Color Fairport Green Book Club | January 14, 2026

Our next read is...
Unraveled: the life and death of a garment by Maxine Bedat

NOTE: Everyone is welcome, whether you've read the book or not. We do ask for a RSVP so we can set up chairs and sometimes snacks. RSVP here.

There are two surprises this month's book club:
1. This book dovetails nicely with the Color Fairport Green's Zero Waste Committee's event on January 10th that references Unraveled on Saturday, January 10 at the Fairport Public Library from 1-4pm called, A Dynamic Look into Slow Fashion. Learn about the costs of fast fashion and how your wardrobe can fight climate change.  If you'd like to register, click here.

A groundbreaking chronicle of the birth--and death--of a pair of jeans, that exposes the fractures in our global supply chains, and our relationships to each other, ourselves, and the planet

Take a look at your favorite pair of jeans. Maybe you bought them on Amazon or the Gap; maybe the tag says Made in Bangladesh or Made in Sri Lanka. But do you know where they really came from, how many thousands of miles they crossed, or the number of hands who picked, spun, wove, dyed, packaged, shipped, and sold them to get to you?

The fashion industry operates with radical opacity, and it's only getting worse to disguise countless environmental and labor abuses. It epitomizes the ravages inherent in the global economy, and all in the name of ensuring that we keep buying more while thinking less about its real cost. 

In Unraveled, entrepreneur, researcher, and advocate Maxine Bédat follows the life of an American icon--a pair of jeans--to reveal what really happens to give us our clothes. We visit a Texas cotton farm figuring out how to thrive without relying on fertilizers that poison the earth. Inside dyeing and weaving factories in China, where chemicals that are banned in the West slosh on factory floors and drain into waterways used to irrigate local family farms. Sewing floors in Bangladesh and Sri Lanka are crammed with women working for illegally low wages to produce garments as efficiently as machines.

Back in America, our jeans get stowed, picked, and shipped out by Amazon warehouse workers pressed to be as quick as the robots primed to replace them. Finally, those jeans we had to have get sent to landfills--or, if they've been donated, shipped back around the world to Africa, where they're sold for pennies in secondhand markets or buried and burned in mountains of garbage. 

A sprawling, deeply researched, and provocative tour-de-force, Unraveled is not just the story of a pair of pants, but also the story of our global economy and our role in it. Told with piercing insight and unprecedented reporting, Unraveled challenges us to use our relationship with our jeans--and all that we wear--to reclaim our central role as citizens to refashion a society in which all people can thrive and preserve the planet for generations to come.

2021, 312 pages, MCLS has 4 copies, Libby none. You can also purchase it at Another Chapter Bookstore in the Village or other independently owned bookstore.