Reddit mentions of Overdressed: The Shockingly High Cost of Cheap Fashion

These are my absolute favorite books about fashion history/the industry:

• The End of Fashion: The Mass Marketing of the Clothing Business Forever by Teri Agins. Honestly the best book for understanding changes in the contemporary fashion space, from "why is fast fashion so shitty?" to "why is it hard to avoid sweatshops?" to "why do trends change so quickly?" to "why don't they make clothes like they used to?"…essentially, 50% of all the big existential-angst questions I see on FFA about The Mysterious Foibles of the Fashion Industry are addressed by this book. It takes on so many angles—how the industry has changed in terms of manufacturing process, marketing process, the press process…from here, I'd also recommend Deluxe: How Luxury Lost Its Luster and Overdressed: The Shockingly High Cost of Cheap Fashion, but the Teri Agins book is, imo, the most comprehensive for an industry overview.
  
• Fashion: 150 Years of Couturiers, Designers, Labels by Charlotte Seeling. Excellent overview of the most influential and frequently mentioned designers, brands, personalities in fashion; also tremendously useful for a decade-by-decade overview of major fashion influences and themes. It's also a great jumping-off point into other areas of interest! For example, if you fall in love with Dior, The Met has a list of downloadable books about fashion, and you can read a whole book discussing every single couture collection by Christian Dior and how that shaped the house. When I first started posting on FFA, this was the first book I read, and it gave me a deep reverence and appreciation for small details of construction (where a button is placed, how a seam is shaped) and how that produces so much character in a brand. It's been very lovely since then to watch various designers (e.g. Raf Simons) operate at Dior, and see how they reinterpret the earliest Christian Dior designs into something new. And The Met has quite a few other books!
  
• Fashion Theory: A Reader, edited by Malcolm Bernard. A dense but wonderful read if you're interested in more theoretical/academic discussions of fashion x imperialism (there's a wonderful piece about Western imperialism as manifested by the men's suit, and how it's overtaken many traditional men's outfits in other countries), fashion x gender (normative gender expression, non-normative gender expression). Really, really wonderful if you are interested in how fashion can shed light on greater trends about globalization, gender, race, class…

Overdressed:The shockingly high cost of fast fashion, is good, not the best written, but has a lot of good information.

https://www.amazon.com/dp/B005GSZJ3Y/ref=dp-kindle-redirect?_encoding=UTF8&btkr=1

H&M stores partner with a firm called I:CO that actually seems to do a good job sorting clothes for resale and recycling. Thrift stores only want clothes that are in sufficiently good condition that you'd also feel comfortable giving them to a friend. What happens to the rest of the clothes they get, though, is hard to say and depends on the store--lots gets sent to the landfill, some might make it to textile recycling, some might get bailed and shipped to Africa.

For other human service organizations, they often have very specific clothing needs. Martha's Table, for example, only wants infant & child clothing; maternity clothing; and business/ business casual clothing, and it needs to be clean, neatly folded, and in sturdy bags or boxes. They do not want anything with tears, stains, holes, broken zippers, or missing buttons.

More on clothing donations from Vice and from Slate, which is an excerpt from Elizabeth Cline's book.