Let Them Be Naked- Review

Words: Words: Lily Crooke (she/her)

For the UK launch of the new documentary Let Them Be Naked, filmgoers who caught the unexpected sight of a white horse wandering down Ashton Lane can be thankful it wasn’t accompanied by American designer, Jeff Garner, wearing only a pair of cotton boxers. It was probably the Scottish winter that prevented the American designer from recreating his entrance to London Fashion Week 2023 to promote his new documentary at this year’s World of Film International Festival. Let Them Be Naked, directed by Garner alongside the Redford Foundation and Suzy Amis Cameron, attempts to piece together the story of toxic chemicals in the fashion industry. Yet, despite their sincere intentions, Garner and his team manage to turn a serious issue into two hours of absurdity and irrelevant stunts.

In 2021 a CBC investigation led by Miriam Diamond from the University of Toronto tested 38 samples of adult and children’s clothing from ultra-fast fashion brands such as Shein, AliExpress and Zaful. They found that 1 in 5 contained concerning levels of chemicals such as lead, PFAS and phthalates. In one case, a children’s jacket contained more than 20 times the safe amount of lead. Diamond explains that these chemicals can be absorbed into the bloodstream, leading to potentially disastrous health effects. This year, Seoul’s city government also found a pair of shoes from Shein that contained 428 times the permitted level of phthalates, a chemical that can interfere with hormones and has been associated with childhood asthma. Although reports of chemicals in clothing are quickly accumulating, it is still an extremely under-researched issue. In the US, there are no restrictions on what can be put into clothing making the presence of unknown chemicals an obscure issue. There are no studies on how hazardous contaminants are absorbed into the bloodstream or the effects of wearing them daily against the skin, making it hard to make definitive statements about the presence and effects of these chemicals in clothing. 

Rather than bringing some much-needed clarity to the topic, Garner’s new documentary somehow adds to the opacity of the issue. A smorgasbord of pseudoscientific studies, improvised experiments, and conspiracies, Let Them Be Naked is dizzyingly hard to follow. The documentary jumps from microplastics, to Kiwi sheep farmers, and 19th century uses of arsenic as a fabric dye. At one point, Garner interviews a man who claims that synthetic bras cause breast cancer, citing as his proof the fact that men don’t get the disease. This is not necessarily a groundless claim as the Center for Environmental Health in California found high levels of BPAs, a hormone-disrupting chemical, in sports bras and polyester spandex socks produced by big brands such as Nike, Champion, and Athleta. However Garner’s primary concern doesn’t seem to be interviewing established scientists whose claims are grounded in extensive peer-reviewed studies. The documentary takes an increasingly absurd turn when Garner and Olien play a game of tennis, comparing how it feels to play in cotton versus synthetic workout clothes, tensing their muscles and measuring their strength on a homemade apparatus they don’t seem to know how to read. As if the film couldn’t become more farcical, another of Garner’s friends licks the breast of a female actress through her sheer top to see whether her skin ‘tastes synthetic’. Any genuine scientific findings get lost in a sea of disinformation and pseudo ‘experiments’, which only serve to alienate the viewer from the real issue at stake.

The documentary also places some blame in the fact that consumers are concerned more with price than material or production methods. When asked about everyday lifestyle changes in the post-screening Q&A, Garner responded that people should simply be willing to pay a bit more for their clothing (his brand Prophetik sells hemp boxers for over £50). The creators of the film seem unable to look beyond capitalistic solutions, positing sustainable fashion brands as the best alternative to fast fashion rather than minimising consumption and investing in affordable alternatives. The documentary also unintentionally illuminates the wider problem of misinformation in America. At one point Garner states, ‘You can find what you’re looking for when you know what you’re looking for’. It is essential that we do our best to get to grips with diffuse issues from a position of uncertainty, fact-checking studies rather than seeking scientific confirmation of beliefs at the cost of veracity. 

After watching this documentary I left the cinema absolutely bewildered, half-inclined to throw the whole issue out with the bathwater. Let Them be Naked certainly highlights the dangerous appeal of subscribing to pseudo-science and fear-mongering conspiracy. However, although it was ill-documented by Garner and his team, Let Them Be Naked does highlight the urgent research and unbiased funding needed to better understand the effects of the chemicals used in the fashion industry.

Sources:

https://www.theguardian.com/fashion/2023/jul/02/fashion-chemicals-pfas-bpa-toxic

https://www.vogue.co.uk/article/chemicals-clothes