No Sweat resonated deeply with me, so much so that I spent the whole of Friday and Saturday reading most of the articles and the interviews between its covers. Clichéd as it sounds, and often unabashedly sensationalist as the book was, No Sweat was one of those books that will actually change some aspect of the way one lives and in particular provoke one to be more critical of one’s consumption habits. It places fashion and production/issues of labour in conversation with each other, something which the fashion industry today has so effectively managed to dissociate. For this last reading response, I’ll engage a little with our readings from No Sweat before considering what implications this may have for neo-colonialism, feminism, and fashion, and ponder what we might do as consumers about the situation. This book really puts all we’ve been talking about this semester – the possibility of agency through consumption, recuperating female pleasure through shopping etc – into perspective.
McRobbie’s article summarizes and traces how the shift in feminist discourse from the 1970s to the 1990s maps a concurrent blindsiding of problematic issues of labour and production alongside the increasing celebration of shopping and consumption. 70’s feminists critiqued women’s fashion consumption – from its exploitative conditions of production, to fashion’s representation of women, to the insidiousness of women’s consumer culture itself. Then, McRobbie writes, the possibility of recuperating fashion consumption and female shopping pleasure as legitimate practices in feminist discourse, began in the mid-80s. The subversive and empowering pleasures accessed by women through shopping were celebrated. But along with this impulse, came silencing of the question of where the clothes came from and under what conditions they were produced. Pessimistic arguments about neo-colonial exploitation through transnational labour industries became a Pandora’s box with no hope for solution, and therefore a blight on the celebration of women and consumption. But McRobbie warns against the loss of political valance in this shift, arguing that we ought not to celebrate the agency of the clothes buyer/wearer when it means the silencing of the women who make the clothes. I am completely with her on her call for a feminist framework which accounts for both women’s shopping pleasures as well as pessimistic truths about the labour behind the clothes.
Such a question becomes pertinent with the shift in the fashion industry toward mass-produced “designer” fashion – as embodied by Tommy Hilfiger, Ralph Lauren, Steve Madden and the host of L.A. sweatshop produced designer denim (I’m sure J Brand, Current/Elliott, AG don’t have their hands clean all having their factories in the L.A. area). The practice of “downsizing” and sub-contracting, incentivised for American companies through the Reagan and Bush administration since the 80s, means that the manufacturing of clothing and its accompanying issues of labour exploitation are hidden from scrutiny halfway across the globe. The increasing ethnic paranoia in the U.S. and the demonisation of immigrants as an assault on (white) America drives matrices of illegal labour deeper underground. Even though illegal immigrants provide the very foundations for labour on which the country’s capitalist system is predicated on (involved as they are in manufacturing and labour intensive work), their transgressions as “illegals” take precedence in the public eye before their rights as workers. Whilst we celebrate increasing access to greater variety in clothes, and whilst we might discuss clothing as enabling expressions of female agency and identity and “resistance”, how can we in all decency do so knowing under what conditions these avatars for agency were produced? As Paul Smith writes, identity though style ought to be thought of in relation to production. I wish there could be a way to celebrate both female consumption pleasures whilst also remaining politically active on the part of the sweatshop labourers who make these pleasures possible.
McRobbie has suggested several ways in which this gulf between consumption and production might be breached. One of the most resounding comments she offers is the need to dissociate fashion from just art in the training of new designers, or at least, be clear about fashion as a production and labour process. In addition, various writers in the book, including McRobbie have suggested the boycotting of labels assosciated with sweatshops. But I wonder, how does boycotting sweatshop produced labels help the workers?
No doubt I completely agree with this move, and will work at implementing it in my own shopping. But I wonder if thinking that a bad rep, boycotts, and dropping sales is all it takes, or is even an effective strategy, in doing good for the garment workers and put an end to labour exploitation. I don’t wish to be pessimistic but factory closures due to consumer boycotts does not pay the garment worker, nor replace her job. Lets take the case of Guess for instance. After public criticism of its involvement in sweatshop labour in Los Angeles in the mid-90s, Guess moved its factories to Mexico. Nike is known to move its factories from South Korea, Vietnam, and Indonesia after changing labour laws and their enforcement. And it would be naïve to think that “third world” governments, for fear of losing foreign investments to competing countries, would crack down on labour codes. Corruption between officials and manufactures is the norm rather than the exception. My ex-boyfriend from Malaysia (which is not even by any means “third-world” and I do detest that term), factors in bribes for officials into his plans for developing a hotel. It is true when McKenzie Wark argues that low-skilled labour will not lead to long-term economic growth. However, short term foreign investments into the country provide much needed relief from an overtaxed system too deeply entrenched in structural problems and a history of colonial exploitation, to be thinking of long-term development.
In addition, entire regions in large developing countries are reliant on the garment industry and on producing products for First world consumption. This reliance is one deliberately embedded within the country’s economic and political structure – through imperial history and the creation of channels of Eastern production for Western consumption, through neo-colonial processes of transnational “sub-contracting”, and though deliberate political measures to gear a country’s economy toward the service of Western metropoles particularly the U.S. (e.g. Reagan and Nicaragua). The rhetoric of informed consumption and boycotts, though romantic and enabling to the Western consumer (and certainly well-meaning), should not be considered near helpful enough. Before we can dream of ending the garment industry's involvement with exploited labour in such countries, we must first ensure their ability to survive independent of the whims of U.S. demands, or at least more autonomously from this transnational ball and chain. And this would be a utopic situation I cannot even begin to imagine in today’s world.
I wonder if all the rhetoric on being informed and discerning consumers, though certainly necessary, takes the attention away once again from larger and far more complex problems underlying sweat labour. Just because we stop buying sweat-made clothes doesn’t end the problem. This is not just a problem for the fashion industry to solve, but one in which an understanding of its complexities involves conversation with political history, imperialism, neo-colonialism, immigration, race politics, government, and a critique of capitalism itself as a failing system.
