It was an April morning in Bangladesh when inspectors entered an eight-story building
and found cracks. Cracks in columns, cracks in walls, and cracks in the floor. For years,
this building housed a number of shops, banks, and, on the upper floors, garment factories. But
the day the inspectors discovered this building was falling apart at the seams, they actually
did their jobs and sent everyone home. Avoiding a potential disaster. Or, so it seemed that day.
Unfortunately, this story doesn’t end in smiles and relief, because this is the story of how the
fashion industry has left deep scars on the world and continues to push environmental destruction
and worker exploitation down our throats. This is the story of fashion. Why a poorly built building
in Bangladesh reveals the horrors of the fashion industry. What Karl Marx has to do with Shein,
and how this might offer a possible path away from our current clothing industry.
This video is sponsored by Brilliant
A People’s History of Fashion: The fashion industry that we know today
didn’t just spring up out of nowhere. If we travel back in time from Instagram shopping, to malls,
through catalogs, to storefronts, and all the way to the textile mills of England in the 18th
and 19th century we can begin to understand that fashion is intimately intertwined with
the emergence of fossil fuels, the birth of the industrial revolution and the spread of
capitalism. Before the invention of the mechanized textile mill, clothing was produced on a much
smaller and deliberate scale. Often, you knew the person who made your clothes or you made
them yourself. But with the water-driven, and then later, coal driven textile mill,
it became a lot easier to create immense amounts of clothes and cotton goods at scale. However, the
invention of these technologies didn’t immediately lead to a boom in clothing production. That was
facilitated by capitalists. The textile mills of the late 1700s and 1800s were perfect examples of
capitalist exploitation. Over the course of those two centuries, former peasants of the English
countryside were forced off their land by a number of decrees and policies, and had nowhere to go
except into mills and cities. Landless and without work, these peasants looked toward the smokestacks
of the textile factories for wages to survive, but this glut of workers meant factory owners could
hand out meager wages and exploit their workers to high hell. Indeed, the conditions of Fredrich
Engels father’s textile mills in 19th century England were part of what drove him together with
Marx to draft the communist manifesto. It also spurred him into writing a book on the conditions
of the working class in textile mills. In that book, Engels writes about one lacemaking factory
that employs “a mass of young girls – there are said to be 15,000 of them in all – who sleep
and eat on the premises,” going on to add that “working-hours, even in the best establishments,
are fifteen, and, in very pressing cases, eighteen a day.” The emerging fashion industry squeezed
workers under gruesome conditions to continuously produce. Young English girls and women sucked
in toxic fumes, lost fingers in machinery, and worked 100-hour weeks. While, across the Atlantic,
enslaved Black people toiled for cotton plantation capitalists who fed the explosion of the English
textile mills. This exploitation of factory workers and of enslaved people combined with
new automatic loom technologies meant massive profits for factory and farm owners. Because,
the lower these capitalists were able to drive wages, the more waste they could dump, and the
more they could produce, the higher their profits. But this production had to go somewhere. It had
to be sold and worn to actually make a profit for the factory owners. Thus clothing became fashion.
A piece of cloth became so much more than just something to keep the sun off your back, it was
a commodity that could display status, wealth, politics and more. Fashion, with its endless
churning of seasons and trends, is a perfect example of how our economic system transforms
something that was made for mere pennies into something that can be sold for riches. And
let’s be clear, those riches never reach the pocket of the workers actually making the clothes.
From Clothes to Fast Fashion:
As production from textiles ramped up over the 19th and 20th century–both
from mechanization and the exploitation of the working class–capitalists needed people to
actually buy all the stuff they were producing. And while fashion trends have always existed,
the wielding of fashion’s cyclical nature became that much more acute as industrial capitalism
took hold of global markets. “Under capitalism” as author of the book Stitched Up, Tansy E. Hoskins,
writes, “people are locked into a mindset where having is more important than being. We learn to
value things only when we directly possess them rather than looking for happiness in ourselves,
in labor, in society or in nature.” So, because people are judged by their material worth under
capitalism, if you attach exclusivity, belonging, wealth, and power onto a piece of clothing,
it’s much more likely to sell. And that’s exactly what happened. Instead of highlighting durability
or usefulness, fashion shows, catalogs and advertisements display what you could be if you
just had that pair of pants. In a capitalist system where endless hours of meaningless
or destructive work grind us into unhappiness, we look to consumption for a way to achieve pleasure,
to belong, to give back, or to heal our planet. When these values are placed onto clothing, then,
we are much more likely to pay top dollar. Our self worth and our image is tied to our clothing,
so much so that a survey of 18- to 25-year-olds in London found that 41% of people felt pressure to
wear a different outfit every time they went out. So, it’s in the best interests of the
owners of clothing brands to not only attach as much desire onto their garments, but constantly
change those clothes so that you always feel one step behind and need to continuously buy
more to feel satisfied. Which, just so happens to be a foundational tactic of fast fashion.
Fast Fashion’s Reign
Let’s head back to that building in Bangladesh. On April 24, 2013, textile workers filed into
the structure to start yet another grueling day of producing cheap clothes for massively wealthy
corporations like Walmart and Primark. But this wasn’t a normal day of work. The day before,
inspectors had discovered cracks in the foundation of Rana Plaza, a building housing various garment
factories, shops and banks. Once the inspectors discovered the shoddiness of the foundation,
they evacuated the building, shutting down the garment factories for the rest of the day. But
the owners of those factories were eager for profits and production. The very next day,
workers were forced back into the building to continue churning out
clothing. Or as one worker describes: “It makes me so angry, because if the owners knew something was
wrong with the fifth floor of the building, the didn’t close down the factory, they even told us:
‘this building will stand for another 10 years and nothing will happen to it.” An hour later Rana
Plaza collapsed under the weight of extra floors, too much machinery, and too many people. 1,132
workers died, 2,500 people were injured. Echoing the many fires and deaths of early industrial
capitalism, Rana Plaza revealed to the world that the exploitation of textile workers didn’t end
with the meager reforms in imperial core countries over the course of the 20th century. Instead the
conditions and the environmental pollution of fashion production, have just been exported to the
imperial periphery. The current ultra-fast fashion economy is able to thrive because companies
squeeze workers under deadly conditions and push the inevitable waste onto the environment.
Online fashion juggernauts like Shein and ASOS are the epitome of this industrial hyper-production.
They release thousands of styles onto their store every day. Much like mechanized looms
and the exploitation of women and enslaved people by English textile mill owners, modern fashion
brands wield the quick turn-around of the internet and the oppression of the textile working class in
countries like Bangladesh to constantly create new trends and sell evermore clothing. The state
of the textile industry is a dark one–driven by a constant desire to gain more and more profits.
Indeed, the former COO of Timberland writes that “While serving as an executive in the industry,
never once did a CFO ask me if the business could contract… Nor did I ever hear from a Wall
Street analyst making a pitch for Timberland to prioritize resilience ahead of revenue growth.”
So, under the glitz and glamor of advertisements and the sterilized ease of online shopping
lies the reality of brutal working hours, dismal wages, millions of tons of waste and carbon
pollution, injuries, and death. Around 40 million people work in the textile industry. The majority
of whom are women and children of color toiling in the imperial periphery. Investigative pieces
like this, and this, reveal that the collapse of Rana Plaza wasn’t just mere fluke. Factory
disasters to stole the lives of workers before and after the Plaza collapsed. A 2017 report from
Global Fashion Agenda roughly estimated that 1.4 million textile workers suffer workplace injuries
every year. The true price of our clothes, especially cheap ones, are pushed on those
stitching everything together in factories. These laborers must endure these conditions for
terrible pay. The Clean Clothes Campaign estimates that the average garment laborer receives just
0.6% of a piece of clothing’s retail price. And while millions of workers get scraps, the barons
of fashion like the owner of Zara and the owner of Louis Vouiton have become some of the wealthiest
men in the world. The business model of fast fashion companies is the inevitable conclusion of
all companies under capitalism: expanding profits by minimizing labor costs, exporting pollution and
maximizing production in order to outcompete other companies. All of this production not only means
long hours on the factory floor, but it also leads to pretty dismal consequences for the planet.
The planetary cost of fast fashion:
In the denim capital of world Xintang in China, a river runs an iridescent blue. Chemicals pouring
out of the denim factories surrounding its banks let dyes run through the river to such an extent
that the waterway can at times look like a vat of toxic chemicals. This river gives us a small
glimpse into the environmental destruction of the textile industry. The constant churn
of new clothes has created a massive footprint. Estimates put the total carbon emissions pouring
out of the textile industry every year to be in the range of 2-8% of total global emissions.
That is a substantial amount for just a single industry. Indeed, the world of fashion
produces roughly 92 million metric tonnes of waste and uses an estimated 79 trillion
liters of water a year. And while fashion burns through resources, consumers churn through
clothes. The average American purchases a piece of clothing every 5.5 days, and from 1996
to 2012 the rate of fashion purchases increased by 40% in Europe. The pants and shirts produced in
the imperial periphery satiate the demand for new trends in the imperial core. But when it comes to
clothing, all too often the environmental burden and indeed the burden of capitalist exploitation
of workers gets placed on the consumer. Much like BP’s devious invention of the carbon footprint to
distract us from their polluting practices, we’ve somehow embraced a narrative that fast fashion
is our problem. So, we buy ethical brands, or used clothing in order to change this
massive industry. I want to make something clear, we can’t shop our way out of fast
fashion. Trends of ethical and sustainable consumption have been trying to do that for last
25 years and have barely moved the needle. That’s because the problems of environmental
and worker exploitation stem from the point of production and not consumption.
This is not the problem of the individual consumer. The few clothing conglomerates like
OTB, VF and LVMH are producing these goods and manipulating our world and our wants so that we
continue to buy them. In order to move the needle, in order to transform the fashion industry, we
need to change the conditions within the factory. We need to change the way we produce clothes.
How we end fast fashion:
The current environmental and human exploitation of the fashion industry will not end by going to
the thrift store or buying so called ethical or sustainable clothing. These things do help
in a small way, but they are ultimately just chipping away at the edges. This might feel a
little defeatist–like there’s nothing we can do except cross our fingers and hope that the
capitalist class will see the flaws in their ways and change. If that’s what you’re waiting for,
unfortunately, the profit-model and competition of capitalism makes that hope impossible. BUT,
if we know that true environmental and ethical change has to come from the point of production,
that means that the very workers in sweatshops, in textile mills, and in garment factories, have
immense power. These workers have the ability to disrupt or even outright end the dual exploitation
of people and planet at the hands of fashion capitalists. Indeed, some of the biggest gains in
worker liberation and environmental justice didn’t stem from sustainable clothing hauls or choosing
to buy less. They came from textile workers agitating for change. From the 20,000 women going
on strike across New York City in 1909 to demand better working conditions, to the Lawrence Textile
Mill Strike, to the 400,000 strong textile strike all over the U.S. in 1934, to the collective
efforts of hundreds of textile unions after the Rana Plaza collapse that forced major clothing
brands into a legally binding accord demanding more humane conditions and better pay for factory
workers. When textile workers collectivize, and consumers show solidarity by boycotting
and divesting, they are remarkably successful at disrupting the flow of profits into capitalist
wallets. But these are just small stitches in a much larger tapestry of change. Because fashion
is so intertwined with capitalism, we need to end capitalism in order to end fast fashion.
Future Fashion: There are many paths
towards more ethical and environmentally sound clothing practices. A future with clothing
not reliant on worker exploitation, pollution, or waste is one in which the workers laboring
in textile factories communally own that textile factory and decide democratically
what gets made. A factory where the designers are the workers and the workers are the designers.
In this economic model, production is not based on how much we can make and sell, but instead on how
much we need to feel comfortable and happy. As Tansy Hoskins notes “Socially organized
production would end over-production because no one not reliant on wages is going to vote
to work 15-hour days seven days a week on an assembly line to produce 20 billion pieces of
clothing. The only people that need such vast quantities of clothing are the people that sell
them at a profit; under collective ownership their role would have ceased.” In addition,
collective ownership means an end to disasters like the Rana Plaza collapse, because no worker
is going to vote to work in deadly conditions. In short, the model of socialism would put an
end to the waste, pollution, and exploitation that is crucial to fashion under capitalism.
But revolutionizing our economic system won’t happen overnight. Workers need to build power,
we need to organize and we need to build networks of solidarity across industries. While we build
that power we can implement methods that reduce the harm of the current industry. This might look
like prioritizing hemp fibers in production over synthetic, fossil-fuel-based materials,
raising wages, making and buying more durable clothes that last ten years instead of ten days,
or even finding ways to continue to use fabrics after they’ve ripped or torn.
But for all of these harm-reduction strategies to actually come to fruition we’ll need tons of
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