working 
conditions 
that 
factory workers in China were 
susceptible to. In an interview 
with Racked, Aflalo said, “I 
also went to China to visit a 
factory, and I had this moment 
where I realized this is really 
a polluted environment … I 
started to make the connection: 
This is me, I’m making clothes 
and I’m a big part of this.” She 
soon left Ya Ya and started 
Reformation in 2009. In the 
beginning, 
the 
company 
practiced 
sustainability 
by 
solely 
refurbishing 
vintage 
dresses 
they 
purchased. 
However, as they expanded, 
they 
were 
able 
to 
buy 
sustainable materials to make 
their own original clothing. 
Now, 
Reformation 
prides 
itself on making sustainable 
clothing 
out 
of 
previously 
produced deadstock (clothing 
that was never sold or used by 
customers), carefully selected 
fabric and repurposed vintage. 
The company itself is very 
transparent about the clothing 
they 
produce. 
Each 
piece 
online provides information 
regarding its carbon and water 
footprints so customers truly 
get to see the difference they 
make in the environment by 
purchasing reformation versus 
clothing from a standard retail 
company. For example, the 
RefScale for the Barb Top is 
labeled as having 9.0 pounds 
in carbon dioxide savings, 1.0 
gallons of water savings, and 
1.1 pounds of waste savings. 
Patagonia 
is 
another 
sustainable clothing company 
that 
stands 
out 
in 
the 
transparency 
they 
exercise 

with 
their 
customers. 
On 
their 
website, 
Patagonia 
openly discusses the journey 
that their company has taken 
regarding their transitioning 

to 
increasingly 
sustainable 
materials. In their clothing, 
Patagonia solely uses recycled 
polyester and 100% organic 
cotton 
that 
they 
produce 
themselves without pesticides. 

Patagonia’s 
sustainability 
efforts are initiated by their 
customers’ existing passion 
for nature. This is why they 
also actively play a role in 
environmental campaigns that 
the company itself is passionate 
about, such as protesting dams 
in the South American region 
of Patagonia. Furthermore, the 
website provides information 
on 
grassroots 
campaigns 
all over the country that 
Patagonia 
supports, 
which 
work to alleviate the damage 
of climate change.
Beyond 
Reformation 
and 
Patagonia, there are other 
companies that are also well-
known 
sustainable 
options 
such as Alternative Apparel, 
Amour Vert, DL 1961, Eileen 
Fisher, 
Everlane, 
PrAna, 
Threads 4 Thought and Tribe 
Alive. 
With sustainability comes a 
higher price. But, if the amount 
of sustainable clothing options 
are increased, the demand will 
decrease and price will fall. 
Therefore, in the meantime, 
we must support sustainable 
brands and purchase vintage 
when looking to save money.
We 
are 
all 
guilty 
of 
sustainable 
ignorance 
and 
steps must be taken to deter 
the irresponsibility revolving 
around the fashion industry. 
Clothing 
companies 
should 
feel inspired by the widespread 
success of Reformation and 
Patagonia and look to these 
companies 
as 
an 
example 
to model themselves after. 
Climate change is not waiting 
and neither should we. 

If Tim Burton and Sam 
Raimi had a child, and they 
raised that child on nothing 
but LSD and Pink Floyd’s Dark 
Side of the Moon, that child 
could feasibly grow up to direct 
“The Nutcracker and the Four 
Realms,” a film so wild in its 
every creative decision that 
it almost succeeds through 
sheer ridiculous force alone. 
At different moments, it recalls 
any number of films, from “The 
Chronicles of Narnia” to “The 
Wizard of Oz” to “The Santa 
Clause 2,” but it more often than 
not dances away to another 
lunatic sequence before you 
can put your finger on what 
it’s causing you to remember. 
If we were to judge the film on 
the number of jaw-dropping 
“WTF” moments alone, this 
newest 
“Nutcracker” 
might 
earn a pass.
Unfortunately, 
we 
must 
also judge it by the characters 
and their uniform flatness, 
the underdeveloped story and 
performances that are, more 
often than not, memorable for 
all the wrong reasons. This 
doesn’t include star Mackenzie 
Foy (“Interstellar”) who leads 
the film as Clara, a young girl 
who finds herself whisked away 
to the magical land of the Four 
Realms while trying to unlock 
a mysterious box left to her by 
her late mother. Where so much 
of “The Nutcracker” relies on 
strange gimmicks and visual 
splendor to keep its audience’s 
attention, 
there’s 
genuine 
emotion and charm to Foy’s 
performance that keeps her 
watchable.
The rest of the cast, however, 

is best summed up by Keira 
Knightley’s 
(“Collateral 
Beauty”) turn as the Sugar Plum 
Fairy, the leader of the Land of 
Amusements. As with the rest 
of “Nutcracker,” Knightley’s 
performance is so bizarre that 
it nearly works — at the least, 
you’re kept wondering why she 
thought that voice was a good 
idea in the first place and why 

no one stepped in to tell her she 
sounds like Moaning Myrtle 
on helium — but as with the 
rest of “Nutcracker,” there’s 
nothing underneath to keep it 
interesting. She’s not funny or 
complex, and the dramatic turn 
her character winds up taking 
is completely unearned.
Similarly 
weak 
writing 
abounds, as even Clara falls 
prey to an arc that doesn’t 
change her so much as it affirms 
what we already knew about 
her. She begins “Nutcracker” 
as an inventive young woman 
confident in her mechanical 
skill, and for all the story’s talk 
about using what makes her 
special, she never wavers in that 
confidence. If she is meant to be 
recovering from her mother’s 
death, the closest thing to an 

alternative arc we’re given, 
then there’s no focus lent to 
that goal. It’s a forced “believe 
in yourself” lesson that’s never 
convincing for all Foy’s talents 
and is communicated in the 
same way as “Kung Fu Panda” 
virtually verbatim.
The one stalwartly good 
aspect is the visuals. While 
the effects will likely date 
themselves 
within 
a 
few 
years, the production design 
is breathtaking from top to 
bottom and there are a couple 
smart visual homages to other 
films, including a beautiful 
send-up to the “Toccata and 
Fugue in D minor” segment 
of “Fantasia.” Some of the 
costumes are sillier than others 
— Richard E. Grant (“Can You 
Ever Forgive Me?”) looks like 
Arnold Schwarzenegger’s Mr. 
Freeze worked him over with 
a lead pipe and Eugenio Derbez 
(“Geostorm”) looks like a Fox 
News anchor’s idea of what will 
happen if you smoke pot even 
once — but for the vast majority 
of 
“Nutcracker,” 
they’re 
ravishing.
The rest of “The Nutcracker 
and the Four Realms” must 
rely on its oddness to make it 
work, and while scenes of Keira 
Knightley eating the cotton 
candy that grows in place of her 
hair are certainly interesting, 
they hardly make it watchable. 
For that, it must rely on what 
actually counts — the story, 
the characters, the themes — 
yet in all these areas, the film 
is 
lacking. 
Maybe 
younger 
audiences 
will 
gravitate 
towards the bright colors and 
quirky characters, but that 
kind of surface-level enjoyment 
only lasts until the next movie 
that relies on those exact same 
things.

“The 
Nutcracker 
and the Four 
Realms”

Ann Arbor 20 + 
IMAX, Goodrich 
Quality 16

Walt Disney 
Studios Motion 
Pictures

FILM REVIEW

BTBU: Chiang’s ‘Stories 
Of Your Life And Others’

One side effect of coming late 
to everything is that I have a lot 
of submerged influences; my 
past resembles a neglected attic. 
I’m always surprised when my 
friends can see themselves as 
somehow continuous with who 
they were at age 14, like they 
haven’t experienced the kind of 
abrupt, dizzying turnaround I 
did when I left adolescence and 
stumbled into adulthood. I still 
sometimes 
remember 
vague 
hints of my experiences, but my 
memories usually feel like they 
happened to someone else. My 
conception of my past is both 
gallingly calcified and shifting, 
amorphous, as if hidden behind a 
curtain blowing in the wind.
One 
thing 
I 
can 
clearly 
remember from my childhood 
and preteen years is how much 
I read. I was not precocious, and 
my taste was conventional. I 
read the “Eragon” trilogy, every 
“Harry Potter” book, “The Lord 
of the Rings,” et cetera — the kind 
of narrative fiction that the reader 
lives in, at once comfortingly 
Manichean and vibrant. I think 
it was this desire for built worlds 
that led me to also spend a 
great amount of time immersed 
in 
popular 
science 
books, 
especially the large, illustrated 
coffee-table kind, usually about 
space. The workings of faraway 
stars felt both fantastical and 
fundamental, grounded in some 
kind of self-consistent celestial 
logic. I didn’t really understand 
anything I was reading, I just 
wanted somewhere to go.
My mom, a science fiction 
author and editor, lent me 
her autographed copy of Ted 
Chiang’s 2002 anthology “Stories 
of Your Life and Others” when I 
was somewhere in middle school. 
She might have been prompted 
by my entirely aesthetic interest 
in science and technology, but 
I also recall that she mentioned 
the book on more than one 
occasion as one of her favorites. 
The stories were unlike anything 
I had ever read before, and I 
remember being shocked by their 
energetic, yet concise structures. 
As I grow into what she calls 
“literary fiction,” I find that the 
collection is one of the only books 
we still have in common. When I 
revisited it a few weeks ago, I was 
just as surprised by it as when I 

had first read it. For a moment, 
I seemed to be seeing out of my 
younger self’s eyes, experiencing 
the stories’ wonder anew. 
Chiang’s day job is a software 
engineer, which is arguably the 
cultural role that the Medieval 
monk and later the Renaissance 
alchemist occupied previously 
— the universal chroniclers, 
arbiters 
and 
discoverers. 
Software engineers now create 
entire 
worlds 
from 
scratch, 
building the Borgesian map over 
our shared reality. More than one 
story invokes ancient engineers, 
alchemists and scholars as stand-
ins for the cultural role of the 
creative programmer. One story, 
“Seventy-Two Letters,” places 
the ancient Jewish myth of the 
Golem — an automaton that is 
activated by a slip of paper with 
a “name” on it — in a rapidly 
industrializing 
19th-century 
context. Chiang’s stories operate 
by the logic of the Golem — his 
stories read like little literary 
automatons, put into play by 
their own mechanical logic. He 
juxtaposes the tower of Babylon 
myth 
with 
contemporary 
cosmological speculation, he uses 
a specific linguistics problem to 
investigate free will, he brings a 
parable about attractiveness and 
charisma to jarring conclusions. 
In his laser focus on extremely 
specific ideas, he doesn’t lose the 
capacity to surprise. If anything, 
it’s his relentless drive to reach 
the logical conclusion of his 
assemblages that, more often 
than not, makes the stories feel 
so strange and surprising.
Rereading 
the 
anthology 
reminded me of my past fixation 
with technology and logic as 
ends 
in 
themselves. 
Chiang 
creates with his stories a feeling 
I usually associate with finally 
grasping a complicated math 
problem — the joy of consistency 
(perhaps sharing an affinity with 
the German term Funktionslust). 
I frequently forget that I came 
close to majoring in computer 
science — I used to be so much 
more attracted to this feeling 
of 
completeness, 
of 
making 
things work. The more subtle, 
incomplete affects I revel in now 
came later. Chiang’s stories serve 
as sort of a bridge between those 
two versions of myself, rendering 
my past mental life in terms that 
I can understand now.
The 
anthology 
also 
gave 
my present self two stories 
that reminded me of what I 

dislike about this mentality. 
“Understand” and “The Evolution 
of Human Science” both have 
an unfortunate fixation with 
superhuman intelligence that 
posits a positivist, quantifiable 
vision of intelligence, and even 
of personality, that I now find 
narrow-minded. 
“Understand” 
follows a brain-damaged patient 
treated with a neuroregenerative 
drug. When he finds himself 
mentally 
“enhanced” 
beyond 
the 
capabilities 
of 
ordinary 
humans, he spends the rest of 
the story basically marveling 
at the “gestalts” he is able to 
grasp that “ordinaries” don’t. 
It’s frustrating to read lines 
like “The quotidian patterns of 
society are revealed without my 
making an effort,” and it’s a little 
embarrassing to think of what 
the 16-year-old version of me 
would have thought of that line. 
It’s hard to deny that even the 
better stories exist in the cultural 
space also occupied with Neil 
DeGrasse Tyson, TED talks and 
XKCD. This affinity was invisible 
to me on first read but painfully 
obvious when I revisited the 
collection.
Even so, Chiang manages to 
hover over the self-satisfaction 
of the other fabulists of STEM, 
using speculation like a wedge to 
crack reality open in unexpected 
ways rather than falling into 
received notions of progress 
and the universal utility of 
science. The true connection 
between Chiang’s work and the 
contemporary culture of STEM 
lies less in tone than content — 
Chiang is satisfied with a working 
concept rather than a working 
plot, and his stories primarily 
serve the ideas they grow from 
rather than their characters. It’s 
this, rather than his ability to 
interrogate through fiction, that 
I think I have outgrown since the 
first time I read it.
I think what I ultimately 
learned 
initially 
from 
the 
collection 
was 
that 
fiction 
was capable of changing the 
way I thought about things. In 
speaking the language I then 
understood and then breaking it 
apart, the anthology changed the 
way I thought about writing in 
general in a way that I wouldn’t 
realize until much later. I now 
ascribe the ability to create and 
destroy worlds to language, and 
this belief has its roots in this 
unlikely collection of stories.

EMILY YANG
Daily Arts Writer

BOOKS NOTEBOOK

Sustainable 
clothing. The 
term isn’t 
something 
you hear too 
often and 
when you do, 
you may feel 
ignorant — 
has the item 
been made 
with organic 
cotton? Is it 
compostable?

WALT DISNEY
‘Nutcracker’ is so bonkers 
it almost works (almost)

JEREMIAH VANDERHELM
Daily Arts Writer

It’s time to start caring 
about sustainable fashion

Sustainable clothing. The 
term 
isn’t 
something 
you 
hear too often and when you 
do, you may feel ignorant 
— has the item been made 
with organic cotton? Is it 
compostable? Patagonia and 
Reformation, two of the most 
renowned sustainable clothing 
companies, are known most 
for their style and high quality. 
Considering how important 
reversing (or slowing) climate 

change is to the preservation 
of our way of life and lives, 
sustainable 
clothing 
should 
be widespread and become a 
household term.
The textile industry is the 
second largest polluter in the 
world after only oil. Fashion’s 
carbon 
footprint 
includes 
the pesticides used in the 
production of cotton and other 
fabrics, the toxic dyes that 
are used and then incorrectly 
discarded, as well as the 
significant amount of pollution 
generated in the processing 
and shipping of garments. In 

basic terms, the cotton t-shirt 
you’re wearing from whatever 
unnamed retail store played 
a role in melting an ice cap. 
It is time that other clothing 
companies take note of what 
sustainable brands are doing 
to help the environment.
Reformation 
was 
created 
by Yael Aflalo, who embarked 
on her journey in the fashion 
world in 1999 by working at 
her first brand, Ya Ya. She 
was devoted to this job until 
she learned how the industry 
was 
detrimental 
to 
the 
environment and the horrible 

SOPHIA HUGHES
Daily Arts Writer

REFORMATION

STYLE NOTEBOOK

 Friday, November 9, 2018 — 6A
Arts
The Michigan Daily — michigandaily.com

