Maria Pilar Uribe Silva’s mission
Lifting the curtain on fashion lies
Maria Pilar Uribe Silva’s love of clothes goes back twenty-five years, though she can hardly believe it herself when she says it. It started sometime in the nineties in her southern Chilean hometown, just at the tip of Patagonia. She was just a teenager then, with little money to spend on fashionable clothes and even less access to the shops that sold them.
That’s how she got into second-hand shopping. ‘I loved the smell, the identity of these clothes, the feeling of the materials’, she says, caressing her fingers as if still touching them. It was a different market back then and she could easily find cheap, high-quality garments imported from the United States and Canada.
‘For us, it was a demonstration that we could wear the styles from these countries too, even if they were second-hand’, she says. To her especially, it was a way to dictate the terms of her own personality and style. ‘I guess that was the beginning of everything’, she smiles, her eyes lighting up behind her chunky glasses.
Polluting industry
Nowadays, however, Uribe Silva’s relationship with fashion is somewhat complicated, or ‘bittersweet’, as she describes it. Fashion represents beauty and fantasy, but that covers up the fact that it is one of the most polluting industries in the world. ‘Fashion is not innocent. People are suffering, the planet is suffering.’
The Global South is taking the hardest hit, she explains, with Chile as one of the most affected countries. ‘Every time I go back, something has changed: nature and biodiversity. You can’t go back to the lake you used to go to, because it’s dry’, she says, her voice almost breaking as she shows satellite pictures, taken in 2022, of the giant piles of second-hand clothes in the Atacama desert. ‘We’re one of the biggest importers of used clothing.’
Working as a journalist for a national TV channel in Chile, Uribe Silva started her sustainability journey by producing a lifestyle segment on green initiatives. ‘I always tried to include something fashion-related, like the up-and-coming designers who were upcycling used clothes.’
Leftovers
When she moved to Europe as a freelance journalist, her interest in sustainable fashion only grew. ‘I was in Milan, the capital of fashion, so I had to explore their options’, she explains. To her surprise, though, there was little to discover when it came to the second-hand market. ‘A friend told me that’s because they send everything to other countries, like Romania’.
That’s when the questions hit her: Which route do second-hand clothes take before reaching their owners? And what happens with the leftovers?
‘I spent most of my time researching this’, she says. Her research took her as far as Romania, where she spent a year working for an NGO helping people in need. It collaborated with Italy, which would send massive amounts of used clothes to distribute to the poor.
‘When I saw the overwhelming amount of clothes this NGO received, I realised the impact they have. Romania didn’t have a clothing recycling system and couldn’t deal with such large quantities.’ Many of the remaining clothes were either burned or thrown away. ‘You could see the waste in front of you.’
Deceptive language
Uribe Silva dove deeper and deeper into the fashion industry and eventually started fact-checking fashion companies’ sustainability reports.
‘I am really obsessed with understanding how everything works and sometimes that makes me sad, because not all processes are transparent’, she says. Especially not those of fast-fashion companies, she adds, which use deceptive language to create an image of themselves as ‘green’ and ‘eco-friendly’. It’s in the phrases like ‘leading the change’, or ‘engaging in circular fashion’, a type of ‘fluffy language’ that Uribe Silva can spot from miles away.
It’s hard to prove something is false, but we need a way to measure that
And that’s also what she’s trying to teach large language models (LLM) for her PhD project at the UG. She’s working on creating a spectrum of deceptive language, which ranges from ‘gaslighting’ and ‘bullshitting’ to ‘impression management’ and many others, hoping to use it to train AI. ‘It’s hard to prove something is false, but we need a way to measure that’, she says.
That lack of a comprehensive model to identify deceptive language in fashion communication strategies is the reason she started her PhD. She has no interest in going into academia afterward – she’s just not ‘an academic person’, she says.
‘I did a master in digital humanities here and when my thesis supervisor told me there was an open PhD position, I wasn’t really interested at first.’ She just loves being a journalist. ‘I miss it, walking around the city, finding stories. I love real stories.’
Easier job
Why, then, go the difficult route of academia? ‘I realised these researchers were trying to answer the same question that I am’, she explains. And so she took off the journalist’s hat, just for a while, to focus on developing her expertise further. After all, this will eventually make her job easier too. ‘AI can’t do my job for me, but it can definitely help.’
It does raise some ethical questions, though. ‘We don’t realise what the impact of AI is. It needs data centres, which require a lot of water and land. That’s the dark side of it, the process behind it. I talk about sustainability, but I use AI.’ She doesn’t feel bad about it, however. We have to use technology in our favour, she believes.
‘I will use all my resources to increase the cost of lies and deceptive language for every company. Because I need to know how you are affecting the environment and the people’, she says, pointing at the interviewer as if she’s facing the H&M CEO.
Held accountable
Those lies, she stresses, lead to climate change. ‘I come from such a beautiful country and it’s painful to see nature disappear and poor people suffering.’ She wonders if there’ll even be any natural parks left in Chile in fifty years.
But she’s not losing hope, because things can change. And until every fashion company is held accountable for their actions, she’ll work on her own relationship with consumption.
To make her wardrobe more sustainable, Uribe Silva goes to every clothes-swapping event she comes across. ‘And when I go to my sister’s home, I always ask her to swap clothes we don’t wear anymore, so we can extend the life of an item.’
When she isn’t swapping, she mostly buys second-hand or supports sustainable designers. ‘Felicità is my favorite vintage shop here’, she says. ‘But if I had to rank them, the charity shops win.’ At the end of the day, she’s just a really big fan of Mamamini and Kringloop Plus.
Her advice for others? ‘It’s easy to be sustainable. Just don’t buy it. Consume less, use more.’
Studium Generale has two upcoming events on sustainable fashion: the lecture Shop ’till you drop with historian Femke Knoop and political theorist Maeve McKeown on February 24; and the O-Swap repair café on March 20, where you can repair and improve your own clothing.