Human Footprint

(Sleepy Brown & Andr 3000) Ain't nobody dope as me (indistinct chatter) I'm dressed so fresh, so clean So fresh and so clean, clean ("So Fresh, So Clean" by OutKast) (Shane) You could say "Dress for Success" is a motto we humans live by.

We're the only species on planet Earth that wears clothes.

They keep us cool in the heat... ...warm in the cold... ...and protect us from hostile environments.

This human obsession, transforming nature into clothing and accessories... (bird calls) ...has helped us thrive in every habitat.

(Sleepy Brown & Andr 3000) So fresh and so clean, clean (Shane) But we don't just dress for the weather.

(hip-hop music) Our desires to fit in, to stand out, and to express ourselves... ...are woven into our DNA.

-(machinery whirring) -(clipper buzzing) As humans conquered the globe, fashion created the fabric of our civilization.

But what's the cost of eight billion people looking so fly?

(energetic music) Welcome to the age of humans, where one species can change everything.

And what we do reveals who we truly are.

This is Human Footprint.

(siren blaring) (horn beeping) (record scratch) (solemn music) (hawk cries) For every species, evolutionary success depends on certain adaptations that help them survive in their native environment.

Humans decided long ago that we would survive in every environment.

(chaotic clattering) What do you think humans would be as a species without clothing?

(Ryan) Confined to 75 degrees and mild weather, right?

(laughing) ("Feel So Good" by Ma$e) (Shane) This is material scientist and adventure gear tester Ryan Jordan.

(Ma$e) What you know about goin' out (Shane) To say Ryan "enjoys" the outdoors is kinda like saying a fish "enjoys" water.

What does a field tester do?

(Ma$e) I'm a big man, give this man room (Ryan) You want to push the limits of gear.

And so, you know, a day like today with 30-mile-an-hour winds and cold temperatures and high altitude is-- it's a good gear testing day.

(Shane) Okay.

So, to push the gear, you really gotta push yourself as well?

(Ryan) You do.

Yeah, yeah.

That's a-- that's a huge part of it.

(Shane) As Ryan sees it, his job, pushing clothing to its limits in the great outdoors, is a modern-day version of something our species has done for millennia.

(Ryan) Let me ask you a question.

Where does a musk ox live?

(Shane) Uh, in very cold environments.

(Ryan) Right.

Do they live in the equator?

-No, they do not.

-Right.

So, where do humans live?

(Shane) Everywhere.

(Ryan) Because of?

-Clothing?

-Clothing.

That's exactly right.

(Shane) But if you ask Ryan, what sets us apart isn't just our ability to transform nature into clothing.

But once we do, it's our inability to stop tinkering.

(Ryan) I always wanna think that there's performance increases -to be had.

-Okay.

(Ryan) And so we're always trying to push those limits.

(whooshing) (Shane) After a rigorous field test, Ryan brings gear back to his van, where he can measure it and evaluate its performance in his mobile lab.

(Ryan) If we take a piece of clothing out into the environment and we--we sweat in it, we get it wet, whatever it is, I wanna bring it in right away and then take a look at it under the microscope, and see how that changed the clothing.

How moisture is transported.

How wicking works.

(Shane) Today, Ryan publishes his findings to inform customers and drive innovation in outdoor products.

But before he started testing gear, Ryan got a Ph.D. studying a natural fiber we've pushed to its limits.

We're at a point now, like, so much lab-made fabrics.

How do those sorts of fabrics measure up to, like, natural fibers like wool?

(Ryan) We can't replicate wool.

We have not cracked that code.

(soft music) (Shane) Wool fibers have an elastic core, a textured surface, and a waxy coating called lanolin.

(Ryan) And so what you end up with is this fiber that interacts with water and heat in a way that keeps you warm when it's cool and cool when it's warm.

This is what gives wool its technological edge in terms of comfort when you're pushing it to the limits in an outdoor environment.

(Shane) Today, wool is still one of the most used natural fibers in outdoor clothing, with properties we've refined over centuries.

(whooshing) (bright music) (announcer) Ladies and gentlemen, we're gonna move on to the Scottish National.

(Sally) Oh, this should be good.

National champions.

Very important.

(whooshing) (Shane) And there's no better place to witness our obsession with wool than the Golden Shears World Sheep Shearing Championships.

(indistinct announcements) How are you doing with the accents?

85% to 90%.

That's pretty good.

(chuckles) (intense music) (indistinct announcements) (shears snipping) (clippers buzz) (Shane) Feel like a lot of-- a lot of tension is building right now.

(indistinct announcements) My understanding has dropped to about 30% now.

(Sally laughs) (indistinct announcements) (hip-hop music) The competitors on stage are some of the best, and fastest, in the world, clocking about a sheep a minute.

(indistinct announcements) (goat bleats) (applause, cheering) (soft music) (Shane) The shearing competition is just one part of the Royal Highland Show, a centuries-old Scottish gathering of majestic horses, big-boned cattle, and a kaleidoscope of sheep breeds wearing the finest wool around.

(mellow music) My guide is fashion historian Sally Tuckett.

(Sally) 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 a past society.

("Zealots" by the Fugees) (Shane) Whether she's teaching at the University of Glasgow... (Wyclef Jean) I haunt MCs like Mephistopheles (Shane) ...or exploring Scotland's beaches with her adventure buddy Margo... (Wyclef Jean) As if my name was Kennedy (Shane) Sally spends a lot of time thinking about wool.

(audible chewing) (sheep bleats) As an American, when I think about Scotland, -Scotch, obviously.

-Obviously.

-Uh, you got castles.

-Yup.

-Uh...kilts.

-Yup.

Grass and sheep.

I think--I think you've got it.

(Shane laughs) (majestic music) You'll see sheep all over the place today, that doesn't mean they were necessarily there to begin with.

(Shane) About 10,000 years ago, people in modern-day Turkey discovered they could raise the wild Mouflon sheep for meat, milk, and fur.

Over time, those animals would become modern sheep, the second animal ever domesticated.

(mellow music) Sheep reached the British Isles about 6,000 years ago.

And through generations of selective breeding... (clippers buzzing) ...we transformed these ancient scruffy breeds into today's luxuriant fluff balls.

(majestic music) And as humans changed sheep, sheep began to reshape the landscape.

(whooshing) (hip-hop music) (Sally) 6,000 years ago, Scotland was much more of a woodland.

(Shane) As wool became a vital part of Scotland's economy, more and more forests were converted into pasture.

(Sally) When trees have been removed, and if sheep are brought in, that stops any trees regrowing.

(soft music) (Shane) By the late 1800s, most of Scotland's remaining forests were in the Highlands.

(Sally) The Highland Clearances are an emotive, possibly very misunderstood, and highly symbolic part of Scottish history.

(Shane) The Highlands were home to thousands of tenant farmers working on land belonging to upper-class landowners.

(Sally) The Highland landowners decided that sheep were probably more stable form of income.

Sheep don't need that many people to look after them, so, whole communities would be moved off the land and replaced with thousands of sheep.

(Shane) It was a period of social and environmental upheaval.

Landowners cleared the remaining old-growth forests to make way for sheep.

(Sally) And so that's fundamentally changed the landscape of the Highlands.

(Shane) Today, Scotland's pastures are home to more than six million sheep.

(whooshing) And they've become an undeniable part of Scotland's national identity.

(sheep bleating) How long have you been doing this?

(Joe) We've been doing this for 31 years, yeah.

-Okay.

-So, yeah, Mum and Dad-- -How old are you?

-I am 31.

(Shane laughs) (Shane) Okay.

(hip-hop music) When Joe Baker isn't out hunting in his tweeds... ("Party and Bulls..." by The Notorious B.I.G.)

...he's busy running Scotland's 2023 Sheep Farm of the Year.

(mellow music) And he's got some very capable assistants.

(dog panting) (Joe) Zoey, come on.

Good girl.

Zoey.

(Zoey barks) (grim music) (sheep bleating) (whooshing) (Joe whistles) Mist, here.

(Mist pants, barks) (hip-hop music) Come by, good girl, come by, that's it.

(whooshing) Good girl, good girl.

(thundering hoofbeats) (Shane) Turns out, managing the second animal ever domesticated means enlisting the first.

(Joe) Way.

So, "way" means right.

"Come by" means left.

(sheep bleating) (Shane) I've never seen nothing like it.

(whooshing) (sheep bleating) (soft music) Wool hasn't just reshaped an ecosystem, it's pushed us to create new breeds of our oldest animal ally.

It's all part of a bigger story, the story of a world reinvented to make clothing.

(Sally) The ability to see something, like who first looked at a sheep and thought, "I know what I can do with that."

So, there's an ingenuity to it.

(Shane) That human ingenuity helped us transform a wild animal into a living factory for one of the world's most extraordinary natural fibers.

(Ryan) So, in that sense, wool is a biotechnology that we've developed over hundreds of years.

(Shane) Cotton, silk, linen, and other natural fibers have similar stories.

In every case, we've harnessed nature to create renewable materials with remarkable properties.

And we use them to thrive in the world's most extreme environments.

But, you know, I also see people walking around the grocery store wearing the same stuff, and I'm just like, "I don't know if the frozen food section is that serious, like why?"

(Ryan) Don't forget about status.

I feel good when I look good.

Human nature is about community, identity, and self-expression.

(soft music) (Shane) That means fashion is more than just function.

(hip-hop music) But as we look for new ways to protect and express ourselves, what happens when everyone wants the same hot commodity and it's not something we can grow?

("Change Clothes" by Jay-Z) (Jay-Z) Woo, uh, uh Bounce is back (Orlando) Sometimes you just wanna strut, and there's nothing wrong with strutting.

I mean, a peacock's a peacock, right?

(laughing) (Shane) Orlando Palacios is a hat maker's hat maker.

You've probably seen his work perched on the heads of stars and even royalty.

And today, I'm next in line.

(Orlando) So, I'm gonna put this on your head.

(Shane) Okay.

(Orlando) All right.

(mellow music) This is a crosscut of your head.

(Shane) Whoa.

(Orlando) What we will do is make a hat jack for you so that the hat fits like a glove.

This is phenomenal.

(whooshing) When someone comes and they buy a hat, like, what are they trying to say about themselves?

(Orlando) It's the character of the person wearing it.

It's either the hat wears you or you wear the hat.

(Shane) Mm.

What makes the difference?

Confidence.

(Shane) In Orlando's shop, there's the Manhattan storefront and then there's the basement workshop.

(Orlando) So, this is the kitchen, this is where we cook.

-We get to cookin'.

-Yeah, that's right.

(Shane) How do you decide what material to use when?

(Orlando) I prefer 100% beaver felt because I love the softness of it.

It's got durability.

Like, this is 33 years old and she's been-- she's been around the world.

Beaver pelts have been turned into felt, it goes back, oh, 400 years.

(Shane) But all these centuries later, the way a beaver pelt becomes a hat hasn't changed all that much.

(Orlando) We select the crown size, we steam it, and then we block it over our crown.

(Shane) Then, the felt gets steamed, brushed, and polished again... ...until it takes on a rich, lustrous glow.

(Orlando) And we use a five-pound iron... (flame billows) ...and you heat it and you apply it to that hat.

After that, it becomes malleable, formable.

(wood sliding) (Shane) And that's when a blank canvas becomes a work of art.

What do you think drives us to, like, adorn ourselves?

(Orlando) Individuality.

(Shane) Mm.

(Orlando) Person inside who was just, is going, "Shane, let me out."

(laughing) (Shane) I hear that voice all the time!

Like, "Leave me alone, leave me alone."

(laughing) (soft music) (Orlando) You know, do you want to be every blue suit or do you wanna be Shane?

(Shane) Hm.

I'll always choose Shane, I think.

Shane with a hat.

(laughing) (Shane) One of Orlando's hats, made from sustainably sourced beaver, is a luxury item.

But not so long ago... (whooshing) ...beaver felt hats, and the giant rodents they were made from, were everywhere.

(Skip) Oh, boy, just go slow.

This is 10,000 years of beavers damming and catching all these fine sediments.

(Shane) So, if I fall, I know who to blame.

-Yeah, exactly.

-10,000 years of beavers.

(Skip) Exactly.

(Shane) The man leading me into the swamp is Skip Lisle.

(Snoop Dogg) I don't say much I don't say Alize No, I don't say Dutch (Shane) Skip spends his idle hours at war with invasive plants on his property in Vermont.

("The Bidness" by Snoop Dogg) It's all part of a mission to make room for a native species that's come to define Skip's life.

So, what is it like living alongside beavers?

(Skip) I think it represents revival, you know, spiritual revival.

All that wildlife, that means everything to me.

(Shane) But not everyone has such a charitable attitude toward beavers.

(whooshing) Where does that conflict come from?

(Skip) Humans have made the best dam sites that have ever existed, and they're called the road culvert, a little tiny round hole in a giant manmade dam.

And I call 'em beaver magnets.

(Shane) They're like, "Well, you built this half ass, like, let me just finish this for you."

(Skip) Right, right, "Why'd you leave-- why'd you leave this little hole?"

(Shane) The problem is, that little hole is the whole point of the culvert.

When beavers clog culverts, they can flood roads, fields, forests, even homes, costing people hundreds of millions of dollars every year.

(whooshing) But just a century ago, American beavers weren't a problem for anyone.

They were on the brink of extinction.

(cell phone ringing) (Ben) Hey, Shane.

How's it going?

(Shane) Hey, what's up, Ben?

How's life?

(Ben) Went fishing this morning in a beautiful beaver pond.

So, all is--all is right in my world.

("Loungin'" by Guru) (Shane) Award-winning journalist Ben Goldfarb doesn't just love fishing in beaver ponds.

His book Eager is a deep dive into the world of beavers, starting with their massive impact on the planet.

(Ben) Well, of course they build dams, right?

And--and those dams, you know, create ponds and wetlands.

And, of course, the beavers are doing that to just enhance their own habitat.

(soft music) But in the process, those pools and ponds are creating all kinds of ecological changes, you know, most of them incredibly beneficial.

(whooshing) Water storage, and carbon sequestration, and pollution filtration, and salmon habitat, and wildfire control, and all of these different ecosystem benefits they provide.

If we rewind the clock like a thousand years ago, like, how many beavers are we talking about?

(Ben) The best guess we have is there were as many as 400 million beavers on this continent.

It was just wall-to-wall beavers.

And, you know, now we're down to probably 10 or 15 million or so.

(Shane) And that's after a century of recovery.

In 1900, there were probably less than 100,000 beavers in all of North America.

(Ben) It was really all-- all about hats.

-(old-fashioned quirky music) -(projector whirring) The reason that beavers make such good hats is that they've got two layers of fur.

They've got these long outer guard hairs and then they've got, uh, sort of an under fur the trappers called the beaver wool.

(Shane) This beaver base layer is soft yet durable, malleable yet waterproof.

(Ben) You know, the perfect substance for these, you know, kind of elegant, quasi-Victorian top hats that were, you know, all--all the rage back in uh, in--in Europe.

(Shane) The hat craze hit Europe's beavers first.

(water burbling) They were exterminated in England by the 16th century.

But in the new American colonies, there were beavers aplenty... (Ben) The beaver trade in North America really starts in the early 1600s.

Trappers and traders are just wiping beavers out of every single river, lake, stream, pond they encounter.

(Shane) It sounds kind of like a gold rush but for, like, beaver fur.

(Ben) It's almost hard to overstate just how kind of historically important this fur trade was in early American history.

Practically every significant event prior to the Civil War had some kind of beaver connection.

The American Revolution, the Louisiana Purchase, the War of 1812.

(whooshing) The story of the fur trade is really the-- kind of the story of, uh, early American history in all of its grandeur and tragedy and--and folly.

(whooshing) By 1850 or so, you would have been really hard-pressed to find a single beaver in the lower 48.

(Shane) And the loss of beavers on such a grand scale reshaped the continent.

(Ben) There are just incredible accounts from explorers, you know, crossing what is today Indiana and not finding a dry place to camp for a hundred miles.

(water flowing) No, that was the work of the beaver, turning this continent into this, you know, green, blue, wet wonderland and, you know, when we wiped them out, we lost so much of that.

(projector whirring) (Shane) And in the process, we forgot how to live with beavers.

(somber music) All of our modern infrastructure, our roads, bridges, homes, and, yeah, culverts, were built for a beaver-less world.

(tree crashes) That's where today's conflict arises.

(Skip) You could kill the beavers here, and the first beaver that comes along is just gonna clog the culvert again, and that's gonna keep going, it's horribly inefficient.

(Shane) And yet every year, tens of thousands of beavers are killed for exactly this reason.

Skip didn't want to kill beavers.

So, back in the '90s, working with the Penobscot Nation in Maine, he tried something different.

-(mellow music) -(water lapping) (Skip) Beavers are working at the water line, sort of responding to what you might call spillover stimuli, the sound, the feel, and the look of leaks.

(Shane) Skip's brainchild, the Beaver Deceiver... (whooshing) ...creates a permanent leak in the dam but moves the source of the leak upstream, where beavers don't know to look for leaks.

The result is a frustrated but alive beaver and a pond that can't get any deeper.

What is the scale with which you've been deploying these devices?

(Skip) I'm sure I've done over a thousand all around the world.

(Shane) Skip's work isn't just about saving beavers, it's about bringing back the lush, green wonderland that comes with them.

Is the ultimate goal with--with these to have 10,000, one at each conflict point?

(Skip) It depends on whether society wants to create just a vast amount of hydrological, ecological, and aesthetic wealth while also saving vast amounts of taxpayer dollars.

Yeah.

(Skip) It seems like an easy-- -it seems like an easy answer.

-It depends on if they want to make a good decision or a bad decision.

(Skip) No, it's true.

It's an unprecedented opportunity.

-Yeah.

-I can't think of another opportunity like that in society.

(drill whirring) (Shane) It's hard for me to imagine North America without beavers, but we nearly got there, all because we wanted hats.

(Ben) They kind of reveal the--the duality of humans in some ways, you know, both our incredible capacity for destruction and the rapacity of capitalism, right?

And--and they also reveal our ability to correct some of those historic mistakes and kind of chart a new path forward.

(Shane) Beaver hats were only in style for a few centuries, but the fur trade changed North America forever, just like our love affair with wool remade Scotland and its most iconic animal.

When we choose what to wear, whether we know it or not, we're choosing the world we want to live in.

(Virginia) Every kind of aspect of human life that you can think about, textiles have had an influence.

(hip-hop music) (Shane) Meet Virginia Postrel.

When she isn't looking for Pokmon around her Southern California home, Virginia writes about politics, culture, and, in her latest book, how textiles built the modern world.

(Virginia) Textiles are everywhere, lots of different kinds of things are made out of textiles.

But clothing is the central thing.

(Shane) Today, clothing is so accessible that it's hard to imagine just how much time people used to spend making textiles.

(Virginia) The thing that is the most time consuming is not the weaving, believe it or not, it's the spinning.

It takes a lot of thread to make anything useful.

So, before the Industrial Revolution, the fastest and best spinners in the world would have taken about a hundred hours to spin the thread to make one pair of jeans.

That is six miles of cotton thread.

(projector whirring) (Shane) Hundreds more hours went into growing plants, ginning seeds, weaving, and dyeing.

Because clothing was so costly and laborious to make, fashion was mostly a pursuit of the elite.

But humans are innovators.

So, spinning thread wasn't going to be a bottleneck in the system forever.

(Virginia) We take textiles for granted because starting in the 18th century with the invention of spinning machines and the Industrial Revolution, they became more and more and more abundant.

(Shane) And the dawn of inexpensive fabrics brought fashion to the masses.

(Virginia) I think it arises from this desire to stand out as an individual and to fit into a group all at the same time.

And fashion lets you do that.

(mysterious music) (Shane) Now, I don't consider myself a fashion expert... ...but I knew where to find one.

("New York (Ya Out There?)"

by Rakim) (man) If you was born in New York City, let me hear you say, "You know that!"

(group) You know that!

(Rakim) New York - New York - No doubt (Frederick) Guys, can you grab me one of the bags, please?

The big -the African bags.

When you walk in a room, whatever you wear is making a statement.

And so people who naturally wanna elevate and--and move themselves up, everything is chosen to curate the life that they've dreamed of.

All right, let's-- let's see you walk for me.

She has the most amazing walk.

I use her for all of my photoshoots.

Just crazy chic.

You just wanna be that girl, that's the whole thing: "I want to be her!"

Even though I would not look good in that dress.

(Shane) I want to be that girl, too!

-You want to be her, right?

-Yeah!

(hip-hop music) Frederick Anderson loves pumping iron.

And it serves him well because he's kind of a fashion heavyweight.

(Frederick) This feather thing, I hate this thing.

I saw the pictures last night.

Hi, gorgeous!

How are you?

There's the innate, like, understanding that it's cold outside, -I need to, like, have a coat.

-Yeah.

(Frederick) And then there's the other side of us that, like, "Well, when I put on that coat, how do I feel?"

The best clothing is something that excites you, solves the problem, and elevates you, and makes you feel fly.

(Shane) For Frederick, what you wear tells the world who you are.

What does my sense of fashion tell you about who I am?

I'm real scared about the answer now.

-But wait, wait a minute.

-Well, no, I mean, I--I know you're an intellectual.

You put on a blazer, you're cleaned up enough -to say that I get it.

-Mm-hm.

But yet you threw it off with a shirt with a print and stuff, like, to say, "But I'm so cool.

I know I have to put on a blazer.

But yet--but yet I'm gonna be authentic.

I'm gonna be my on (bleep)."

So, oops.

Excuse!

And... (laughing) Guilty as charged.

You nailed it.

(laughing) (mellow music) If you want to make a name for yourself in this industry, New York Fashion Week is the place to be.

(energetic music) (Frederick) So, fade the drums out as you go into the eight count.

(Shane) What role does this week play for the industry?

(Frederick) It's really important.

Everyone forgets it's work.

You know, the press are gonna write about you.

That's the number one reason you're there.

People who are random can't get in.

I mean, clients, press, influencers, celebrities, and then lots of photographers.

That's it.

(Shane) Those folks and, this year, one very out-of-place biologist.

So, the big question for me... (Frederick) Yes.

(Shane) What the hell do I wear?

Oh, I got a surprise for you.

We're gonna solve that.

(whooshing) -This is the man.

-Okay.

(Frederick) He's like the king of tailoring in New York.

Carlos Campos.

Let's try a few things on, yeah?

-All right, let's do it.

-All right, let's go.

-Come on, let's go.

-All right.

(hip-hop music) (Frederick) This is gorgeous.

(Carlos) Some model poses.

You're gonna do this.

(laughing) Yes.

There you go.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Yeah.

(Frederick) Oh, yeah.

Oh yeah, Fashion Week is coming.

-("Bowtie" by OutKast) -(camera shutters clicking) (Shane) Showing up to a runway show at Fashion Week is like stepping into another universe.

(Sleepy Brown & Jazze Pha) Crocodile on my feet Fox fur on my back Bowtie 'round my neck That's why they call me the gangsta mack In the Cadillac (Shane) It's fast, it's loud, it's in your face.

(Big Boi) As we step in the place The nursery's crunk, we've come to play (Sleepy Brown) Everybody's watching (Shane) The new collection is on the runway, but everything and everyone is part of the spectacle.

(Sleepy Brown) The V.I.P.

where we proceed to give you what you need Throw your hands up if you feel me Throw your hands up if you feel me - 'Cause we well designed - Bowtie - Like the finest wines - Bowtie - Feel good to be fly - Bowtie - So don't you ask me why - Bowtie (Frederick) It's almost like a trading card, like, you know, you put on Louis Vuitton because of, you know, Pharrell's there and you wanna be in that tribe.

-Mm-hm.

-Do you know, you're in that tribe by putting that on.

That's tribalism.

It's a basic human function.

(mysterious music) (Shane) But these days, a new look can spread around the world at the speed of Instagram.

And suddenly, everyone wants to be part of the tribe.

(Frederick) What has happened is people have now used the world of fashion as a way to sell more stuff.

And the idea of fast fashion is the idea of how quickly can we get it in your hand and how quickly can you throw it away so you can buy something else?

So, they take what is the top and then they sell it down, down, down, down, down, down, down to $5... All of a sudden, it becomes cheap.

It's, like, not just the price that becomes cheap, but your investment in whatever the idea was is cheapened.

(Frederick) It doesn't bring you value anymore.

And that's what cheap is, it isn't how much you pay.

Cheap isn't $5 'cause that's expensive.

-Mm-hm.

-To get to $5 is expensive for the world.

(whooshing) (Shane) A famous economist once said, "There's no such thing as a free lunch."

And I'm starting to realize there's probably no such thing as a $5 shirt, either.

Somebody, somewhere, is paying full price.

(dramatic music) (traffic whirring) (Clare) So, welcome to the Ecology of Fashion.

(whooshing) I absolutely love the clothes pile.

(Shane) In case it's not obvious, that's a heap of unwanted garments on display in a museum.

(Clare) We wanted something that would be surprising when people walked in.

(Shane) Yeah, it's definitely that, for sure.

(Clare) It really gets right to the point of, you know, we have a problem.

(SZNS) I look good 24/7 I'm hot 24/7 (Shane) This is fashion historian Clare Sauro.

("24/7" by SZNS) And as much as she wishes this was her closet, it's actually the historic costume collection she curates at Drexel University.

(SZNS) I'm hot 24/7 Dudes be like, "Ooh, she's stunning" (Shane) In 2024, she co-created a new exhibit, the Ecology of Fashion.

(SZNS) I'm hot 24/7 (Shane) Old folks say, it's like, "Oh, it's, you know, it's not made like it used to be," but I think when it comes to clothing, it actually seems like it's not made like it used to be.

Absolutely.

A lot of mass-produced fashion today is only made to be worn about seven times before it starts pretty much falling apart.

(Shane) Oh, wow.

According to Clare, knowing the difference between clothing and fashion can help us understand the dilemma we face today.

Where do you draw the line, then, between function, the sort of clothing part of it, and fashion?

I mean, we don't really need all that much.

Really, you can just wear the same clothes over and over again and just replace them when they wear out.

Pretty much as soon as there's available resources, we start doing things that really make no sense.

This is fashion with a capital F. (mellow music) It's not logical, but that's fashion.

(Shane) Fashion with a capital F might not help us survive the elements, but we're a social species.

The ideas we express and identities we signal through fashion can mean everything.

(Clare) In the 19th century, you have more and more people participating in fashion, and, therefore, well, if my housemaid is wearing that, I'm not gonna wear it anymore, so it's gonna speed up.

Almost kind of like an arms race.

-It is.

-Okay.

(explosions) (Shane) After World War II, with a very real arms race underway, synthetic textiles opened the door for America's growing middle class to buy once inaccessible fashions.

(bright, old-fashioned music) (Clare) Big crinoline skirts, colorful lingerie, and all of these things that would have been out of reach for most people.

Things are brightly colored.

You can buy multiples.

It's not so serious, it's fun.

That mindset is a very big shift.

(Shane) With more people participating in high fashion, trends accelerated.

Designers created distinct seasonal collections for their upper-class customers, only to be copied by big, mainstream retailers.

And that was just the start.

(Clare) The internet has really changed everything.

(whooshing) (dial-up internet squealing) (man) You've got mail.

(energetic music) (Shane) Before the internet, major department stores would send sketch artists to fashion shows.

But it would be months before those sketches became mass-produced clothing.

(Clare) Now, people snap pictures with their phones as the models are walking down the runway, and somebody's copying it, like, immediately.

The turnaround on the copying, it's unparalleled.

We've never had anything like that before.

And social media has exacerbated this.

(fast typing) Once a month turns into every two weeks, which turns into once a week.

(zipper zips) The consumer is trained to come back and to buy on novelty.

(Shane) And the pace of trends has changed our relationship with what we wear.

(mysterious music) (Clare) I think the average person doesn't appreciate what they have.

Because we buy impulsively, we sometimes do have a closet full of clothes and nothing to wear.

(Shane) That's interesting, a closet full of clothes and nothing to wear.

(laughing) (machinery whirring) New global supply chains emerged to meet our insatiable demand for trendy, inexpensive apparel.

(Clare) How can it be that inexpensive?

Corners have to be cut somewhere.

(sewing machines whirring) And it's in the quality of the materials, it's the quality of the workmanship, and the bottom line is the workers.

(bell rings) (Shane) The textile industry relies on 75 million workers worldwide, most of them working grueling hours to earn less than a living wage.

(grim music) All to keep our wardrobes full of cheap clothes we hardly use.

(Clare) History has shown that we do things without thinking about the future.

Fashion, in particular, is very much a in-the-moment discipline.

(Shane) And when a new look catches our eye, it doesn't matter whether it's a $5,000 dress or a $5 shirt.

The last thing most of us think about is where it'll go when we're done with it.

(cell phone ringing) (John) Well, I've done a lot of these environmental stories, but I've never seen anything like what I saw the first time I came to Iquique.

(energetic music) Visually, it was incredible.

The first thing you start to wonder is, like, why?

Why is that happening?

(Shane) Meet journalist John Bartlett.

(whooshing) When he's not playing cricket for Chile's national team, he's investigating the complicated story of fashion waste.

His recent story in National Geographic captured the world's attention.

(John) When you walk through the market, you'd be amazed at the kind of things you find.

("This is Not America" by Residente) (Shane) This is La Quebradilla, one of the largest open-air markets in South America.

But most of the clothes here come from the United States.

(Residente) Desde hace rato, cuando uste' llegaron (John) I mean, this is from, like, a farmer's coalition in the U.S. We've got, like, college volleyball down there.

This from Amazon.

There's so many things commemorating sports tournaments that I don't think even the fans of the team think about it anymore.

(Residente) No entiendes el dato pues te lo tiro en cumbia Bossa nova, tango o vallenato (Shane) John investigated every stage of this second-hand economy, starting at the port.

(ship horn blasts) (John) The free port's a really, really interesting place.

The reason it exists, really, is because Chile's a strange-- strange-shaped country.

(soft music) (Shane) Iquique lies on the Pacific coast, nearly a thousand miles north of Chile's capital, Santiago.

(John) And one of the ways they managed to make sure that the north of the country stayed Chilean was to create jobs up here.

(whooshing) And one of the ways of creating those jobs was to declare Iquique a free port; to create this sort of tax-free area where you could import goods without import duties.

(whooshing) (Shane) With no import tax, it became cheaper for U.S. businesses to ship their unwanted clothing here than it was to dispose of it at home.

(John) We were down at the port this morning and there was a huge container ship.

A lot of it will be clothing.

They come in these huge bundles, plastic wrapped and then bound with plastic bindings.

(mellow music) (Shane) Thousands of these bales are unloaded to importers' warehouses.

(John) Teams of workers in the warehouses separate them out into-- usually into three categories.

The first, which is basically new.

Often they come in with tags still attached.

And they're either sold in these sort of premium warehouses or they are, incredibly, baled up again and shipped back to the U.S. for resale.

(Shane) Back to where they came from?

Yeah, yeah, for resale.

I mean, environmentally, it's catastrophic.

It's insane.

(Shane) Second- and third-tier clothing is re-baled and either shipped elsewhere in South America or trucked over the dunes to La Quebradilla Market.

(John) You see these clothes which are...

I mean, they've obviously been pre-used, but they're still in largely perfect condition.

And then the third class, they don't even really sort them out.

They're just these huge piles of clothes laid out on tarpaulins.

(soft music) (Shane) Some of these garments go on to live second lives here, supplanting traditional Chilean fashion.

But millions of tons are never sold.

(John) Eventually, the easiest thing to do is to just give it to somebody with a truck, and that's when it ends up getting dumped or burnt out in the desert.

(eerie music) These things do not decompose.

They just sit there forever in the desert.

You're not just seeing a current problem, you're seeing a future problem as well.

(crow cawing) (Shane) Is this dumping something that's--that's regulated?

It's very unregulated.

People know they're not supposed to be doing this, uh, which is why people have been burning the clothes.

(fire crackling) Get rid of the evidence, sort of out of sight, out of mind, which I think probably brings us nicely to, uh, you know, exactly what we think of when we're giving things to charity shops or to thrift stores.

Oh, really?

So, the things that, like, I give to thrift stores, like, those are clothes that could potentially end up where you are right now.

(John) Yeah, they just receive too many donations to deal with.

Less than 20% of what we actually donate to thrift stores or charity shops is actually resold.

Every country kind of has its sort of receptacle country, where a lot of this clothing ends up.

(somber music) It's the poorer and developing countries are the ones who kind of foot the bill for this problem.

People say that 100 billion garments are manufactured every year.

In the U.S., the amount of textile waste produced annually went from 1.7 million tons in 1960 to 17 million tons in 2018.

This has happened so quickly.

It's only accelerating.

(Shane) By 2030, some estimate that the global fashion industry will create 148 million tons of textile waste each year.

(John) I just think that, ultimately, the problem is--is attitudes.

You know, the amount of clothing we buy, it's the amount of textile waste that we're creating.

Clothing is a sort of unavoidable fact of life.

We all need to fit into society in some way.

The fact that it's such a basic need makes it inherently manipulable, right?

(typing) (Shane) And corporations have taken full advantage.

(John) You can make people dress basically in any way you want with all of the tools that marketing people have nowadays.

They find it very easy to manipulate and kind of make people have this sort of, you know, fear of missing out or fear of not fitting in.

That is the root cause of all of these sort of temporarily fashionable items ending up in places like the Atacama Desert.

(mellow music) (Shane) How can we reconcile our desire to express ourselves through what we wear with the costs we can see all around us?

I don't think it's wrong to care how you look.

I wouldn't call myself a fashionista, but, if I'm being honest, I do love shoes.

I like looking at them, I like having them, I like wearing 'em.

Stepping out in a dope pair of kicks makes me feel good.

And I'd hate to give that up.

Thinking about shoes brought me here to San Diego, where a team of scientists and entrepreneurs has a vision for the future of fashion.

(Michael) We need designers to be wholeheartedly adopting sustainable and biodegradable materials and--and putting them into their designs.

("Nuthin' But a 'G' Thang" by Dr. Dre & Snoop Dogg ) (Shane) This is Michael Burkart.

(Snoop Dogg) One, two, three, and to the four (Shane) When he's not breathing new life into old espresso machines, he's running a biochemistry lab at UC San Diego.

Michael's research is all about finding sustainable alternatives to plastics, which I learned have a surprising origin.

(Michael) They're all made from petroleum products, and we're kind of still living with the reality that had been baked in from the petrochemical industry decades ago.

(projector whirring) (Shane) The plastic boom began in the mid-20th century... (hip-hop music) ...and production has grown ever since, reaching over 400 million tons a year in 2023.

(Michael) It's in everything we buy.

It's wrapping every single thing that we're purchasing.

And, you know, that transformation, nobody predicted that that would happen.

(whooshing) (Shane) Synthetic fibers made their fashion debut in DuPont's nylon stockings in the late '30s.

But it was polyester, which exploded in the 1960s and beyond, that became a fashion staple.

Today, polyester and other synthetic fibers account for almost two thirds of global textile production.

(Michael) The problem is these things, they do not biodegrade, they do not break down.

They do fragment into smaller and smaller pieces, but they fundamentally don't go away.

(grim music) (Shane) These often-invisible fragments are called microplastics.

They're like a more insidious counterpart to the conspicuous piles of unwanted clothing in places like Chile.

Wearing and washing synthetic clothing adds 200,000 to 500,000 tons of microplastics to our oceans every year.

(Michael) Not only do we know that these things are found all over the planet, but they're found in all organisms, right?

And they've found microplastics in every organ of our body.

And that's kind of scary.

(whooshing) (Shane) So, Michael and his team want to replace synthetic plastics, in fashion and elsewhere, with more sustainable alternatives.

(Michael) Two things I think are critical.

Number one is we need to move away from petroleum.

And number two, we can replace 99% of plastics we use with biodegradable alternatives.

(Shane) Traditionally, plastics are made by breaking up large hydrocarbon molecules, like those found in crude oil, into simple units called monomers, then assembling chains of monomers into polymers.

The molecular bonds holding these polymers together are unlike any found in nature, which is what makes them so hard to break down.

But Michael thinks there's another way.

(liquid glugging) (Michael) What's amazing about green algae is they are the most sustainable photosynthetic organism on the planet.

(Shane) Algae grow fast, and they produce lots of useful molecules like oils and proteins.

So Michael and his team are using algae to produce the building blocks for more sustainable plastics.

(Michael) And once we've done that and we've shown that it works, we can now pitch it over the fence to Algenesis where the company can take it and now start prototyping it.

(whooshing) (Shane) And that brings us back... -(shelf clatters) -(paper rustles) ...to shoes.

-(whooshing) -Here we go!

(Blackalicious) Ca(OH)2 wine water Solution of calcium hydroxide, slobbin' it CaO lime will make bleach powder Galvanic metal beats stomp out louder ("Chemical Calisthenics" by Blackalicious) (Stephen) There are 25 billion, with a B, pairs of shoes made every year on this planet.

(Shane) Wow.

Three pairs of shoes for every man, woman, and child.

(whooshing) (waves crashing) (Nipsey Hussle) Ocean views, small circle, it's a chosen few (Shane) As a surfer, Stephen Mayfield's passion for protecting the ocean is more than academic.

("Ocean Views" by Nipsey Hussle) He's the CEO of Algenesis, a company bringing algae-based polymers out of the lab and into production.

(Stephen) We make biodegradable polymers.

And the way we got here was, we were funded by the Department of Energy to work on biofuels.

(Shane) The biofuel work was going great, but when the price of oil fell, so did the demand for green alternatives.

Stephen realized that there was an easier path for algae to make a difference.

(Stephen) We complain about fuel.

Let's say it's four bucks a gallon.

That's like 60 cents a pound.

It's super cheap.

Like, potatoes are way more than that.

Anything's more than that.

So, rather than take this algae oil and turn it into fuel, let's take that algae oil and turn it into polymers.

-Okay.

-And since we're gonna do that, since we're gonna re-invent things, the second time around, let's make 'em biodegradable.

(soft music) (Shane) This lab is where they prototype new plastics and send the samples to manufacturing partners for testing.

(Stephen) They'll measure all the parameters and then they'll call us up or email us back and go, "Hey, latest TPU looks great."

Maybe it's not hard enough.

Maybe it stretches too much.

Whatever, then we can modify it again.

(Shane) One of the products they've focused on the most... shoes.

Remember the 25 billion pairs of shoes we make each year?

(Stephen) Most of those end up in somebody's closet or probably not worn very much.

And then after several years, they get thrown away and end up in landfills.

And so the reason we picked shoes was simply volume, how many of 'em are made.

(Shane) Shoes are one of those things that some folks, you know, not to name any names, will pay a premium for, making them a great proving ground for new technology.

(Stephen) Oh, right there, men's 13.

You are in luck.

-All right.

-Oh-ho-ho.

(Stephen) Top is 50% hemp, 50% Tencel, so, eucalyptus fiber.

Our material is here and here, it's called the outsole, this is called the cup sole.

Cinderella, see if you can fit that on.

(Shane) All right.

I like a comfy pair of shoes.

But it's even more comforting knowing they'll return to the Earth when I'm done with them.

But not until I'm ready to say goodbye.

(Stephen) "Oh, if you have biodegradable shoes, you know, they're gonna biodegrade on my feet!"

So, biodegradation and durability are two completely separate physical processes.

Durability has to do with the physical properties of the polymer.

We picked polyurethanes because they're incredibly durable.

(soft music) (Shane) These days, a lot of shoes claim to be sustainable, even biodegradable.

And Stephen and his team have tested some of those claims.

(Stephen) One of the media companies sent us all of these shoes.

Some of them kind of tell the truth and some of them are just unbelievable what liars they are, right?

(Shane) Okay.

(Stephen) This shoe has been in our respirometer for ten months.

You could wash this thing off and wear it.

So, this is one that is all advertising.

(Shane) According to Stephen, we already have a lot of technologies that can make fashion more sustainable.

But that transition has a human element, too.

(Stephen) You know, when Ford started pumping out cars, there were a bunch of people that were like, "I got a horse."

But over 20 years and it was like, "Nah, I don't have a horse anymore.

That'd be silly."

-Yeah.

-Right?

So, eventually, that's what'll happen with our polymer.

But it's gonna take 20 years.

We know that.

(mellow music) (Shane) Humanity's a big ship, and we often turn slowly.

But fashion shows us just how fast a trend can sweep across the world.

A global phenomenon can begin with an idea on a runway.

And that power could become a force for good.

(Stephen) That doesn't change fashion as an expression.

We just do it a little more in harmony with nature and with the understanding there are eight billion of us on this planet and we've all got to give a little if we're all gonna stay here together.

("How Much a Dollar Cost" by Kendrick Lamar) (camera shutter clicking) (Shane) Fashion is more than superficial.

It helped us spread around the globe.

It's a way to tell the world who we are and, maybe, what we value.

So, what do we want to say?

(Kendrick Lamar) How much a dollar really cost?

The question is detrimental, paralyzin' my thoughts Parasites in my stomach keep me with a gut feeling, y'all (Shane) Are we simply consumers, driven to copy the trend du jour, and consequences be damned?

Or could we be part of a bigger, more collaborative human project, sharing in a finite and fragile world?

When what we wear expresses what we truly value, I think we can be who we want to be and give future humans a chance to show us who they are on a healthy planet, too.

(creature coos) (mellow hip-hop music) (woman) This program is available with PBS Passport and on Amazon Prime Video.