Because this post is HUGE now and I get allllll of your comments in my notifications, I just want to drop a couple of links regarding pricing of US-made, independently owned and operated clothing companies.
40 pieces of Cute, Ethically Made Lingerie…
Fact: people still handmake every single item of clothing we wear – including lingerie.
Whether it’s a luxurious $180 silk bra or a pair of $2.50 cotton panties you wear to work, every single item in your underwear drawer was made by human hands. Budget lingerie is priced so low in part because of the low cost of labor in many countries, but also because of major labor issues within the fashion industry. Garment workers, a majority of whom are women, are often exploited for cheap underwear.
So until robots start independently operating sewing machines, ethically-made lingerie – that is, lingerie that is created by people who are paid a fair wage in good working conditions – will always be more expensive than budget lingerie. Pricewise, ethical garments simply can’t match the brands selling 5 for $25 panties and underwire bras for under $20.
This is why your ethically made bra costs more:
If a designer is factoring in their own time as one of their costs (which, ethically, they should), or if someone is utilizing ethical factory labor: this is guaranteed to significantly increase the price of your clothing.
Companies that rely on manufacturing in places with little legal oversight or workplace protections capitalize on the fact that they can pay their workers a pittance so as to maximize their profit margin. (I’d recommend watching The True Cost, an excellent documentary on the subject.)
It’s not a moral failing to not be able to afford ethically-made clothing. It’s a symptom of a larger capitalist system, and the reality is that the people who might be interested in a swimsuit like this, particularly queer and trans folks, are often even more likely to be underpaid and under-employed.
However, these suits are:
custom printed, meaning the cost of manufacturing just the fabric is likely exponentially higher than for companies like Forever 21 who can buy massive amounts of fabric and cut costs by using cost-saving cutting techniques. I’m guessing the pieces of each suit are also hand cut individually, rather than cut in a stack as you’d have with most RTW clothing, which also means time just getting the pieces ready to sew is much longer.
sewn in the US, which means at higher wages than if manufactured in the same factories used by most fast-fashion and RTW companies, and likely at a higher per-item cost because of the smaller batch size than a corporation might order.
handmade, because every clothing manufacturing technique requires human labor to make. There is no such thing as automated sewing, and sewing is specialized, skilled, trained labor. Even if they’re not made with hand stitching techniques (ie even though they’re using sewing machines), they’re still made by human hands.
sold by a one-person company. As in, the founder does all the rest of the labor to market, package, and ship your items.
Again, it is not at all a moral failing to not be able to afford this object. We all have budgets and have to make decisions about what to buy, and many of us are in demographics that mean budget constraints are even greater due to the racist, classist, sexist, homophobic, transphobic, ableist systems in which we live. But to suggest that an item of clothing is not worth paying a living wage to its manufacturers is a particularly troubling way of reaffirming a system of devalued labor.
