Source: The Guardian

Investigators found severe environmental damage including water pollution from untreated contaminated waste, and air pollution.

Viscose, touted as a sustainable alternative to cotton or polyester, is often used as a cheaper and more durable alternative to silk, commonly in skirts and dresses. Experts say it is just as likely to be found in a £10 t-shirt as a £2,000 suit.

Investigators for the Changing Markets Foundation visited 10 manufacturing sites in China, India, and Indonesia, and found severe environmental damage including water pollution from untreated contaminated waste, and air pollution. Brands alleged by the report to source from these factories include H&M, Inditex (the owner of Zara), Marks & Spencer and Tesco.

Most of the brands contacted by the Guardian have acknowledged that the impacts of viscose production are an industry-wide problem and say they are exploring ways to produce more responsibly.

Also known as rayon, viscose is made from cellulose or wood pulp, often from soft woods like beech, pine and eucalyptus. “Although viscose is made from generally quick growing, regenerative trees,” says Renee Cuoco, manager of the Centre for Sustainable Fashion at the London College of Fashion, “the sustainability of the wood sources varies greatly.”

Viscose production is also chemical-heavy. Central to the process is carbon disulphide, a highly volatile and flammable liquid. The report cites evidence that carbon disulphide exposure is harming both factory workers and people living near viscose plants. The toxin has been linked to coronary heart disease, birth defects, skin conditions and cancer. Historically its use was found to cause severe mental health problems in rubber factory workers exposed to high levels of the toxin.

Other toxic chemicals used in the production of viscose include sodium hydroxide (caustic soda), and sulphuric acid.

The Changing Markets Foundation visited six manufacturing plants in China and said investigators found evidence of water and air pollution and severe health impacts on local communities. The report cites evidence in Jiangxi, a province in the southeast of China, that viscose production has contributed to the pollution of China’s largest freshwater lake, Poyang, killing aquatic life.

One of the plants visited in the eastern province of Shandong was the Shandong CHTC Helon Company which the Changing Markets Foundation says supplies H&M, Inditex (Zara), and Marks & Spencer.

The report alleges residential areas nearby to the factory are polluted with carbon disulphide levels three times higher than the permitted limit. According to the report, local people told investigators water from their well is now undrinkable due to pollution.

The Shandong Helon plant has faced criticism in the past for excessive emissions of air pollutants. It was highlighted by the Institute of Public and Environmental Affairs, the NGO set up by prominent Chinese environmentalist Ma Jun, as a company which regularly exceeds discharge standards.

Natasha Hurley, campaign manager at Changing Markets, blames fast fashion’s emphasis on volume and quick turnaround on product lines. “Clearly the viscose producers themselves have a huge responsibility here, but what has become increasingly clear is that retailers are putting huge pressure on producers and asking them to cut costs, cut delivery times – the pressure coming from the brands themselves is creating an unsustainable situation both on a social and environmental front.”

In response to the report, Ida Ståhlnacke for H&M told the Guardian it was deeply concerned at the findings and would “follow up with mentioned viscose producers that we source from.” H&M says the chemically intense nature of viscose production means it is an industry wide problem and that they are working with an external consultant to evaluate their supply chains.

A spokesperson for M&S said the company was concerned by the report and has the use of chemicals in viscose manufacturing firmly on its agenda: “We already encourage suppliers to produce more responsibly or more sustainably by incentivising them with an M&S accreditation if they do so. We know that there is much more to do though.”

A spokeswoman for Inditex spokeswoman said it works continuously with its suppliers to improve conditions and ensure that they adhere to sustainable practices. It says it will “publish our preferred viscose supplier list, according to compliance with our standards, at the end of this year.”

Tesco did not comment on its viscose suppliers, other than to say it does not source from Shandong CHTC Helon Company. A spokesman said the retailer is committed to zero discharge of hazardous chemicals: “we will continue to work closely with our suppliers on these issues.”

For Natasha Hurley at the Changing Markets Foundation, brands are not going far enough: “What we’ve seen with our investigation is that transparency doesn’t necessarily go hand in hand with more sustainable production.”

Hurley explains that while brands like Zara and H&M were very open about where they source viscose from, “that hasn’t translated into the factories they’re sourcing from being to a standard that we would expect. The whole reason for transparency in the first place is to stamp out human rights and environmental abuses.”

The report is calling for carbon disulphide to be completely eradicated from the viscose production process, and for all viscose production to occur in a closed loop system which eradicates chemical discharge and prevents harm to workers and the environment.

Tansy Hoskins is author of Stitched Up: The Anti-Capitalist Book of Fashion. She writes often on labour rights and the fashion industry. She is the subject of a Q&A in Issue 1 of Transform, a Journal of the Radical Left, which is reproduced here…

Celebrity lives are a form of fantasy for people, a distraction from a reality that recently has been overwhelming and pretty dark.

Tansy Hoskins is the author of Stitched Up: The Anti-Capitalist Book of Fashion. She has worked for ITN, Stop the War Coalition, Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament, Islam Channel, and appeared as a political commentator on the BBC, Sky News, Al Jazeera and Channel 4’s Ten O’Clock Live. She is interviewed by Phil Hearse, a writer and lecturer who specializes in culture and communication. The interview is published in the first issue of Transform, a new journal of the radical left.

Phil Hearse: Your book Stitched Up celebrates the creative potential of fashion. But do human beings really need to express themselves through what they wear? Isn’t that a bit superficial? How do you see fashion developing in a post-capitalist society?

Tansy Hoskins: Fashion is art, and I think there would be an explosion of art and creativity in a post-capitalist society. At the moment fashion, like much of art, is in the grip of small groups of mostly white male European shareholders with millions of people all but enslaved in fashion’s factories. What we need is for the profiteering to cease and for design to be let off its leash. There is also a tendency to dismiss fashion and dress as art because although it is highly skilled, it is traditionally a woman’s craft.

I also don’t see any reason why there has to be a puritan aspect to a post-capitalist society. I would like to see freedom of expression for the individual and an end to rules about what people can wear, rather than more rules or moralising about clothes. At the moment capitalism pretends that it is the ultimate purveyor of freedom but in fact people are hemmed in by rules around gender, sexuality, race, age, class etc. that govern what we wear.

Currently fashion is often the only means people have to be creative. In an ideal society there will be more access to music, literature, sculpture, sport etc., so people would hopefully be more fulfilled creatively – but I don’t think that this will mean that enjoyment of clothes and self-expression through the body would cease. Included in this new found freedom of course, is the freedom not to care, or be judged, about how you look or what you wear.

PH: Fashion seems to be morphing into a branch of a generic celebrity industry, or perhaps celebrities are being dragged into the fashion industry. Runway models -whose names were unknown 40 years ago – are now big stars and for some (Rosie Huntington-Whiteley, Abbey Lee Kershaw, Kate Upton) a route towards movie stardom. At the same time it seems as if movie stars wearing designer outfits on award show red carpets are more important for some designers than their own runway shows. Fashion shows surround themselves with celebrities and Kanye West designs his own fashion line. All in all, fashion seems to have a much bigger space in our culture than 20 or 30 years ago. What explains this?

TH: Brands want the magic that our favourite actors and singers feel associated with. When Emma Watson models lipstick for a corporation it is not just Emma Watson peer-ing out from the advert but Hermione Granger from Harry Potter as well – a fictional character that millions of people adore.

Celebrity is another layer obscuring the brutal reality of the fashion industry. In turn, celebs want these contracts because they bring in a hell of a lot of money, and are considered prestigious and a way to boost profile. A huge amount of the public’s time is taken up with celebrity news – this means the selling power of a few handfuls of people, whether they are footballers or Hollywood actors, is colossal and the brands want that publicity.

It is certainly a generic turn because 99% of what is worn at awards ceremonies is forgettable and pedestrian. In fashion terms, it is safe rather than innovative. It must also be deeply frustrating for fashion designers and students to watch celebrities launch fashion lines or the children of celebrities get hired as fashion photographers. Not a lot of what happens in the fashion industry is fair.

PH: In your book you point out that mass fashion reproduces a few weeks’ later cheaper versions of styles that have been in the haute couture shows. Doesn’t that mean that fashion is getting more democratic, is no longer just for the well-off ?

TH: It has certainly been argued that fast fashion has made fashion more democratic and that a system where only the rich have access to the creativity and joy of fashion is a deeply unfair one. I think however that there needs to be a serious examining of what we mean by democracy. What we have at the moment is poorer people having access to really rubbish clothes – clothes that fall apart and shoes that wear through and must be quickly replaced, clothes that go out of fashion quickly and become a source of shame, clothes that are riddled with dangerous chemicals with serious health implications.

Plus on a global scale, the global working class is being completely screwed by fashion – millions of women in the global south are locked into the poverty of sweatshop fac-tories, the Rana Plaza factory collapsing and killing 1,138 people in 90 seconds, workers being gunned down for ask¬ing for a wage rise, seas drying up, forests being cut down, pollutants clogging our rivers.

This fast fashion system exists to benefit people like Armancio Ortega, the owner of Zara who has a personal fortune of $67 billion whilst Bangladeshi workers are paid $68 a month. We have been sold an absolute sham of democracy and the quicker we shut this whole system down and create something based on real democracy and fair¬ness, the better.

PH: Guy Debord in his Society of the Spectacle insisted that under modern conditions life presents itself as ‘an immense accumulation of spectacles’ and ‘images de-tached from everyday life’. Fashion of course is not just im¬ages, but don’t you think that modern celebrity depends on an ‘immense accumulation of images’ to be consumed in magazines, social media etc – and that fashion easily fits into that? So that top fashion models are likely to spend much more time being photographed than walking on the runway? Put it another way, there is the real fashion world of material clothes and design, but an enormous linked and parallel world of fashion photography, magazines, websites, celebrities and gossip, which needs the material fashion but almost outweighs it in cultural significance?

TH: Fashion is definitely an illusionary practice! The clothes themselves are a small part of the business. It is everything that goes around clothes that makes them so highly regarded – from fashion magazines, to the carefully designed stores, to catwalk shows, celebrity endorsements,and the cultivated myths aroundtop designers.

The internet and social media is also changing how brands market their clothes with models more than ever having to turn themselves into brands with selling power of their own.
The most profitable areas of apparel are the intangible ones – design, branding, marketing. It is not in manufac¬turing clothes. Brands outsource all their manufacturing and concentrate on creating an image of a lifestyle that they can sell. One positive side to this is that brands are vulnerable to fear of being damaged. Campaigners and trade unions can have leverage if they successfully target a brand over an issue like fair wages or safety.

That clothes are king is also a myth because a lot of the profit for fashion companies like Burberry now comes from bric-a-brac like keyrings, belts, perfume, makeup, purses, and so on. A £5,000 coat might be unaffordable for most people, but a £100 keyring that makes you feel like you own a bit of glamour and prestige might be within reach. But again this is not something brands want to be known for.

PH: In their writings about popular culture, especially Resistance through Rituals, Stuart Hall and his col¬leagues insisted that popular culture was not just mindless rubbish passively consumed by the masses, but contained the potential to provide the raw materials for the creative self-expression of masses of ordinary, mainly working class, people. Fashion was part of that, for example they wrote about Rude Boys in the 1950s, and Mods and Rockers in the 1960s. But do we see that today and has it happened in recent years – ‘fashion from below’ or fashion as the signifier of rebellious subcultures?

TH: Fashion has a long and powerful history of resistance, one moving example is how people taken to Jamaica as slaves shaped the linen they were given into clothes with a distinctly African aesthetic. The linen was supposed to humiliate them and rob them of their cultural practices but instead it was subverted to keep self-identity and rebellion alive and prevent the required psychic-annihilation.

More recently there has been Sudanese journalist Lubna Ahmed al-Hussein who was put on trial in Sudan for the ‘indecent act’ of wearing trousers. And the explosion of ‘fat-shion’ bloggers who are teaching self-acceptance is definitely outside of media norms. But above all I would say that the hijab in Europe – and now the USA – has become a very real and serious point of rebellion and tension about which way a society will go and whether there is true freedom. The simple act of personal expression through dress has become an act of rebellion.

PH: At the 2014 Super Bowl, Beyoncé led a troupe dressed in sort of ersatz Black Panther outfits, which led to a social media storm between those who thought it legitimate protest (in the light of Black Lives Matter) and those who thought it cheap and inauthentic. What’s your take on this? I guess postmodernists think authenticity is worthless in the era of pastiche and bricolage.

TH: The sight of a troupe of black women with Afros and berets certainly made a lot of people uncomfortable in the USA – and I thought that was an excellent thing. I am a big fan of Beyoncé’s ‘Formation’ track and would like to see more political music that deals with issues of inequality, gun crime, and police violence. Beyoncé – whether as a woman or a brand – is undergoing a fascinating political evolution and I look forward to seeing what happens next. I want ideas about feminism and Black Lives Matter to become so popular that they become normal and unstoppable, and Beyoncé is certainly boosting them up the global agenda.

It also shows the enduring power of the Black Panther ‘brand’ and the tensions that have not been dealt with by American society.

PH: John Berger in Ways of Seeing said that without social envy glamour cannot exist. That’s pretty much putting down fashion to upper class conspicuous consumption, and high fashion at least to be a series of signs that are signifiers of wealth and power. Isn’t the fashion world full of very reactionary people of immense wealth and power, providing luxury items to their class peers? How many socialists will you find among the people invited to a front rank designer’s show?

TH: Class is absolutely the driving factor behind the fashion industry. For centuries fashionable clothing has been a means for wealthy people to differentiate themselves from people they view as beneath them. As soon as a fashion trickles down to the middle classes it becomes a source of horror and the horrified rich are propelled to find something new as a means of differentiating themselves.

The simplest way to prove your wealth is to attach expensive objects to your body and walk around, that is what much of the industry is about. Certainly for many designers they are caught in the milieu of the rich and powerful and will do whatever is required of them – a low point for fashion designers is Paris during the Nazi occupation where designers such as Christian Dior, Cristóbal Balenciaga and the Vuittons all served the occupying Nazi forc¬es. Gabrielle Chanel also did but she seems to have been far more ideologically motivated by fascism.

That said, there is a difference between the fashion industry and fashion itself which I tend to define as changing styles of dress adopted by groups of people. Certainly there exist many brilliant socially minded fashion designers who use their work to advocate for change, Katharine Hamnett being one famous example today and there are countless lesser known people combining design and activism. Historically there are women like Popova and Stepanova, the Bolshevik Russian fashion designers who believed fashion evokes the spirit of the times. Then there are the millions of people who are not part of the scheming at the top but who love fashion either because their present is bleak, as Berger would say, or because it is their true outlet for creativity and joy.

PH: German philosopher Jürgen Habermas claims that the ‘lifeworld’ of the masses has been seized by reactionary popular culture in commodity capitalism, much like the view of Adorno and Horkheimer in the 1960s. For Habermas the masses have been lobotomised and it’s all over for critical thought. Perhaps it’s significant that celebrity culture, so strong today, was also strong in the crisis-ridden 1930s – with the great economic slump, a renewed fascination with the rich and famous. Sections of the masses, especially the young masses, seem to seek continual diversion in following the lives of celebrities. The Instagram and Snapchats feed are endless. So is celebrity culture and its glamour component a new opiate of the people, dulling their critical faculties and preventing critical thought?

TH: “The more monotonous the present, the more the imagination must seize upon the future,” argued John Berger. Many people are stuck in lives and jobs that lack meaning or fulfilment. Celebrity lives are a form of fantasy for people, a distraction from a reality that recently has been overwhelming and pretty dark.

In the 1930s, movie stars dripping in pearls and mink were so far from the reality of the dust-bowl depression and again today £10,000 handbags and private yachts are not something 99% of people will experience. But wealth-hoarding is what people get taught to dream about so that they don’t start thinking about the real reasons they have no money and about how society could be truly fair and equal.

Social media certainly has an extraordinary reach and influence in today’s society and issues like the ‘facebook facelift’ and online bullying are definitely deeply negative. However social media also has the ability to connect people who were previously isolated from likeminded people – whether that’s LGBTQ kids in the Mid-West or people looking for their first protest to attend.

If social media is changing our brain functions and attention spans then that is worrying and I guess it is up to all of us to create things, whether that is books, classes, events, demonstrations, films, music, or discussion groups that are more diverting than Snapchat.

This interview is published in the first issue of Transform, a new journal of the radical left.

Read More…

Source MRzine

Hoskins’ polemic begins with the title.  In British usage “to stitch up” is “to swindle, to overcharge exorbitantly,” according to the Oxford English Dictionary, and Hoskins’ goal is to show the many ways that fashion swindles us all.  Through its own media outlets and its billions of dollars in advertising, the industry creates a glittery illusion of beauty and sophistication.  The reality is a $1.5 trillion industry as grimy and profit-driven as any, and the glossy pages of Vogue conceal a record of human and environmental damage we might expect from coal mining or oil drilling.

Some of Hoskins’ material is familiar: the torture deaths of animals to produce handbags and fur coats, the starvation wages and intolerable work conditions of the young women who stitch our clothes.  We’re less likely to know that the draining of the Aral Sea to irrigate Uzbekistan’s massive cotton fields has produced what Hoskins calls “a diseased rock-salt desert plagued by winds that blow carcinogenic dust into villages.”

The media covered the deaths of 1,133 Bangladeshi workers in the April 2013 collapse at Rana Plaza, but few people are aware of fashion’s connection to an even greater industrial accident.  At least 3,800 people died in the December 1984 explosion at Union Carbide’s chemical plant in Bhopal, India; tens of thousands were injured, and the health effects continue to this day.  The plant had been producing aldicarb, a pesticide largely used in the cultivation of cotton — “a deadly harvest,” Hoskins writes, “to be turned into disposable clothes and goods.”

From Bhopal to the Catwalk

The industry has its victims in the advanced capitalist world as well.  The exploitation of consumers in New York or London is clearly less horrifying than the treatment of workers in Bangladesh, but it remains exploitation.  Frequently using and reinforcing racist and sexist stereotypes, fashion pressures working people here to consume, and to consume more than they can afford.  Women especially are subjected to “constant messages that [they]must diet, must get cosmetic surgery, buy clothes and feel bad about themselves,” Hoskins writes.  And those of us who can resist the omnipresent pressure to buy are still compelled to “dress for success” if we hope to get and hold most types of job.

The exploitation extends even to the industry’s glamorous façade.  While the media fetishize a handful of Photoshopped top models, the young women on the catwalk actually tend be underage, vulnerable immigrants from Eastern Europe and South America, models’ union president Dunja Knezevic tells Hoskins.  These are “girls for whom not having food available for eight hours is acceptable because their mother works in a factory and doesn’t have any food for 12 hours a day,” Knezevic says.  And models aren’t exempt from industrial accidents: between August 2006 and February 2007 three models died from the effects of self-starvation.

Stitched Up would be invaluable just as a reference book on the devastation fashion has inflicted.  But Hoskins isn’t content to expose fashion on paper; she also wants to take it on in the real world.

Consumers in the Global North are generally aware of the issues; they’ve at least heard about the deaths in Bangladesh.  But what can they do?  The most common reaction is to feel guilty and, at the same time, helpless.

Routinely assaulted by the claim that “the consumer is king,” that shoppers control industrial practices through what economists like Paul Samuelson call “dollar votes,” people here feel they have a responsibility as individuals to change the way they shop.  But “ethical consumerism” isn’t easy to carry out in everyday life.  The products that claim to be nonpolluting or sweatshop-free “are often the most expensive on the market,” Hoskins notes, “so ethical consumption is unfortunately deeply class-based.”  We end up in effect “blam[ing]those with the least individual power in society for the destruction of the planet or the existence of sweatshops.”

And how are consumers to know whether the “ethical” products are what their retailers claim they are?  After all, we’re dealing with an industry that specializes in creating illusions.  Hoskins describes how in 2005 a company named NatureWorks LLC emerged to sell Ingeo, a “miracle fabric” advertised to be biodegradable and free from petroleum.  Ingeo turns out to be made largely from genetically modified (GM) corn, developed in a joint venture by Cargill Inc. and Dow Chemical.  Cargill is the world’s largest corn merchant, and its interest in the project seems to be a desire to increase consumer acceptance of GM products.  Dow is of course the producer of napalm and Agent Orange; in 2001 it merged with Union Carbide, inheriting responsibility for the carnage in Bhopal.

From Guilt to Solidarity

This doesn’t mean that there’s no room for action, according to Hoskins — just that “action must not stop at the checkout.”

The media tend to depict garment workers simply as victims, but as Hoskins points out, for more than a century “predominantly female garment workers” have led “some of the bitterest and hardest fought battles of the international labor movement.”  Workers in places like Haiti and Bangladesh need our solidarity far more than our sympathy.  In recent years consumers from the Global North have helped win meaningful changes in the garment industry, but this has happened only when they acted in collective, organized campaigns coordinated with the workers in the Global South.  Here in the United States, for example, groups like United Students Against Sweatshops (USAS) have used focused consumer boycotts on campuses — sometimes just the threat of boycotts — to force major manufacturers to agree to honor demands from workers in the Caribbean Basin.

There are limitations to this strategy.  Hoskins notes that despite recent victories real wages have continued to fall in the garment sector internationally, and she contends, convincingly, that fashion’s crimes are to a large extent inevitable in a capitalist system.  Still, solidarity campaigns “can unite, engage, educate and inspire people,” she writes.  They “have vital parts to play in changing the world and fashioning a new one.”

Stitched Up is a useful and even attractive aid for people ready to take up this challenge.  Its scope is encyclopedic, but the prose is rarely dull; Hoskins’ writing is powerful when describing the industry’s atrocities and witty when exposing its absurdities.  Nothing with so much content is going to be perfect, of course: too many of the footnotes give URLs without further information; the discussion of surplus value seems overstated; and some of the denunciations of capitalism may be unnecessary after Hoskins has already exposed the system’s fundamental faults.

But these are minor problems that can be resolved in later editions — because this is a book that will need to stay in print for years to come.  It may be too much to hope that Stitched Up will do for fashion what Rachel Carson did for pesticides and Jessica Mitford did for funeral homes; this is one slim book against an industry with a powerful machinery of deception.  But at the very least it will be an indispensable handbook for every labor and environmental activist, and for all consumers who wonder what they can do to prevent future Bhopals and Rana Plazas.

Stitched Up: The Anti-Capitalist Book of Fashion by Tansy E. Hoskins is available from Pluto Press here…

Demolishing the fashion industry: interview with Tansy Hoskins

Source: OLR

Karl Marx: Eccentric white-haired bearded theorist and writer. Also mostly pictured wearing black suits. Godfather of anti-capitalism and, despite dying in 1883, recently experiencing a revival thanks to the global financial crisis.

But what does Karl Marx have to do with Karl Lagerfeld? Is it only German heritage and the dedication of their followers that links these two Karls? Why talk about them in the same article? What does fashion have to do with anti-capitalism?

The aim of this article is to give an overview of the fashion industry by exploring how it has been shaped by neoliberalism and blind faith in the markets. What does a deregulated industry look like, what is its impact upon people working inside it and for our planet’s natural resources?

Where are the billions of dollars created by the industry going? Additionally, this piece looks at why individualised solutions –like shopping differently–are proffered as the answer for solving matters like environmental destruction and workers’ rights violations.

Capitalism’s Favourite Child

Fashion is ‘capitalism’s favourite child’.^[1] As far back as 1690, the economist Nicholas Barbon praised fashion for its ability to ‘dress a man as if he lived in a perpetual spring – he never sees the autumn of his cloth’. Unlike other commodities, replaced only once they had worn out, the fashion cycle meant clothing was replaced long before it was necessary. Rather than use value, fashion relies heavily on symbolic value and thus, for Barbon, was ‘the spirit and life of trade’.^[2]

More than three centuries later, fashion runs on a cycle that would make Barbon dizzy. High street shops replace stock up to fifty-two times a year, producing weekly opportunities for new clothes. This accelerated process has been labelled ‘fast fashion’ – a business model that consists of the expedited production and distribution of short runs of trend-based fashion.

Short runs of stock means pressure to buy is increased, since traditional seasonal sales of these items do not happen.^[3] Quickly shifting mass quantities of stock requires it to be sold at a low price, which in turn means it must be made as cheaply as possible.

Brands thus sell clothes that are not of the highest quality, also ensuring that they will wear out and that you will be forced to buy new ones. What has therefore been created is a deregulated, subcontracted, trend-based industry that relies on selling billions of short-life units every season at a maximum profit. This build-up of pressure from short turn-around times and low costs results automatically in intense exploitation of both people and resources in the supply chain.

Workers

Where once the UK and the United States were key manufacturers of apparel, production has now shifted overseas. Fashion retailers do not own the factories where their clothes are made; instead, they hire manufacturers, who hire contractors, who hire subcontractors, who hire garment workers.

It is this extreme level of subcontracting that has allowed retailers to attempt to distance themselves from factory conditions. In fact, as the most powerful player in the fashion system, they have almost total control over factory wages and are directly responsible for the industry’s exploitation.

To have clothes produced so cheaply, manufacturers look for labour markets with large urban workforces where wages are very low and where there are few or no pension, healthcare or insurance obligations. Manufacturers also seek out countries where there is little to no democracy, where organisations like trade unions are either outlawed or curbed, and where there is a state apparatus ready and willing to crack down on any dissent such as strikes or demands for a higher minimum wage.^[4]

From South East Asia to Latin America and Eastern Europe, conditions in fashion’s factories – where 85 percent of staff are women – are grim. In the factories of China’s Pearl River Delta forty thousand fingers are severed each year. In Cambodia, six striking garment workers were recently killed in protests aiming to raise wages up from $61 a month. Garment workers in Bangladesh have just marked the one year anniversary of the Rana Plaza factory collapse. In one of the worst industrial incidents in human history, 1,138 garment workers in Dhaka were crushed to death and another 2,500 seriously injured when a recognised death-trap building containing garment factories collapsed. It was a building that Primark had twice inspected and certified as a safe working environment.

Mothers whose children died when Rana Plaza collapsed gather at the factory. Picture: Tansy Hoskins

In terms of production levels there is one clear winner of the global apparel export race, and that is China. The size of China’s fashion industry becomes apparent if you consider that the next six exporters (Turkey, Bangladesh, India, Vietnam, Indonesia and Mexico) produce just half of China’s output between them.^[5] This is despite the fact that China is no longer the cheapest place to produce apparel. Wages continue to rise slowly but manufacturers have stayed because China is a reliable source of quality goods. In April 2014, China experienced its largest strikes in recent history when at least forty thousand sports shoe workers at Yue Yuan in Guangdong province walked out over insufficient social insurance and housing payments. Yue Yuan is the world’s largest manufacturer of sports shoes, supplying Nike, Adidas and Reebok, amongst many others.

Planet

In 1977, 31 million tonnes of textiles were produced worldwide; by 2007 this figure had risen to 80 million tonnes, the vast majority of which was destined for the fashion industry. This mammoth production requires 132 million tonnes of coal and 9 trillion litres of water.^[6] It is an intensely wasteful process that leaves nearly all the water unusable: the Chinese textile industry is ranked as the third worst water polluter of all China’s industries.^[7] This short-termist economic model of treating the environment as a free resource has been possible whilst oil and clean water supplies have been abundant. But as resources shrink and ecological flashpoints increase, fashion – and capitalism itself – can be seen as an economy of unpaid costs.^[8]

Humanity’s ecological debt to nature is huge and, if nothing changes, may ultimately be paid back at a terrifying price. This became startlingly clear at the start of October 2014 when NASA announced that the Aral Sea in Central Asia had completely dried up. The Aral Sea was once the world’s fourth largest lake, home to twenty-four species of fish and surrounded by fishing communities and lush forests and wetlands. Whilst the lake was salt water, the rivers that fed it were fresh water. In the 1950s the Soviet Union began using the rivers to irrigate the surrounding agricultural area, a process that has been continued to this day by Uzbekistan’s brutal dictator Islam Karimov. The crop being watered is cotton – 1.47 million hectares of cotton.^[9] A hugely water intensive crop, one cotton shirt uses up to 2,700 litres.^[10] The exposure of the bottom of the lake has released salts and pesticides into the atmosphere poisoning both farm land and people alike. Carcinogenic dust is blown into villages causing throat cancers and repertory diseases.^[11]

The harvest, which takes place each autumn, is another horror story. On top of the environmental devastation, this is cotton picked using forced labour. Every year hundreds of thousands of people are systematically sent to work in the fields by the government. In 2013 there were eleven deaths during the harvest, including a six year old child, Amirbek Rakhmatov, who suffocated to death after falling asleep on a cotton truck. The cotton crop provided then President Karimov with the majority of his export earnings whilst his human rights abuses went uncriticised by such allies as the US and the UK. Having been processed and sold to manufacturers in Bangladesh and China, Uzbek cotton garments are sold in Europe and the US. The case of the Aral Sea is emblematic of fashion’s vampiric relationship with the planet. A relationship hidden behind a glitzy façade and by labels in clothing that tell us less than nothing about the providence of each item.

Monopoly Money

Whilst this façade of creativity and choice hides the reality of production, it also hides fashion’s 1 percent – the corporations and CEOs who reap the benefits of the industry’s social and environmental degradation. Three of the Forbes ‘Top Ten Billionaires’ list are fashion retail moguls. The fourth richest person in the world is Amancio Ortega who as founder of Inditex, home of high street favourite Zara, has a fortune of $61.8 billion. At number eight is Christy Walton of the Walton family, owners of Walmart which makes annual profits of $17 billion. And at number ten is Bernard Arnault, owner of 60 luxury brands, who has a personal fortune of $35 billion. Also notable is number sixteen Stefan Persson, Chair of H&M, who has a net worth of $32 billion – with which he bought an entire English village in 2009 for £25 million.

Global sales of luxury goods stand at $150 billion per year. Of this $150 billion, 60 percent goes to just thirty-five companies.^[12] Arnault’s corporation LVMH controls the most – from Louis Vuitton to Christian Dior, Givenchy and Marc Jacobs. Then there is Kering which owns Gucci, Saint Laurent, Alexander McQueen, Stella McCartney and so on. Whilst fashion appears to be an endless variety of options with which to craft and display your identity, this illusion disguises its unhealthy concentration in the hands of a narrow demographic.

The same is true of the high street. Giant corporations own dozens of brands – many of which appear to be competitors. Arcadia, owned by tax-exemption billionaire Philip Green, controls Topshop, Dorothy Perkins, and Miss Selfridge amongst many others.

Fashion magazines are also a multibillion-pound web of media brands monopolised by a few giant multinational corporations. The Condé Nast portfolio of media brands is the most striking, with Vogue, Vanity Fair and the journal Women’s Wear Daily amongst many others, but other conglomerates like Hearst and AOL have subsumed the rest of the market. Again we have an illusion of choice hiding media brands espousing the same values and owned by the same corporations. Whilst monopolies in other sectors cause prices to rise and standards to drop, what happens when our received ideas, culture and information are dominated by just a few companies?

Ideology

In ‘Part One’ of The German Ideology, Karl Marx wrote:

The ideas of the ruling class are in every epoch the ruling ideas, i.e. the class which is the ruling material force of society, is at the same time its ruling intellectual force… The ruling ideas are nothing more than the ideal expression of the dominant material relationships.^[13]

Strikingly relevant to the fashion industry, this passage illuminates an industry held aloft by ideas designed to exclude and exploit the vast majority of the world. The ideology of the industry exists to maintain the status quo of billionaires and monopolised ownership. For instance, implicit in the fashion industry is the idea that while the ruling classes of Paris, Milan, London and New York ‘do fashion’, everyone else (for example, Lagos, Mumbai, Rio de Janeiro) just ‘does apparel’.  This instantly creates a national, racial and class hierarchy, which relegate the vast majority of the world to a subordinate cultural status – and which allows for the guiltless exploitation of millions of people in the Global South.

Protecting supremacy means protecting the idea that you are supreme. This applies to global fashion houses like Chanel, to fashion hubs located in powerful centres of industrial capital like New York, and to the ruling class. They must protect the fashion industry because not only is it a source of huge financial wealth, it is also a key method of differentiation and of proving supremacy. As Quentin Bell wrote in 1947: ‘the simplest and most obvious manner of displaying wealth is to take the greatest possible number of valuable objects and attach them to the wearer’s person.’^[14]

King Consumer?

Our wardrobes are the meeting point for two premises: that the fashion industry is responsible for widespread devastation and misery, and that it is our behaviour as consumers that is to blame. Clothing is presented to us as a question of individual choice. If you buy the ‘good’ clothes you are good, if you buy the ‘bad’ clothes you are bad. This mistaken method of viewing the world ignores all the factors that define ‘choice’ – the primary one being class. It also allows for an enormous transfer of blame. Emphasis on individual consumption means blaming the least powerful entities in the fashion equation. Thus sweatshops become not the fault of capitalism and giant multinational corporations, but of teenagers shopping in Primark.

It is no coincidence that we have been steered into a dead-end of viewing clothing as an issue of the individual. This goes right to the heart of neoliberalism – a system that teaches us that empowerment comes from acting independently (not collectively), that freedom means variety in what we consume, and that we should trust in the system and shop (not fight) our way to a new world. It is a way of thinking that neatly obscures the role of capitalism – the same old economic system that has wreaked havoc on people and planet for centuries. It is a way of thinking with some obvious beneficiaries.

Living neoliberalism in the early twenty-first century means being witness to an increase in corporate power accompanied by the idea that the opposite is true.^[15] The narrative today is that companies listen, that they can be tamed by consumer spending and be made ‘ethical’. A rhetoric of democracy acting as a screen for exploitation.

As Naomi Klein explained in her seminal book No Logo: ‘every company with a powerful brand is attempting to develop a relationship with consumers that resonates so completely with their sense of self.’^[16] Take for example the ‘green’ lines brought out by H&M or the feminist protest (or faux-test) staged by Chanel at the most recent Paris Fashion Week.

From Rana Plaza to the Aral Sea there is irrefutable evidence of the toll the fashion industry takes on the world. This is the direct consequence of a deregulated, subcontracted industry grounded in the inequalities of capitalism. Yet pushing the idea that the same system that created this catastrophe is the one that is going to get us out of this mess, and that more shopping is what is required to free us, is the perfect route to ensure nothing ever changes. It is a solution more concerned with saving capitalism than saving the planet.

Bangladeshi garment workers who have unionised their factory at NGWF demonstration. Picture: Tansy Hoskins

An author, campaigner and journalist, Tansy Hoskins writes for the Guardian, New Statesman and the Business of Fashion. Her book Stitched Up: The Anti-Capitalist Book of Fashion (Pluto Press, 2014) is winner of the ICA Bookshop Book of the Year 2014. As a political commentator she is passionate about discussing fashion, politics and change and has done so on Woman’s Hour, BBC Breakfast, BBC World Service and Channel 4’s Ten O’Clock Live.

^[1]        Giannino Malossi (ed.), The Style Engine (New York: Monacelli Press, 1998), p. 68.
^[2]        Nicholas Barbon, A Discourse of Trade (London: 1690) <http://www.marxists.org/reference/subject/economics/barbon/trade.htm> [accessed 24 January 2015].
^[3]        Gerard P. Cachon & Robert Swinney, ‘The Value of Fast Fashion: Quick response, enhanced design, and customer behaviour’, Management Science, 57.4 (April 2011), 778-95.
^[4]        Robert Ross, Slaves to Fashion: Poverty and Abuse in the New Sweatshops (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2004), p. 103.
^[5]        Olivier Cattaneo, Gary Gereffi and Cornelia Staritz, Global Value Chains in a Postcrisis World: A Development Perspective (Washingdon, DC: World Bank, 2010), p. 159.
^[6]        Lucy Siegle, To Die For: Is Fashion Wearing Out The World? (London: Fourth Estate, 2011), pp. 105-6.
^[7]        Institute of Public and Environmental Affairs (IPE), Beijing, China.
^[8]        John Bellamy Foster, Ecology Against Capitalism (New York: Monthly Review Press, 2002), p. 57.
^[9]        ‘The Aral Sea Crisis’, Environmental Justice Foundation <http://archive.today/QRrp> [accessed 24 January 2015].
^[10]       ‘The hidden cost of water’, World Wildlife Fund <http://www.wwf.org.uk/what_we_do/rivers_and_lakes/the_hidden_cost_of_water.cfm> [accessed 24 January 2015].
^[11]       ‘The Cost of Cotton: Dirty Cotton’, People & Planet <http://peopleandplanet.org/redressfashion/briefing/dirty> [accessed 24 January 2015].
^[12]       R. T. Naylor, Crass Struggle: Greed, Glitz, and Gluttony in a Wanna-Have World (London: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2011), p. 372.
^[13]       Karl Marx, The German Ideology [1846] ( Moscow: Progress, 1968), see also <http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1845/german-ideology>.
^[14]       Quentin Bell, On Human Finery (London: Hogarth Press, 1947; rev. edn Allison & Busby, 1992).
^[15]       Juliet Schor, ‘In Defence of Consumer Critique: Revisiting the Consumption Debates of the Twentieth Century’, Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science, 611 (May 2007), 16-30.
^[16]       Naomi Klein, No Logo: No Space, No Choice, No Jobs (London: Flamingo, 2001), p. 149

Source: Business of Fashion

On the surface, the recycling of used clothes, often charitably donated, means old garments don’t go to waste, while new owners get a bargain. It seems like a “win-win” situation that couldn’t be more ethically sound. And as the Christmas season approaches, millions of Westerners will soon flock to charity shops to donate their second-hand clothes.

But on closer inspection, the reselling of clothes is more complex than one might think, posing difficult questions for those hoping to do good by donating their old clothes.

Contrary to its homespun image, the second-hand clothing industry is dominated by what Dr Andrew Brooks and Prof David Simon at the University of London have called “hidden professionalism.” The majority of donated clothing is sold to second-hand clothing merchants, who sort garments, then bundle them in bales for resale, usually outside the country in which the clothing was originally donated.

One key market is sub-Saharan Africa, where a third of all globally donated clothes are sold. In a paper entitled “Unravelling the Relationships between Used-Clothing Imports and the Decline of African Clothing Industries,” Brooks and Simon quote a representative of UK-based anti-poverty organisation Oxfam Wastesaver, who states that 300 bales of second-hand clothing can be sold in Africa for around £25,000 (about $40,000 at current exchange rates), while transport costs are just £2,000.

Even taking into account the costs of things like collection and processing, these numbers suggest that the selling of second-hand clothing can be a lucrative affair, especially as the clothing being sold has often been charitably donated for free. While exact figures are scarce, in 2009, used clothing exports from OECD countries were worth $1.9 billion, according to the United Nations Commodity Trade Statistics Database.

But it’s not just the “hidden professionalism” of the used clothing business — and the resulting gap between costs and resale prices — that hurts markets like sub-Saharan Africa. The flood of castoffs collected via second-hand clothing schemes (along with the rise of cheap Chinese apparel imports) have also helped to undermine Africa’s own fledgling textiles and clothing manufacturing industry, says Cambridge economist Ha-Joon Chang.

The second-hand clothing market has a negative impact in donor markets, as well. Consumers in the global North throw away vast quantities of clothing every year. In the UK, for example, people dump 1.4 million tonnes of clothing into landfills, annually. To combat dumping, charities and local governments have increasingly instituted clothing recycling programmes. But, ultimately, recycling tackles the symptom not the cause — and gives consumers a false sense of security that the rate at which they are consuming and disposing of clothing is at all sustainable.

The truth is, “fast fashion” is a deeply unsustainable model. And by emphasising recycling rather than tackling the root cause of why people continue to buy and dispose of larger and larger quantities of lighter, thinner and less well-made clothing, consumers are reassured that they can continue shopping as normal.

“There is now this notion that fashion is just a commodity, and that we are just consumers,” laments Dilys Williams, director of the Centre for Sustainable Fashion at the London College of Fashion. “It doesn’t do justice to us or to fashion. Fashion should be about cherishing clothes and creating an identity, [but today it’s]based on constant adrenalin and the excitement of purchasing. There is no anticipation or dreaming. Nothing lasts or is looked after. We each have a mini-landfill in our closets.”

But why stop and think when the charity shop or recycling bank is there to take care of the mess?

It provides the perfect facade of choice and empowerment when in reality its beating heart  is not creativity but profit.

Source: New Statesman

In 1844 Friedrich Engels, co-author of the Communist Manifesto as well as a factory owner’s son, described the most common factory accident in the cotton mills of Manchester: “the squeezing off of a single joint of a finger”. Entire fingers, hands and arms were also trapped and lost in the machines – often followed by infection, then death. Workers, many of them children, faced constant ill-health from breathing fibrous dust, and deformities from the repetitive nature of machine work. A particularly horrible but not uncommon cause of death was being caught in the straps that powered the machines: “Whoever is seized by the strap is carried up with lightening speed, thrown against the ceiling above and floor below with such force that there is rarely a whole bone left in the body,” wrote Engels. “Death follows instantly.”

The Manchester cotton industry – dependent on cotton grown and picked by African slaves – began the mechanised mass production of textiles and fashion. Fast forward through the same industry for one hundred and seventy years and what do we find? The Manchester mills are now luxury flats and manufacturing has travelled overseas. Yet industry standards are as low as ever – if not worse.

The Pearl River Delta is a colossal industrial zone in China covering nine cities. It recently saw the largest strikes in recent Chinese history as more than 30,000 workers took action against Yue Yuen, a sports shoe supplier for Nike and Adidas located in Guangdong. Despite its deceptively lovely name, the Pearl River Delta is also famed as the place where 40,000 fingers are lost or broken each year in industrial accidents. Engels would have recognised such factories.

Nor has it become any easier to breathe in fashion’s factories since Engels wrote of fibrous dust causing “blood spitting, noisy breathing, pains in the chest, coughs, sleeplessness…ending in the worst cases in consumption (TB).” Guangdong is responsible for half the world’s production of blue jeans. Sandblasting is used to distress jeans. The dust this produces enters the lungs of workers sanding for 15 hours a day and causes the deadly lung disease silicosis.

To the west of China, Cambodian garment workers are paid $61 a month and are gunned down and imprisoned for striking to gain an increase. In Bangladesh, the fashion industry recently presided over one of the worst industrial incidents in human history when 1,138 workers were crushed to death at Rana Plaza having been forced inside the unsafe factory. A year on from the tragedy those affected are still waiting for compensation.

As an illustration of how capitalism operates, fashion is perfect. The inequality and exploitation are straight out of the past. Just as Queen Victoria wore dresses stitched by seamstresses who went blind in the candlelight, so today’s society it-girls now wear dresses stitched by Romanian sweatshop workers paid 99p an hour.

Society is as it is because capitalism requires inequality. The fashion industry makes this painfully clear. Giant monopolies make billions in corporate profits because millions live on poverty pay and at permanent risk of maiming and death. Corporations purposefully choose countries and factories where wages are very low, pensions and sick leave are non-existent, and the people in charge will keep it this way.

In corporate terms, the “fashion” part of all this is just an excuse for exploitation. It provides the perfect facade of choice and empowerment. It gives the impression that we are all in this together, that we are somehow part of H&M or Gap and have control over the corporations. The glossy idea of “fashion” hides the labour of millions of deeply exploited labourers. It hides the terrifying environmental impact of fashion, and the sexism, racism, and alienation enshrined in the industry. It hides too the cultural lock-down that we find ourselves in, the dictation of our common cultural heritage by a handful of white male European shareholders.

Fashion allows exploitation to pretend to be something else, when in fact the beating heart of the fashion industry is not creativity but profit. To understand this, you need look no further than the writings of Marx and Engels, more than a century ago.

Tansy E Hoskins is the activist author of Stitched Up: The Anti-Capitalist Book of Fashion.

¡No pasaran! Confronting the Rise of the Far-Right

2 March 2019  ¡NO PASARAN! Conference in London to organise against Europe-wide rise of the far-right. Bringing together activists, MPs, campaigners from across Europe.

Details and registration…