Last week my 10-year-old son’s big school bag was in need of repair: the thermos bottle kept falling from the frayed containing pouch that had become too loose.

I went to my wife, and she was unable to help. Although as a surgeon she is dexterous at stitching flesh and skin, her needlework is not the best.

I took the school bag to a professional tailor and she too was helpless. A few stitches in the hem of the bag would fix it, she conceded. I suspect she was not interested in a small job that had to be done manually, rather than mechanically.

During the journey home I experienced a sort of awakening. Why not do it myself? I found a needle, and fixed the problem in five minutes.

Needlework used to be one of the most basic of womanly virtues.

When I was my son’s age, some of my clothes were made by my mother on her sewing machine, and she spent much of her time stitching the soles of our cloth shoes.

Such were the quality of the garments and shoes that they would last a long while, and with some mending and patches, they could be passed on to brothers and sisters.

At that time, when two middle-aged women met, one of their favorite topics was the fabric texture, cut, and workmanship of a homemade garment, especially a dress.

Today, a woman’s dress is more a statement of her consumption power, or her sex appeal.

Throwaway culture

As Elizabeth L. Cline writes in “Overdressed: The Shockingly High Cost of Cheap Fashion,” Americans buy more clothes than anything except food, and have come to view their clothing as disposable and transient. Consumers used to buy quality outfits that were meant to last and be repaired, but today they treat clothing as a “disposable good” that they can replace over and over.

Just as junk food has made our real food non-food, fast fashion has made sewing at home a lost art. Worse, as the garment industry revs up to keep new products constantly available and to stoke this unnecessary need, many young woman face the plight of having to accommodate the new additions to their crammed wardrobes.

Constantly shopping for clothing at discount and other trendy stores for “low-priced” bargains, they unwittingly become slaves to fast fashion by catering to the throwaway culture favored by Americans, Europeans and many others.

In times past, clothes were priced according to their quality.

“Where my father’s generation could shop in the downtown department store for unique and well-made clothes, we’re now faced with a cookie-cutter fashion landscape that offers many great deals, but not much in the way of actual choice,” Cline sums up incisively.

According to Cline, this change took place fairly late, in the 1990s, when the Gap, selling moderately priced garments, began major branding campaigns. In time, traditional clothing sellers were confronted with the choice of either responding by lowering their prices and selling large volumes, or going out of business.

When prices become the sole competitive edge, manufacturers began moving their factories to places where they didn’t have to worry about working conditions, minimum wages and unions. As a result, inexpensive clothes are constantly available at discount retailers, priced to move all the time, dozens at a time. In some stores, collections turn over as frequently as every two weeks.

In this illuminating study of the fast-fashion industry, Cline explains why fast fashion is a really bad idea — for garment workers, the clothing industry, for the environment and, most of all, for the consumers themselves.

Bargains

Given the aspiration for brand names and labels, the physical aspect of a garment becomes essentially irrelevant. Thanks to the phenomenon known as outsourcing, Nike has never made a single shoe inside American borders. In 2010, more than 70 percent of its shoes were made in China and Vietnam. Ironically, many Chinese and Vietnamese are making pilgrimage to US outlets to snap up Nike or LV “bargains.”

If you compare what a Nike manager makes to what a worker in a Nike plant in Vietnam earns, you might be surprised that even Karl Marx did not envision how bloody LV and Nike brand owners can be.

Given capitalists’ native craving for more profits, and the need to compete in pricing, brand owners’ first priority is to work backward from their bottom line to determine what corners they can cut and how effectively.

To make these mass produced items look classy and individualized, manufacturers make simple fashions look intricate or expensive by adding quick furbelows or “sequins ... grommets and studs,” Cline observes.”

Often I see rather tragicomic scenes of an elderly farmer or children in a backwater village, sporting vests painted with large English letters. That’s fashion in its crudest, and probably cruelest, form.

For while affluent Chinese may be splurging thousands or tens of thousands for a small handbag, because they are buying “prestige,” these farmers and their children no longer have any other options.

High fashion and fast fashion cannot but converge. For fashion to be really exclusive, it must be rare, and sought after. But the brand owner always feels the temptation of making more profit by selling more. Instead of making money from more exclusive collections of “high-quality” items, brand owners may learn to content themselves with small profits on large volume — cheap, cookie cutter goods at that.

High costs

High fashion’s glamour, increasing cachet and augmented international profile have actually increased consumers purchases of cheap fast fashion, because the affordable clothes at discount stores made people feel that they are getting even more of a deal.

A colleague of mine recently spent quite a fortune in Paris on a small handbag of a “still little known,” thus exclusive, brand, presumably on account of its “exquisite craftsmanship,” but probably more because of the 20 percent discount.

When every housewife is toting a LV handbag, it’s time for the brand owner to design the next label.

With consumption now elevated by many people into sole rationalization of this life, stores regularly entice consumers to return and snap up whatever is new. This is a manifestation of the phenomenon of “continual consumption” or “the Costco effect.” Buy regularly, buy “fresh” and buy lots of what you’re buying.

When you realize that “the low prices Americans now expect to pay for clothing are built around the cost of production in other countries,” you are getting closer to the environmental consequence of rampant consumption.

According to Cline’s book, the US discards a total of 12.7 million tons, or 68 pounds of textiles per person annually.

That partly explains why the plants in some Asian countries are manufacturing garments on a terrifying scale.

These Asian countries are paying for American “affluence” with polluted air and water, lost youth, overtime, forced relocation, and their own money.

To avoid being enslaved by fast fashion, or any fashion, you must acquire a common personal skill that I learned last week: sewing.

If you cannot make your clothes from scratch, learn how to make basic repairs, like stitching a hem or sewing on a button.

Just as we are learning the benefit of “slow food,” we may also learn to appreciate the benefits of making our own outfits and turning to local sources of materials.