Adrianne: This is Underunderstood.
Billy: Hey friends.
John: Hello.
Regina: Hi.
Adrianne: Hey Billy.
Billy: So I just want to start before I say anything else I’m going to say, I just want to start off by saying that I am a big Billie Eilish fan.
Regina: Same.
Billy: I love Billie Eilish. I love her music. I think she’s great.
Regina: Me too.
Billy: So-
John: Can I admit something? I don’t think I could name a single Billie Eilish song.
Billy: [laughs]
Regina: Go listen to Billie Eilish, John.
Billy: You’re not helping my point, John. My point was I wanted to say officially to Billie Eilish fans, my fellow avocados, please don’t come from me, I’m on your side.
John: You can come from me instead, I have no alle- allegiance.
Billy: [laughs] Okay, so Billie Eilish fans, John hates you and hates Billy. Also, he hates BTS, I’m just throwing that out there. That’s unrelated, but he hates the band BTs.
Adrianne: Don’t say that, John will get death threats.
Billy: Anyway, what I’m leading up to is our friend Rhondo shared a link with us. Something about Billie Eilish.
You’re a fan of Billie Eilish?
Rhondo: I would, I would say I’m a pretty big fan of Billie Eilish. I love the last album. Her and Phineas cranked out a modern masterpiece as far as I’m concerned.
Billy: This is an article from Refinery29. This article is titled at H&M Now Sells Billie Eilish Merch—and It’s Sustainable. And so this is basically just like-
John: This is what she looks like?
Billy: John-
Adrianne: John-
Billy: What planet have you been on, my friend?
John: Sorry.
Billy: Ah, okay. Well unlike you John, Rhondo could not escape Billie Eilish.
Rhondo: It was actually, I have the Google app on my phone, like the Google search app. I don’t know if you know that is, it’s weird. I don’t even know I have it. But when you open it, it just gives you Google news, just like stories that are relevant to things you’ve searched in the past. And so I guess I’ve searched a lot of Billie Eilish stuff, so it gave me a story saying Billie Eilish and H&M come out with a new sustainable merch line. And I was immediately like, “what?”
Billy: This is the article about this new clothing line that she’s doing in collaboration with H&M. Uh, there’s lots of photos of it, but sort of the big point here is that it’s sustainable, in the article they say, “Eilish’s signature oversize outfits and love for the color green landed her on top of Google’s most Googled style list. So it’s safe to say you can expect a similar vibe for the singer’s H&M merch, all of which is made from sustainable materials.” And then they go on to talk about how she loves to promote sustainability. She asked, she has asked her fans to use refillable water bottles at her shows when she talks about climate change a lot. Um, all of which I think is very genuine.
John: Hey Billy, just so we’re on the same page here, what do you mean when you say sustainable fashion?
Billy: Sustainable fashion. Sustainable fashion, a lot of people assume just means environmentally friendly production of clothing, but if you talk to people who actually advocate for sustainable fashion, it really means more than that. So I think the easiest way to think about it is like this, if we assume that we want to make global progress on issues regarding the climate on humanitarian issues, like workers’ rights and social justice and ethical treatment of animals and even things like consumer safety and health, then sustainable fashion is fashion that actively contributes to that progress in a net positive way.
John: Okay. Got it.
Billy: But Rhondo sent this link to us and he was like, “I can’t figure out what is actually sustainable about this.”
John: Mmm.
Rhondo: So I copied the link, pasted it in our group chat and I said, “what the heck is sustainable about this?” Because, I mean, if you know, if you like do any research or know anything about fast fashion like H&M is one of the top uh, sort of villains of fast fashion like H&M and Zara I think is another really big one. I, I was very skeptical about H&M doing like a 180 and becoming sustainable in this short of amount of time. And then luckily you were there and you started sleuthing immediately.

[music]

Billy: So I started to look into and a little bit. They didn’t really explain it in the article, so I was like, okay, this article has to come from a press release, right? That’s normally how these things work. So I tried to find the official press release and I did, and it’s mostly just talking about the clothing, but there’s a line in it where it says, “the overall vibe is laid back and accessible, yet edgy and all of the clothing has been made from materials sourced in a more sustainable way.”
John: Then what?
Billy: Exactly. And it doesn’t say, it doesn’t clarify. So this is their line they’re using, “this merch has made in a quote, more sustainable way, which-
Adrianne: Sounds like greenwashing.
Billy: Yeah, exactly. Is that a term, greenwashing?
Adrianne: Yeah, definitely.
Billy: Hmm. Could you explain what that is?
Adrianne: Greenwashing is where someone, usually a brand tries to make something out to be eco-friendly or sustainable when it’s really not. Like when politicians talk about clean coal.
Billy: Yeah. Well I think that might be what’s happening here. So-
Regina: Yeah, like if you look on their site, there’s like if you do, if you look at all the Billie Eilish merch, there’s like two items that actually are tagged as conscious, which is like H&M’s, whatever we’re trying thing. It’s like what Billy was just saying. Like they’re, they’re vague about their language, but even with the vagueness in the language, only two items are actually tagged as conscious.
Billy: Yeah, exactly. That’s very weird, uh, but it’s kind of disheartening if that, it seems like most of the people who covered this launch of this merch, this collaboration between H&M and Billie Eilish just all went along with this line. So here are some examples. Teen Vogue: “Billie Eilish has some hot new merch with H&M and it’s all sustainable.” Mtv.com: “Dressing like Billie Eilish just got a whole lot easier. Run, don’t walk to your nearest H&M for her new sustainably sourced merch.”
John: Huh.
Regina: Also, Billie Eilish doesn’t wear clothes that say Billie Eilish on them.
Billy: [laughs] Right.
Regina: You’re not dressing like her.
Billy: Mic.com: “Billie Eilish just dropped a sustainable merch line with H&M.” Wwd.com: “Billie Eilish drops sustainable merch collection with H&M.” Uh, and then the subhead on this one is my favorite on an NME. They say, “we stand a sustainable queen.”
John: My jeez.
Billy: So none of these articles have any details. They don’t explain what makes it sustainable. So that’s all very strange. But what’s more strange to me at least, is that Billie Eilish herself seems to have done no PR for this.
John: Hmm.
Billy: As far as I can tell, she hasn’t posted about it on her Twitter account, she has a posted on her Instagram about it, she hasn’t posted anywhere about it. Anything that there’s a record of, she doesn’t even mention this. And you would think something like this, you know, a collaboration between a big clothing company and, uh, one of the biggest music artists right now. You know, that that would include some heavy promotion on the artist’s part. But in this case there is none.
Adrianne: Billy, when, how recently did you Google this?
Regina: Yeah, I think it got pulled. On H&M’s press page, there’s no, you can’t find anything about this.
Billy: Oh really? If you search it too.
Regina: Yeah.
Billy: That’s interesting.
Regina: Yeah.
John: I’m 404-ing on this one.
Regina: Yeah. Even if you go to their press page, like the newsroom, uh, none of their, it has all of their other press releases, but I don’t see anything about this. Um, and I’ve tried a bunch of different filters and like whatever. And I, it’s just not here.
Billy: There we can find copies of it, which is what I read earlier.
Regina: And they’re selling the merch.
Billy: And they’re still selling the merch. But yeah, the, they took the press release down, which is, yeah, it’s strange. The press release, which all of these other articles based their quote unquote reporting on, this whole thing is strange to begin with. And that’s strange that she doesn’t, doesn’t mention it.
Adrianne: Okay. So my theory is I think she got into this deal with H&M, they didn’t talk about sustainability. She has her own line and it looks Hot Topic carries her stuff as well. And I think H&M comes out with the merch line. They throw sustainability in there, Billie was like, “I’m not getting behind this.” And just ignored it and didn’t promote it at all and maybe some of her people complained and H&M took down the press release and just ended up redirecting it to the line itself.
Billy: Yeah, I think that’s very likely as well. But no one really covered the story with that level of nuance or really any level of nuance. And Rhondo kept monitoring the internet waiting for a second wave of news, the second news cycle, but it never came.
Rhondo: Because Billie’s so popular, I thought they’d be people like probing the authenticity of this claim of sustainability, but absolutely no one did. They just kind of regurgitated the press release and said, “Billie Eilish sustainable clothing line.”
Billy: So you basically just want to know like what, what’s actually going on here?
Rhondo: I guess I want to know is it actually sustainable? Are there any parts of it that are sustainable?
Billy: Yeah. Okay. I’ll find out.

[music]

John: Coming up. Billy looks into Billie.

[music]

Billy: Hi everybody.
Adrianne: Hey Billy.
John: Do you have answers for us?
Billy: Yes, I’m back. I have sort of some answers, I have lots of details.
Adrianne: Did you get Billie Eilish?
Billy: I did not get Billie Eilish.
Adrianne: Does she want to be our friend?
Billy: Uh, I’ve long maintained that Billie Eilish wants to be my friend, so I don’t plan on changing my stance on that. However, I do not have any evidence, uh, and I have no direct contact with her.
Adrianne: Okay.
Billy: Anyway, I’m really eager to share what I found with you guys, but there have been some developments since we last spoke.
Regina: I would hope so.
Billy: [laughs] So here’s one. Google, is Billie Eilish’s H&M line sustainable?
Speaker 7: On the website mike.com they say, “Billie Eilish just dropped a sustainable clothing line with H&M.”
Billy: If you use like a Google Smart Display or like a nest tub or if you just Google this question, the full answer it gives you in the featured snippet is, “Billie Eilish just dropped a sustainable clothing line with H&M. The collaboration went live January 2nd and according to H&M, it’s made entirely of sustainable materials.”
Adrianne: What?
John: Wait, they didn’t even say that.
Adrianne: I know.
John: Where’s the, what’s the source of ?
Billy: mike.com
John: Do we have to disclose that, uh, three of us used to work at mike.com?
Billy: Yeah, I guess I should probably mention that I used to work at mike.com as well as-
Regina: As did I.
Billy: Me too.
As did Regina and John.
Adrianne: I never miked.
Regina: But your husband did.
Billy: Yeah. [laughs]
Adrianne: It’s a small town.
Billy: But anyway, I may or may not have mutually agreed with management to quit that job. [laughs] And, and I may or may not have signed a, a not a hypothetical non-disparagement agreement. I just want to like make very clear that uh, I’m not saying anything bad about mike.com that said, you remember how we establish that no one covered this news critically?
Regina: Yes.
Billy: So I started kind of digging into this myself, trying to gather as much real information as I could. And while I was doing that, Adrian went searching for other people talking about this and she sent me this other article. How did you find this? Is this from Reddit or something?
Adrianne: I dunno, I just like start Googling and then my brain turns off and my hands do all the work and then I’m on an article, I blackout-
Regina: I love that description so much [laughs] I feel like- [crosstalk 00:12:53] that describes most of my life.
Billy: This is an article titled, Greenwashing Alert: H&M and Billie Eilish Collaboration.
Adrianne: I told you, greenwashing, it’s a thing.
Billy: Yeah. So this is a term you taught me earlier and so this doesn’t seem like it got a lot of traction, but it came from this website called eco -.
John: Okay.
Garik Himebaugh: [phone ringing]
Hello?
Billy: Hello.
Garik Himebaugh: Yeah. Hey.
Billy: Hi. How’s it going?
Garik Himebaugh: Good, how are you?
Billy: Good.
So this is Garik Himebaugh. He’s the founder of Eco-stylist.
Garik Himebaugh: We research brands to see, to find brands that really are sustainable and putting a high bar on what it is that that means. And then we create like a list of brands as well as we carry items from those brands in our online shop.
Billy: So full disclaimer here, eco-stylist makes money from affiliate links on their site, so they’re not exactly a neutral party here, but they’re pretty transparent about their process and their business model. And they have like a whole ethics section on their site that lays out all of their criteria for what brands they work with in detail. Um, so it’s a pretty good resource if you want to buy a new piece of clothing, but you want to make a decision based on how it’s made.
Garik Himebaugh: You know, the problem I was finding then with people is that, you know, they have like 30 browser tabs open. They don’t know who to trust that a lot of these media sources can’t be trusted. Um, because they’ll just, you know, they’ll just pop out like these top 10 sustainable brand lists that aren’t really researched or have no, um, like basis for determining that a brand is sustainable.
Billy: Normally he’s just kind of curating items. He’s normally not writing pieces like this.
Garik Himebaugh: This is a pretty, I should mention, it’s a pretty atypical piece of content for me. Like I want it to be fair in my, you know, what my assessment is of the collection. But at the same time, there are so many publications that were just basically just jumping on the bandwagon and like pretty much regurgitating what H&M had said. And that was concerning to me because I was like, is anybody like scrutinizing this claim at all? And so then I looked into and you know, the collection is not very sustainable.
Billy: [music]
So the first thing, and Regina actually pointed this out earlier, is that only two of the 16 items were even flagged as, quote unquote, conscious on H&M’s website.
Garik Himebaugh: H&M’s conscious line is their line that’s supposed to be more sustainable. So if something’s sustainable it should be in that line. So just the fact that like only 12.5% of this collection is in that line is, is already a red flag. And then in addition to that though, even their conscious line is open for scrutiny and you know, cause like the Norwegian Consumer Protection Agency called them out and they were like, we can’t say this is sustainable, you know, without giving like concrete examples.
Billy: So in Norway, what he’s talking about here is they have something called the Marketing Control Act, which is designed to protect consumers from inaccurate claims and things like advertisements. And the Norwegian Consumer Authority or CA, which is responsible for enforcing this, basically in June of 2019 called H&M out for quote illegal marketing with this conscious line.
John: Where in the, I’m looking at the website now with the Billie Eilish collection, where, where, am I supposed to be seeing the conscious label?
Billy: It’s a really small tag. It’s like right under the image. There’s a teal, a little bit of text in all caps. It says conscious. So, so there’s the T-shirt dress is the one item and yeah, and the oversized joggers.
John: Yeah. So you could wear these together and a yeah. Guilt-free.
Adrianne: [laughs]
Billy: Presumably, but we’ll get back to that cause maybe not.
John: Oh, well I already bought them. So they’re on their way.
Billy: Anyway. The, uh, the Norwegian thing, so H&M actually responded to that. Uh, and they apparently told the publication Ecotextile, that the agency, “doesn’t have the background or competence to evaluate the apparel collection.” Which is pretty spicy. Right?
John: Jesus.
Billy: Uh, they, they later gave much less spicy quotes to other publications. So, uh, perhaps whoever was speaking to Ecotextile didn’t realize they were on the record or something. But the point is, this line is pretty controversial as is the conscious line. Uh, and only two of the 16 items in the Billie Eilish line have that label of being up to what H&M’s higher standard is for what it calls conscious clothing.

[music]

Okay. Second thing, the suspicious rollout.
Garik Himebaugh: Honestly, like I was putting myself in a little bit of a vulnerable position even by writing this article because they had a press release about it and I could link to that. And then like, while I was writing this article, you know, like over a couple of days while was before I publish it, uh, the link to the press release was no longer, uh, live. And they instead, they were just linking to the collection. And I was like, well why did they do that? Like why are they hiding their press release now? And then I noticed some similar things too with their website. Like I noticed some slight changes in information, not to sound too suspicious, but I was a little bit concerned about that just cause I was, I was, I was watching over the course of a few days like information change.
Billy: So this all seemed really hastily done to like certain media assets that were in the original press release were still publicly hosted on the site. Uh, even though the press release itself was taken down, it was just weird.
Adrianne: And you checked all of Billie Eilish’s, official channels and she did not promote this line anywhere?
Billy: Yeah, as far as I can tell. Um, I mean there could have been something like a femoral, like in a Instagram story or something that I wasn’t able to catch, but you know, any, anything she’s posted to Instagram, uh, on her main feed or like on Twitter or anything like that, yet she’s not talking about this at all. And in the, in the press release itself, they don’t even have like a quote from her or from Interscope or Universal or like anybody that represents her or is like even remotely associated with her, which I assume they would like try to get something if they’re going to do a press release.

[music]

Okay. Third thing, the hidden details.
I started really analyzing these pages, like looking for anything else that seemed suspicious. So I want to ask you guys to go to H&M.com right now and just click any clothing item on H&M, anything that’s not a collaboration with another brand.
Regina: So just click on an item.
Billy: Yeah, just pick any item that’s not a collaboration with another brand.
Regina: All right. Clicked one.
Billy: Okay. And then at the bottom you’ll see like a link that says details.
Regina: Yeah. Where it says details effortless shopping, product sustainability.
Billy: Yes. That’s what I wanted to ask you. What else was down there? So what did you say?
Regina: It says details, effortless shopping and product sustainability.
Billy: Right. And then what happens when you click product sustainability?
Regina: I forget what it’s called. Like a little column slides out from the side that says product sustainability and then it has a blurb at the top and then it says like what the materials are and who the suppliers are.
Billy: Yeah. So they have a breakdown of the materials here and kind of some vague explanations of how things are sourced. It’s actually mostly saying that things are sourced in a bad way.
Regina: Yeah.
Billy: So I sort of get H&M credit for that, but you’ll also find some vague promises of how they plan to do better in the future. Uh, there’s a goal to move away from unsustainable materials by 2030 and there’s also like a goal to switch to better cotton by 2020.
John: Yeah, I’m seeing all this.
Billy: Okay, so now I want you to go to one of the Billie Eilish product pages and scroll down to where that details link was before and tell me what you see.
Regina: Oh, it doesn’t say it doesn’t have the sustainability tab.
Adrianne: What? Details and effortless shopping?
Billy: Yeah.
John: Well, is this true even for the items that are marked conscious?
Billy: Yes. It’s also true for the items that are marked conscious.
John: [laughs]
Billy: But I, I found this to be true for other brand collaborations, so you’ll find this button missing on Mickey Mouse merchandise which they sell or Snoopy merchandise which they also sell.
Adrianne: So if they’re doing a collaboration that allows them to be less transparent-
Billy: Yeah, I guess I don’t know if there’s some sort of legal explanation here. If they don’t want to hold other companies accountable for the accuracy of their sustainability claims or what exactly is going on. I reached out to H&M for comment on this and also everything else I found multiple times and they have not responded but was weird to me with this Billy Eilish merch, which was marketed as more sustainable, is that you can’t even access the functionality on their website. That’s supposed to give you the details on all of this stuff, including like you said, with the two items that are labeled as conscious, but I figured something else out that function actually is there, it’s just hidden.
Adrianne: Ooh.
Billy: When you click this button on another product, what happens to the URL at the top of the browser?
John: Probably sustainability. Ah, okay. So it adds a, um, an anchor link to the URL. So you’ve got like your whatever number.html, When you click the sustainability link, it adds pound sign, modal sustainability. So this modal that comes out the side of the thing is controlled by this anchor link.
Billy: Right. So you can just simply copy and paste that part onto the end of a Billie Eilish link and you’ll get the, you’ll get the little sustainability report thing. And it all seems accurate, you know, if you compare the materials that are in the breakdown there to what is listed elsewhere on the items seem so-
John: It’s weird that they keep it accurate actually, I was kind of expecting that it would be like junk data if they were hiding it from the page.
Billy: Well the thing is, it’s not like they just remove that button from the page. The button itself is still there.
Adrianne: Oh, really?
Billy: It’s just hidden. So if you-
John: Display:none? [laughs]
Billy: Yeah, exactly. So if you inspect the source code of a Billie Eilish item on H&M’s website, you’ll find that the button is there. It just has the style element, display:none, which if you know anything about HTML or CSS, that’s sort of the basic standard way of hiding elements on a page, right? Like you might have used display:none to hide elements on your Tumblr or something.
John: We do this all over the WordPress theme we’re using on our website, it’s very handy.
Billy: Okay, well you don’t have to like out us-
John: You’re loading a whole second website when you go to ours.

[laughs]

Billy: Um, so if you just delete that from the source code, the button then appears and you can click it and it all works like normal. And when you do that, the results aren’t great.
Which brings us to the fourth thing, the materials.

[music]

So here are some of the materials that are used in the line, cotton, polyester, acrylic, polyamide and elastane. So first up is cotton. Cotton is probably the least harmful material they use. H&M has vowed to switch to a hundred percent recyclable or sustainable cotton by 2020 and while they haven’t announced that they’ve fully achieved that goal yet, it seems like they’ve gotten close in the last couple of years, but they are not clear at all about that. And H&M sort of has a history of setting goals for positive PR and then not totally following through on them.
Garik Himebaugh: They are doing things from a sustainable perspective, but they do have a track record of missing their promises. Yeah, like like in the PR, they had promised previously to pay living wages across their supply chain by 2018 and that didn’t happen.
Billy: So for all the other materials listed, polyester, acrylic, polyamide, elastane, basically all of these are made from fossil resources and H&M just has one of these like super vague goals of moving towards more sustainable materials by 2030 but that’s obviously pretty far off. It’s possible that they’re using recycled materials in some of this stuff, like the polyester, but they don’t say that anywhere. mike.com reported that the rib knit hat was created from 100% perspex sell cast acrylic, “which can be recycled and reused for just about any purpose.” they say in the article, which I couldn’t find anywhere else other than in articles that were using the mike article as a source.
Adrianne: Right. I don’t even see it on the perspex.com/responsibilities/sustainability page.
Billy: Yeah. Perspex doesn’t say anything about that, but given the fact that the same article also said that the line was quote entirely sustainable, which is 100% not true. I’m sort of inclined not to totally trust them. So I went to H&M to check out the clothing for myself.
Regina: Ooh.
Billy: [music]
So I went to two separate malls in New Jersey actually-
Adrianne: [laughs] Oh my God, you went to two malls?
John: But it was in New Jersey, so they must have been around four minutes apart from each other.
Billy: Yeah. These malls were literally on Route 1, they’re like a mile and a half away from each other.
John: Okay.
Billy: If you want to talk about unsustainable, they both have a Macy’s. How is this possible?

[laughs]

So the first H&M I went to only had two items. This is the Menlo Park Mall in New Jersey. They only had two items. And both of those items actually had conscious labels on them, like physical labels.
John: Were those the same two that were labeled on the website?
Billy: No.
Adrianne: What?
John: What?
Billy: That’s the weird thing. On the website, the two that are labeled conscious are the T-shirt dress and the joggers.
Adrianne: Right.
Billy: In the store, the two that are labeled conscious that I found are the T-shirt, regular T-shirt, non dress T-shirt and the sweatshirt. And so for some reason they’re labeled in the store as conscious, but not on the website as conscious.
Adrianne: Huh.
Billy: So they have this green conscious tag on them that’s attached with a piece of plastic. And for the T-shirt it says the T-shirt is a hundred percent organic cotton, which in theory would be good. Um, and it says that the sweatshirt is 60% organic cotton and the rest is polyester. Um, and it doesn’t say like recycled polyester or anything, it just says polyester. But the tags that are sewn into the garments themselves, just say cotton for the T-shirt one and uh, and cotton and polyester for the sweatshirt, which is what the website says. So that was weird.
Then I went to the second mall and the H&M there had those items and they also had a lot more and the two items that were labeled conscious in the other store, were labeled conscious in this store. They still didn’t have the two items from the website that were labeled conscious, but they had the socks, the bucket hat, the rib knit hat, and none of, none of these additional items they had were labeled as conscious.
Regina: So why would more items be marked conscious in the store then on the website?
Billy: I don’t know. It’s very confusing.
Regina: Ooh.
Billy: So there are some discrepancies in the information here. Uh, but the answer to the original question seems to very clearly be, no. This line, especially when you look at it as a whole, is not sustainable. With the potential exception of a few items, this line is no different than all of the other stuff that H&M produces, which is still for the most part, completely unsustainable. And there’s plenty of evidence to support that it is unethical as well.
Garik Himebaugh: Fast fashion, uh, argues like a, it’s, it’s in their, um, annual report that their CEO says their, their goal is to democratize fashion, right? And it sounds great and you think about like cheap prices. And I think when you talk about price, it’s very close to people’s hearts, especially if like they don’t feel like they can afford much. But the thing is you can’t like democratize fashion at the expense of the people who are making it, right? Like, and that’s the part that we’re not seeing. Like we’re seeing, we’re seeing that they’re offering cheap prices for us and we feel good about that, but we’re not seeing the woman who’s working in a sweatshop or the woman who’s like being paid barely anything to make you that shirt and like, you know what I mean? Like you can’t make things like easier access for some people while making them at the exploitation of others. It’s just not right.

[music]

Billy: So I was kinda feeling bummed out this honestly, you know, it seems like what’s going on with fast fashion is really like irreversible in a lot of ways. And personally like I would argue that most people really don’t have like the money or the time or the ability to really be discerning about their purchasing decisions. Like no one would blame a consumer for buying poisoned food from a grocery store, right? Like it takes the FDA and the USDA and these other systems of accountability-
Regina: Falling down on the job.
Billy: Yeah, it’s a, it’s, we required them to make sure that everyone doesn’t have to have the unrealistic expectation of having to have their guard up about these things all the time. But there’s not really anything like that for materials and fashion. And so like the word sustainability essentially means nothing. So like H&M can kind of get away with this. I reached out to both the US contact for H&M and the international one I laid out sort of everything I found, they did not respond. And I also reached out to Billy Eilish’s PR people, they have not responded. And so, you know, I’m kind of feeling like super bummed about all of this.
So I called up my friend Alex O’Keeffe, who is creative director at Sunrise Movement. If you don’t know Sunrise Movement, they’re this big youth led movement that advocates for urgent, really ambitious, big, sweeping political action to address the climate crisis and all of the related issues around it. So he’s really good at thinking big picture about this stuff in a way that is positive. So I sort of called him out of pure desperation.
Alex O’Keefe: [phone ringing]
Hello?
Billy: Hey Alex.
Alex O’Keefe: Billy, what’s good man?
Billy: Ah, you know, how you doing?
Alex O’Keefe: [laughs] What’s up?
Billy: So Alex is always talking about radical optimism, you know, that’s sort of like what Sunrise Movement believes in. So I basically was like, give me some of that. I need some of that right now.
Alex O’Keefe: The fast fashion thing kind of reminds me of like me getting woke in middle school, when I found out that the Converse shoes that I had, um, were built by, you know, Indonesian slave kids my age. And so I resolved that I was just going to wear one pair of Converse shoes for like the rest of my life. But the thing is, when I was in middle school, I was a very shy kid. I was not able to talk to anybody. So people would ask me why my shoes were falling apart and I couldn’t even tell them why. But this was my big moral statement. I mean, that’s the issue with individual choice.
Billy: Alex says that when he’s out there fighting for the Green New Deal at Sunrise, that he finds that bickering over people’s choices and putting the responsibility on individuals is actually kind of antithetical to big meaningful change.
Alex O’Keefe: You have to take action in the real world and you have to take collective action. The whole point of this life is to build things, and we have to choose a future that we have to sacrifice colorful, different kinds of clothes. We have to sacrifice showing off our identity that no one’s going to fight for it. So it’s pointless to just berate people for, “ah damn, you look too hot right now.” [laughs] That’s not sustainable. You know, I think we’d have to figure out, and we have the minds in this world to figure out solutions that make life happier and make it more interesting and make it more colorful and keep, you know, the things that we like as well. We don’t have to sacrifice one for the other.
Billy: Yeah. And that actually makes me feel a lot better.
Alex O’Keefe: [laughs] Okay. Good.
Billy: [music]
so I’m feeling better, but I really prod Alex for something specific. Like I want him to give me a specific idea that makes me feel better about all of this.
Alex O’Keefe: Oh dude, I have something perfect on this. So we want to be able to wear a bunch of different Billie Eilish shirts. We want to be able to wear a Sean Mendez shirts as well. But also we know every time we make a new shirt, we leak carbon into the atmosphere. So what do we do about it? I have a proposal. What I believe we should have Billy, is we should take something that we already have that everyone likes. Um, libraries. Everyone likes a library. And there’s people of all walks of life, of all income brackets in a library and no one argues about it, no one says, “Oh my God, this radical socialism of allowing people to educate themselves, libraries are done.”
So we just had to focus on building out libraries for everything. And I think we should have a fashion library. I think you should be able to go to a library that’s like a thrift store that has all sorts of different styles for you to try on. And then you check out new styles for the season and you can try on different clothes and it’s like an H&M, but you don’t even have to pay for it.
Billy: I love that. Yeah. There are a lot of vacancies in malls across America is like big giant retail vacancy.
Alex O’Keefe: Oh my God.
Billy: So like to the question of like, where would you put your fashion library? I, there’s probably plenty of places that [laughs] are just vacant- [crosstalk 00:34:53] otherwise.
Alex O’Keefe: Let’s seize them all. Billy you don’t understand, but you just became a revolutionary [laughs] because you’re educating the masses.
Billy: [music]
I started this by saying like, I don’t want to directly implicate Billie Eilish in any of this because I don’t have any evidence to support that, like any of this was remotely her idea. Right? Like she doesn’t own, Billie, Billie Eilish does not own Billie Eilish.
Adrianne: It seems like she could not have been less involved in this.
Billy: Right. [laughs] I don’t think Billie Eilish can control who sells her merch and what deals Universal strikes to put her name on things. But I assume there’s nothing in her record contract that prohibits her from promoting the idea of a fashion library, right?
Adrianne: Okay. But I also kind of want to see some beef between Billie Eilish and H&M.
Billy: sure. We’ll take them on directly by launching a fashion library. So Billie Eilish could team up with a, you know, a local politician somewhere. Uh, that’s like looking for some extra juice in their campaign and run on the platform of a, a fashion library and do it as a test and it can be something that’s deployed across the nation. Just an idea.

[music]

Adrianne: Thanks for listening. Underunderstood is John Lagomarsino, Regina, Billy and me, Adrianne Jeffries.
John: As always, if you’ve got a question the internet can’t answer, send it to us as an email at helloatunderunderstood.com we just might answer it on an episode.
Adrianne: If you want to support the show. The best way to do that right now is to just follow us. We’re on Instagram, we’re on Twitter, we’re on Reddit. We’re in all of the podcast apps except for one, which I won’t name, and we have a website. It’s underunderstood.com where you’ll find transcripts, photos of Billie Eilish merch, and if you’re interested in the collective action thing, there’s some links in there for that as well.
John: Thanks so much for listening. We will be back again next week.