The horrific history and pernicious present of fashion's unfinished death toll

Sabrina Maddeaux: While often dismissed as frivolous, fashion’s long history of being literally a life-or-death choice beckons us to better consider what we wear and how it’s made

Radium Girls work in a U.S. Radium Corporation factory, circa 1922. Wikimedia Commons

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The press at the time described Matilda Scheurer’s death in disturbing detail. While historians have suggested that the particulars of her demise range from reliable to exaggerated, one thing is certain: She died terribly.

On November 20, 1861, the 19-year-old began vomiting “green waters.” She convulsed; the whites of her eyes and fingernails turned green. She foamed from the mouth, nose and eyes; and then, she died, with what doctors described as “an expression of great anxiety.”

Scheurer’s job was to dust a popular green pigment onto the faux leaves of artificial flower crowns with her bare hands. Long before millennial pink, there was arsenic green. As the trendiest colour in Victorian society, the vibrant green hue showed up on everything from opera gowns to gloves and even wallpaper. Arsenic green, brighter and longer-lasting than other greens, was made by mixing arsenic and copper together.

While we now know that a mere 1/8th of a teaspoon of the concoction constitutes a fatal dose, garment workers at the time were exposed to gallons of arsenic. A report in the London Times later revealed that each flower crown Scheurer had dusted contained enough poison to kill 20 people. Her autopsy also confirmed that the arsenic she was using every day had reached her stomach, liver and lungs.

Bangladeshi volunteers and rescue workers are pictured at the scene after the Rana Plaza complex collapsed in Savar, on the outskirts of Dhaka. AFP PHOTO/Munir uz ZAMAN/FILESMUNIR UZ ZAMAN/AFP/Getty Images

Sadly, Scheurer’s story is far from unique. The history of fashion is littered with gruesome deaths. In fact, Western apparel’s past is so toxic, it’s a wonder anyone survived the Victorian era, alone. But perhaps the most astonishing aspect of fashion’s deadly history is that many of the cases were entirely preventable if not outright intentional, with deaths more often than not the result of our worst tendencies: Fulfilling a selfish desire to maintain a certain status, exploiting workers to make a quick profit or simple and unmitigated murder.

In their new book Killer Style, former fashion editor Serah-Marie McMahon and associate professor at Ryerson University Dr. Alison Matthews David recount centuries of deadly attire. “The most surprising cases were those where people knew about the dangers of something, but still continued to wear it,” says Matthews David.

Killer Style presents “murderous mercury hats” as one such case. In the 1730s, hat-makers discovered that adding tiny amounts of mercury to cheap furs transformed them into felt. This was momentous because other supplies of fur were either dwindling or increasingly unaffordable. However, years of mercury exposure caused men’s gums to shrink, teeth to fall out, tongues to swell so much that they couldn’t close their mouths; their arms and legs would convulse. Many men also developed paranoid personalities, earning them the nickname “mad hatters” (some people think this inspired the most famous Mad Hatter of all in Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland).

Even though the ghastly effects quickly became obvious, men continued to wear these felt hats until they became unfashionable sometime in the 1960s. In fact, mercury wasn’t banned by the U.S. until the 1990s and Canada didn’t issue regulations surrounding it until 2014.

“Sometimes, with fashion, the reason people get killed is purely an accident. Your scarf gets caught on a go-kart. But sometimes there are power dynamics and people taking advantage of other people,” says McMahon. She says it’s for this reason the tale of the Radium Girls was the hardest to write.

In the early 1900s, the Radium Girls were women who worked in a factory painting radium on watch faces so that they’d glow in the dark. In order to paint in finer detail, they were instructed to put the radium on a paint brush then use their tongues to bring the brush to a super-fine point.

“This meant that they were constantly, all day long, getting micro-dosed with radium inside their mouths,” says McMahon. “Some women only worked there a year and they ended up dying from radium poisoning, which doesn’t happen quickly. It really rots you from the bones in; it’s not a pleasant way to go.”

A Bangladeshi garment labourer works in a sandblasting factory in Dhaka on August 4, 2011. MUNIR UZ ZAMAN/AFP/Getty Images

When the women cried out, factory owners denied that radium had anything to do with the deaths and concocted other excuses to explain them. Eventually, the Radium Girls launched a class-action lawsuit that would forever change health and safety regulations at work. Tragically, none of the women actually lived long enough to witness the legacy they so harrowingly earned.

While a lot of these stories occur well into the past, there are still fashion deaths this day. The most infamous modern-day fashion disaster was the 2013 Rana Plaza collapse in Bangladesh, which killed 1,134 garment-workers.

However, a  lesser-known case revolves around young Turkish men who were tasked with sandblasting jeans to achieve the trendy early-2000’s faded look. Many men, after inhaling the fine sand grains produced by sandblasting for hours a day, developed advanced silicosis (an environmental lung disease). The Turkish government banned sandblasting in 2009, but hundreds of men still die each year from the disease and the practice still occurs in other nations where regulations are far more lax.

“Those jeans were so ugly anyways, and to imagine that those terrible jeans killed an entire generation of men in whole towns in Turkey is insane,” says McMahon. “For people who make clothes, this is still a huge issue.”

On a more positive note, the overall number of deaths caused by fashion is way down. It’s extremely unlikely that a dress or hat bought today will kill you. This is thanks to lessons learned from the past, scientific advances and increased regulation. “Although it really depends how long it takes to kill you,” says McMahon. “If something kills you quickly, it’s discovered much faster these days. If it takes a very long time to kill you, then it’s often a lot more difficult for people to pinpoint exactly what it is.”

This, of course, is one of major concerns driving the green fashion and beauty movements. Many beauty products still contain substances like formaldehyde, petroleum, heavy metals and flame retardants. The same chemicals can also show up in clothing, alongside other carcinogens and hormone disruptors. The questions of whether there are any “safe” amounts for these chemicals are still debated by medical professionals, scientists, manufacturers and concerned consumers. And their long-term effects remain unclear.

Today, if you suffer immediate death from a garment, chances are it was intentional. Assassination by fashion is more common than most realize. Contact chemicals have a long history and are notoriously difficult to trace. Developing countries in particular tend to have very limited testing and reporting for cases of poisoning.

In Greek mythology, Hercules was allegedly poisoned by a shirt given to him by his wife. In the medieval period, royals succumbed to poisoned gloves, saddles and shirt tails. More recently, in 2016, a Chinese woman made headlines when she poisoned her husband’s underpants with a toxic herbicide called paraquat. According to the World Health Organization, there are 200,000 fatal paraquat poisonings a year and 91 per cent of those are ruled intentional (although this statistic includes self-poisoning cases).

While often dismissed as frivolous, fashion’s long history of being literally a life-or-death choice beckons us to better consider what we wear and how it’s made. Not only should we look to protect ourselves, but also those who are forced into dangerous and deadly situations because of our choices and consumer demand. As climate change becomes an increasingly important topic, it’s not inconceivable that future generations will consider the industry’s lack of sustainable production means as a form of deadly fashion.

In another twist you may not have seen coming, Killer Style is actually a children’s book published by Owlkids with colourful illustrations to match each story. Hopefully, it can impart an ethos of more conscious consumption to the next generation, or at least prompt a question that McMahon hopes we all ask: “Is what you look like and what you wear worth the risk?”