I am often asked why I don’t ‘go into business’ selling my
clothes. These questions arise more
often just after I have finished a collection for a school project, or have
completed a new historical outfit. They are
often prefaced by the compliment that my work is so good, I could make good
money at it. Then I ask what people
would pay for the skirt I’m wearing, and inevitably they come up short.
So let’s break down the cost of the skirt I am wearing right
this moment. It was designed as part of
my MA thesis collection and is based on research on Vivienne Westwood’s Bondage
wear, an integral part of the early Punk scene in the UK. The denim fabric cost
15$/metre, and there is about a metre in the skirt, if I cut very carefully.
Then there is about another 20$ worth of notions; the buckles, vintage buttons,
waistband tape, zipper, hem tape, thread. The skirt itself took two days to
sew. If I was to charge just 10$/hour, that’s 160$. So the skirt cost, at
minimum, almost 200$. Questions arise in
my mind when I lay out the figures like this. First one is that I am worth far
more than just 10$/hour. I have a Master’s degree and almost 30 years of
experience. And so I ask how much money the person asking for this skirt makes
in their job? How about their Dad? What should a person earn who has a Master’s
degree and 30 years’ experience?
And then, what would Walmart charge for a denim skirt?
Cotton is one of the most expensive fibres to process, both
financially, but also expensive for the environment. The amount of pesticides
used on cotton fields would make any hipster vomit at the idea. It is often
produced in Third World countries where environmental concerns are non-existent,
so who cares about the environment, or the farmer? Farmers of cotton live with
this every day, and they only earn pennies for the cotton crops they produce.
Yes, pennies. The cotton crop is then sent to another Third World country for
processing. Indigo in its natural form is too expensive, so synthetic indigo is
used for dying cotton denim. The excess
dye is often dumped into the local water source to be taken ‘away’. The
processors are also often only paid pennies for the cloth they have produced. That
processing includes scrubbers, dyers, weavers, and finishers, before the fabric
is ready to be cut into pieces to be made into clothing. The finished fabric is
then sent to Bangladesh to be made into jeans and other denim clothes. The film
we are currently watching, The Last Train,
is an older film. Manufacturers are now
sending contracts to Bangladesh because the work can be done even cheaper, and
yes, the labour and environmental laws are non-existent. The machine operators
who construct our clothes are paid by the piece, usually fractions of cents per
seam. They sit at sewing machines all
day and sew one seam of the garment, often for years, one. Seam. This works out
to roughly 10$/month in salary. Then when the cost of their meals and housing
is deducted from that wage, you get the drift. Garment workers in Bangladesh
cannot afford the clothes they create, they don’t earn enough money. All the
clothes they make are sent to western markets, where we buy them at Walmart,
Forever 21, H&M, for rock bottom prices. And I am not even going to dig
into how little sales associates are paid to work in those stores and sell you
those clothes.
The clothes we buy are what is known as ‘Fast Fashion’. High
turnover of styles in stores feeds an appetite for more. Our clothes are only
supposed to last 10 weeks before we are expected to throw them away because
they have become too worn out, or too out of fashion. Often times, North
Americans will only wear an item of clothing once before it goes into the
trash, or sent to the second hand market. Fashion is the second dirtiest
industry in the world, second only to oil. Think about that for a second.
There is an internet full of articles on the subject of fast
fashion, I’ll give you a quick link to a good one here http://jcooper.co.uk/fast-fashion-toxic-facts/
to start you off. There are far too many reasons to dwell on why I don’t ‘go
into business’ and sell my clothes, but the main reason is that we’ve been
conditioned to think we can only afford fast fashion, and so, you cannot afford
me.
And then I ask again, can we really afford Walmart?
No comments:
Post a Comment