Textiles: Agriculture, industry, couture, and exploitation
You guys may not know this, but I’m a fan of the fashion world, I have a deep respect for handcrafted clothing. The skill needed to make clothes is incredible, I’m a bit rusty with a needle and thread myself, but a few of my friends are spectacularly skilled with a sewing machine and a needle. Envy aside, this is actually a very good skill to learn, the decline of this knowledge has been beneficial to those who work in the fast fashion sector and nobody else. Clothing is an essential part of culture and I think that essential aspect is part of why I really dislike fast fashion as well as haute couture. Generally speaking the fashion industry does some pretty shitty things to workers and markets to those who don’t see anything bigger at stake than how they look, which is awful for a culture that’s as consumption obsessed as that of the US.
It all has to start somewhere, mostly from seeds, as long as you pretend that synthetic fabrics don’t exist for a moment (that deserves a post of its own when I move onto the topic of fossil fuels and their obsolescence), most clothes are made from cotton yarn, which is woven into fabric, which is then cut into various shapes and made into whatever clothing item is being manufactured, yeah? Well, there’s a problem with cotton even into the modern day and that’s the energy cost for processing and water cost for growing when you look at the water cost alone and combine it with the fact that in needs to be processed, transported, woven, and cut that comes out to be a lot of fossil fuels and even more water consumed. Roughly 20,000 litres of water (5,283 gallons) is used to produce 1 kilogram of cotton (2.2 pounds). High water cost combined with pesticide, herbicide, and fungicide use make cotton a nightmare for groundwater pollution, agricultural runoff, and soil depletion. There is a better source of fiber than cotton which uses less water and produces more than cotton does, hemp, the industrial variety of hemp is easy to grow and could be replacing half of all textiles very soon. Industrial hemp uses less than a third of cotton and produces, to read more about this hemp click here.
Now onto the textile industry and how it feeds into both fast fashion and couture. As we’ve established, cloth is incredibly important when talking about fashion and clothing. It’s sometimes a selling point, if you want clothes that are easy to take care of, or want something that’s luxurious but is dry-clean only (I don’t know why people would do that to themselves, but that’s besides the point). The top textile manufacturer right now is Arvind Limited which deals in cotton fabrics, cotton is still king it seems, but it’s an India based company. I can’t seem to find who they supply to, although their financial reports are public access, I cannot find who they sell their fabrics to. I am willing to bet it’s mostly to fast fashion companies and some premier brands. That information is out of my hands however, but I can say they’re making bank as a 3rd party distributor with cheap labour on the ground floor. I’m afraid I cannot give detailed accounts of whom they ship to, but speculation will have to do for now.
A little break from serious topics to discuss couture, haute couture, and handmade clothing, I swear we’ll move onto the topic of exploitation of workers after this. Couture is essentially custom fitted clothing, haute couture is luxury custom fitted clothing, and handmade clothes are self explanatory. The only one out of the three that I don’t have a problem with is handmade clothing because it’s made to be warn more than once and is pragmatic, the couture however, is basically what you see at the Met Gala, to be worn once and never again. I think you see the problem as much as I do, a waste of resources and idolization of others based on appearance. Now, I may be misunderstanding or biased, but clothes are supposed to be worn multiple times. In this respect, couture is no better than fast fashion.
Now onto the final topic of an already lengthy post, exploitation of workers in textiles. From the farmers who grow the fiber, to the cloth makers, to the ones operating the sewing machines in sweatshops, all of these people are being exploited by different organizations. The farmers are exploited via the seed industry as well as pesticide, herbicide, and fertilizer industries because they’re viewed as essential in the production of clothing fibers and food crops. For the manufactures of the cloth, they’re being exploited by whomever runs the factory for processing and weaving the fibers, same goes for sweatshop workers. It’s like this anywhere you go in the textile industry, even “high end” fashion is infamous for seasonal crunch times and overworking designers, photographers, and models. It may not be the same as meager wages in a sweatshop, but nobody should be under extreme stress over something that will go away from public vision in a month’s time. We need to rethink what we wear, me included. Instead of throwing clothes away, we should learn how to resize and repair. We’ll get to that point eventually, but until then we have to be more conscious about the things we take for granted and their social & ecological impact.
That was all for today, this post was 2 days late, but I work a lot now and it’s hard to keep up with any social media, especially when I’m essentially writing essays. So have a good one and stay safe babes.
This has been @punkofsunshine, out.
