial's book, The Fabric of Civilization . In some ways fitting in feels almost like a dirty word, but I think I have a much deeper appreciation for how important it is, and I came to realize how critical of a role that form is to function in our groups and in society and in this complicated world we live in.' Virginia Postrial and her book, The Fabric of Civilization. Courtesy of Day's Edge Productions 'For my part,' Dr. Losin told me, 'I think historically I felt like the person who dresses functionally and I didn't care what people thought, like that. I think I've realized as I've gotten older, and maybe a little more introspective, that even in the social circles that Nate and I travel in, in our jobs, we're science and wildlife documentarians. You walk around a film festival or an industry event and it might not be high fashion. But there are still the social signifiers in the way that people are dressed, right? It's the North Face jacket and it's the Arc'teryx slacks, or some certain shoes, something like that. And yes, those things are very functional, but I think it's fascinating the way that function has been co-opted into a social signifier and a fashion statement as well.' At its essence, fashion, both what we wear and how it is made, how all of that affects everything else in our world, it's a fascinating intersection of science and culture. Fashion needs to make changes to its industry practices, for the good of all, we need to remove petroleum from clothing. Messaging that audiences will hear is vital to making progress, and this series is an excellent example of how things could be done. It's pretty impressive work from (relatively) new filmmakers.'This is the first hosted show that we've made,' Dr. Losin told me. 'We were all new to this to some degree when we started,' We met Shane back when he was a grad student studying lizards at Harvard.' American fashion designer Fredrick Anderson closes his fashion show in a scene from 'Dressed to Kill.' Courtesy of Day's Edge Productions It turns out that all three of them began their careers in herpetology. 'We bonded over that,' said Dr. Losin, 'and the first time we filmed Shane, we filmed him for a film about lizards.' A few years later they worked together again on a science communication workshop and when they were finished Dr. Campbell-Staton told Dr. Losin and Dr. Dappen about an idea he had been playing with, how neat it would be to create a docuseries about evolution that is driven by people. At this point, Dr. Losin told me, 'Shane had done a little bit of on-camera work, but nothing where he was the main character, the host. We learned together and we learned to trust Shane's instincts and he learned to trust our instincts. Nate and I had actually already begun developing a similar concept on our own that we hadn't really started pitching to broadcasters yet. And Shane said, 'I think I should be the host.' And we looked at him, we had interacted with Shane maybe a handful of times at that point, and we both thought he really would be a good host. PBS was really excited about the concept and gave us the opportunity to actually give this a shot.' That was that. Roughly a million hours of work later, and Human Footprint was born. Orlando Palacios, haberdasher behind Worth & Worth, in a still from 'Dressed to Kill. Courtesy of Day's Edge Productions 'Making a show like this,' Dr. Losin told me, 'it has to affect you in some way. Hopefully it affects the audience in a similar way and gets people to think a little bit harder. About the choices they make and some of the hidden costs that go along with that, the externalities that aren't priced into the sticker price, whether that's a $5 t-shirt or it's a $3 hamburger. We're not paying for the environmental costs or the climate change costs of the production of that beef. These kinds of choices are all over our lives, where either our social structures, our institutions make the costs invisible or whether, in some cases, there are literal subsidies to industries that artificially decrease the prices of things. I think it's always worth investigating, interrogating the choices we make and trying to get why this thing that seems like it ought to be expensive is really cheap? Usually there's a scary answer at the end of that tunnel.' The most cursory online search into the impact that the textile industries in Southeast Asia have had on the waterways in that part of the world will prove to you how very right he is. 'I don't have any empirical evidence to support this,' Dr. Dappen said, 'but I feel deeply, after working on this episode and so many other episodes of Human Footprint , that the big thing we're lacking in our lives is connections to the people that make the things that make our life good. The systems that we operate in now make that so difficult. The people who make our clothes are on the other side of the planet now.' Neil Losin and Nate Dappen, producers and directors of 'Human Footprint.' Courtesy of Day's Edge Productions I asked if the guys if making the episode had convinced them to talk more about clothing, if it changed the way they communicate about what we wear with the people in their lives. 'A lot of the conversations I have with my family and with my friends now revolve around, how can I have less that is more valuable,' Dr. Dappen told me. 'It does seem like there is an obsession with individual expression, but the value in that individual expression, I think it doesn't align with folks' true values. I think most people want the world to be a good place. They want the world to be more sustainable, but through a lot of the choices we make, they betray them. That's a core thing that I've been taking away. I don't mean to put the blame on customers because we're in a system now where the consequences of our choices are totally obscured by the system. We don't even know how bad of a choice we're making or what it's doing to somebody or someplace on the other side of the world.' Dr. Losin agreed. 'I think we in the developed world are incredibly insulated from the consequences of our consumer choices. I think we're pretty immersed in this world of conservation and wildlife and sustainability. I had certainly heard of these clothing graveyards in Chile, for example, but had not seen them, had never filmed them and I really didn't understand the full scope of what was happening there. We are rarely doing true investigative reporting. You can't really do that on a documentary timeline, on a documentary budget, at least not for broadcast television. Some people work on investigative docs that take many, many years to make. We're not doing that, but we are able to find the people who are doing that investigative work.' Iquique, a massive clothing graveyard in Chile, west of the Atacama Desert. Courtesy of Day's Edge Productions In this instance, talking to John Bartlett, a National Geographic journalist based in Santiago, Chile, really helped cement the vision for this episode of the show. 'Spending time on the ground with John in Iquique,' Dr. Losin told me, 'which is something that Nate did basically solo, it all came together on very short notice. We happened to be in Princeton filming with Shane for something else and then there was this opportunity to get a camera person down to Iquique and meet up with John. And we were like, we've got to do this. It all came together fast. Being able to tap into the people who are actually on the ground doing that investigative reporting is something that we really like to do. It's why we feature so many journalists in the show, because we recognize that we're not the ones actually doing the discovering. But by tapping into those who are unraveling these systems, those supply chains and everything else, we can bring the audience to a place of learning something new and hearing it directly from the people who really found that out.' 'What we tried to do,' Dr. Dappen added, 'is piece together disparate aspects of this story in a way that have never been put together. Leading people from the creation of a fiber through the devastation of an ecosystem, through the creation of hats into Fashion Week and then showing how that all connects to what's happening today with fashion waste and issues of sustainability. I think that is one of the things that the show does well, I think we put together the story in a way that is unique.' A conversation sheep farmer Joe Baker and host Shane Campbell-Staton while filming Season Two, Episode 3: Dressed to Kill. Courtesy of Day's Edge Productions The story is important, telling it is the reason for this work, but the people making this series are very conscious of the experience the audience will have. This is not a heavy handed lecture and you will not be made to feel like a terrible person at any point in time while watching. After speaking with the filmmakers, I suspect that they would see very little utility in that approach. 'We put a huge amount of effort into doing everything we can not to create any villains,' Dr. Dappen told me. 'Because, I would say, with very few exceptions, there are no real bad guys and good guys in this world. It's just most people trying to fit into their groups and make a life for themselves that is reasonable. And that is by design in our show. We definitely don't want to point fingers or if we do, we want to make it feel like Shane in the voiceover. As it's written, you can hear Shane grappling with himself, with his own choices. That's intentional on our part, like, hey, I'm also part of the problem. I'm also on this journey of self-discovery.' Season Two of Human Footprint ,' including 'Dressed to Kill,' is now available on the PBS channels and Apps. MORE FROM FORBES Forbes Shackleton Would Have Died In Antarctica If He Wasn't Wearing Burberry By Rachel Elspeth Gross Forbes The Future Of The Spacesuit: What NASA's Artemis Astronauts Will Wear By Rachel Elspeth Gross Forbes 'Unbound': Becky Hutner's Film About Women's Footwear Liberation By Rachel Elspeth Gross
Wall Street Journal
24-06-2025
- Science
- Wall Street Journal
‘Human Footprint' Season 2 Review: Clean Up on Aisle PBS
A title like 'Human Footprint' does not suggest a celebration of homo sapiens treating the Earth with kindness, being cautious conservators of its natural resources and making generous room for the millions of other species occupying the planet. It sounds a lot more like they've been stomping around, and for quite some time. True perhaps. But if we casual observers of science can get over feeling guilty about what we eat, wear, drive and buy, the second season of this offbeat nature-science-psychology-philosophy show contains a lot of stuff we didn't know we didn't know. What do cane toads and honey bees have in common? Both are examples of what can happen when man tries to tweak nature. The six new episodes, hosted by evolutionary biologist Shane Campbell-Staton of Princeton University, wanders all over the globe, addressing instances in which humans tried to manipulate the environment to meet a very reasonable end—Australia's introduction of cane toads, for instance, which not only failed to eat the cane beetles they were meant to eradicate but poisoned native species that tried to eat them (though why any creature would attempt such a hideous meal is a mystery). The efforts that Mr. Campbell-Staton tracks in rescuing honey bees from extinction are more a case of reversing the unintended consequences of pollution and pesticides.
