The history of the fashion industry that this chapter has detailed is implicated in the present, in terms of who makes fashion, where, and how. Fashion is a glamorous industry with a “dual nature” that conceals a “life of corrosive toil for the workers hidden from sight. The glamour seems almost separate from exploitation.”135 In the late
nineteenth and early twentieth century as ready-to-wear began to grow, so did the
reliance on exploited sweatshop labor – usually young women - in Western cities. In the United States the 1911 Triangle garment factory in New York killed 146 of its employees when the owners locked the doors to prevent theft, mobilizing anti-sweatshop activists to fight for more progressive labor laws. They were able to attain them, and the garment industry in cities like New York was for many years a decent way to make a living. However, as the industry became increasingly corporatized and American culture shifted to demanding cheaper clothes, companies started to look for cheaper suppliers. To demonstrate the shift in the U.S. clothing industry consider that the United States started to import cotton in the 1950s, and even in 1965 imports were less than five percent of all clothing. Yet by 2010 only about two percent of apparel is made in the U.S. Clothing is produced in poorer countries where companies place immense pressure on factories to produce forever-falling prices by selling cheap and producing quickly on shorter
deadlines. In 2005 the Multi Fibre Arrangement (MFA), a worldwide quota system that limited the number of clothing exports from developing countries into industrialized
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ones, expired. Not coincidentally, it was around this time that fast fashion retailers expanded their retailers all over the world. That same year, “Chinese cotton trousers exported to the United States leapt by an unreal 1,500 percent and shipments of cotton knit shirts were up to 1,350 percent; meanwhile sixteen thousand U.S. textile jobs were lost and at least eighteen factories closed that year.”136
Although exploited labor has become synonymous with China, in recent years China’s increasing wages and better working conditions have forced companies to look elsewhere – namely to Bangladesh. In 2011-2012, garments represented nearly 80 percent of the country’s manufacturing export income of $19.1, making it the second largest exporter of apparel in the world. Yet despite the industry’s rapid growth in the last thirty years, Bangladeshi workers are still the lowest paid garment workers in the world, earning on average $37 a month – far below the living wage of $120 that is needed for basic household necessities. Workers’ efforts to organize for better pay and safety regulations are all but outlawed. In April 23, 2013, an eight-story building in the Rana Plaza building in Savar, Bangladesh collapsed, killing over 1,000 people and injuring more than 2,500. Although it is easy to blame the factory owners, who had deemed the factory safe the day before, one must consider that low prices in the garment industry are, after all, the country’s best selling point in the global economy. So suppliers cut their prices at the expense of their workers, who are paid poverty wages and made to work excessive hours. Factory owners, pressured by their buyers, often find their efforts to invest in factory safety undermined by the pressure to reduce costs.137
136 (Cline, 2012, 55)
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This neoliberal capitalist governmentality has also been disastrous for workers in the U.S., where workers, usually immigrants in cities like L.A. and New York, are forced to work for low wages in an effort to compete with offshore prices.138 Smaller designers
and independent companies also struggle to find affordable factory resources, and to charge prices that are fair while also generating profits. This is an especially difficult task in a fashion landscape dominated by ‘fast fashion,’ which, as mentioned previously, is a method of retailing in which trendy clothes are produced at much lower than its competitors at a very high turnover. This method of production has catastrophic consequences for the environment and for our bodies. For example, the average U.S. citizen throws away 68 pounds of clothing per year, with 2.5 billion pounds of post- consumer textile waste ending up in our landfills annually. The process of clothing production is itself toxic, as more than 8,000 toxic chemicals, many of which are carcinogenic, corrosive or include biologically modifying reagents, are used to turn raw materials into textiles. In fact, a recent study of 20 name brands revealed that clothing companies like Calvin Klein, Levi’s and Zara, contain traces of hazardous, potentially cancer-causing chemicals.139
Most consumers, however, are shockingly unaware of the human and
environmental consequences of their consumption. Images from tragedies such as Rana serve as a harsh reminder of what happens when we treat humans as just numbers, or as simply ‘cheap labor’ within a global supply chain that feeds the consumption patterns of the United States and European Union by delivering low-cost clothing from Bangladeshi
138 (Cline, 2012, 48) 139 (Dawisha, 2012)
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factories to stores in the Global North. It is an industry that operates according to a logic of distance, in which a consumer is so removed from the condition under which a producer labors that they are less likely to have awareness, let alone any motivation to protest.
X. Conclusion
One hundred years after the Triangle Shirtwaist factory, we are once again at a cultural moment in which human rights are being violated and major reform is needed. This chapter has provided historical context on the creation, marketing, and production of fashion, and how fashion’s disciplinary power is constantly re-articulating itself to
reinforce power systems, making intervention difficult. In subsequent chapters, I will be exploring how different agents in the fashion industry employ a diverse range of practices and tools to close this distance between producer and consumer, creative and non-
creative worker. The following chapter will focus on social media as a particularly timely strategy.
102 Chapter Three
Fashion as a Site for Constituting and Intervening in the Fashion Media Complex I. Introduction
In 2011, an article on Reuters titled “Fashion Bloggers to Spur Online Luxury Sales”1 reflected the changing nature of the fashion industry, in which the influence of
fashion critics like Suzy Menkes and magazine editors such as Vogue’s Anna Wintour was being questioned by an increasingly influential fashion blogosphere. This “fashion democratization” was at turns hailed by some as proof that fashion had become easily accessible to everyone, and criticized by others for allowing too many ‘amateurish’ voices into the fashion landscape.2 As fashion bloggers became increasingly visible, with
young teens such as Tavi Gevinson awarded front row seats at fashion shows, so did the critiques leveled at these new fashion critics. Some media outlets, from The New York Times3 to The Business of Fashion,4 questioned whether bloggers were really the “authentic, democratic” voices that they claimed to be, as it became ever more evident that lines between editorial content and advertising were becoming increasingly blurred.
To that end, this chapter will examine the fashion media complex, which draws from hidden or unexamined discourses of governmentality grounded in marketing and
1 (Cianco, 2011) 2 (Pham, 2010) 3 (La Ferla, 2012) 4 (Berlinger, 2014)
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advertising. Media and technology can fuel this discourse through product placement and the blogosphere, but can also disrupt it through these mediums. At stake is the economic, cultural, and social significance of the fashion media fashion complex, and I hope to argue for its political and organizing potential.
The chapter will dissect the socio-historical context that presaged this current cultural moment, beginning with the rise of the fashion magazine and the role of other media – such as television – in rearticulating advertising and the interaction between producers and consumers. I will focus also on product placement and the case of Gossip Girl as an example of efforts by advertisers to blur the boundaries between product advertising and program content, thereby increasing the labor extracted from consumers. Then the chapter will discuss the contested ‘democratized’ space of the fashion
blogosphere and to what extent it can serve as a site of political, feminist, class, and race struggle when operating within neo-liberal boundaries.
II. Advertising: From Magazines to Television, how marketing helped to shape the