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Clothing, in our troubled modernity, is considered a rather trivial thing.It’s super easy to buy, wear and throw away without thinking.Perhaps in the face of climate change, the threat of nuclear war, and the lingering shadow of a global pandemic, cloth is relatively irrelevant.But a new book and a (perhaps unexpected) TV series about post-apocalyptic America offer a striking philosophical contrast: The way we make fabrics shapes our societies and environments, for better or worse.
Let’s start with Sofi Thanhauser’s Worn: A People’s History of Clothing, published earlier this year.In it, she argues that much of the history of human conflict (and even climate change) has to do with the capitalist evolution of the textile industry.
Worn began with meticulous linen craftsmanship in Shakespeare’s day, a time when even a modest, minimal wardrobe — which took weeks to knit and sew — would be far more than the bosom that contained it.From there, she took us on a world-wide tour of cotton, from pesticide-soaked, water-sucking fields in West Texas to sprawling factories in southern India.The process is logically familiar: we laboriously make things by hand, then we figure out how to make them with machines, and then we use those machines to exploit people for very little pay to make large quantities of goods.
Much of Worn is actually about labor inequality, the disparities that emerge when the few get rich through the suffering of the many.For example, about a quarter of the way through this comprehensive book, she makes an eye-opening assertion that the “industrial revolution” — the most annoying of all our current climate problems — “is A fabric revolution.” Cotton mill owners, textile executives and silk merchants became rich, while those who hand-woven, sewed and dyed fabrics lived in pure poverty.“Promoters of industrialization celebrated factory work as the savior of poor rural women, but failed to acknowledge that their poverty was a direct result of the destruction of a once successful and sophisticated textile culture,” Tannhauser wrote.
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It’s a complex argument that is the subject of the current debate: why hasn’t widespread industrialization freed us from long, strenuous work hours?Few of us long to return to the days when we had to shear wool, spin wool into wool, and knit wool into sweaters if we wanted to keep warm in the winter.But it is not a controversial claim to say that the mechanization of garment production has brought huge profits and improved the quality of life for some, while pushing millions into poverty.
This power dynamic has proven extremely difficult to overturn.In the rayon factories that sprung up in the Appalachian foothills in the early 20th century, factory workers—nearly all of them women, many of them teenagers—had suffered from extremely low wages and toxic fumes of carbon disulfide.The ingredient used in the manufacture of rayon is so potent that it causes fainting on the factory floor.Tannhauser describes how an organized strike by union workers in North Carolina in 1929 found itself against “a combined force of industrialists, civic leaders, local law enforcement, the press, the National Guard, and the terror of law enforcement” – Brutal clashes a few days later that failed to bring any benefit to the workers.
When you delve into the history of garment production, it’s clear that the fabrics we drape on — and the types of jobs that the fabrics are said to represent — really cover a wide and overwhelming range of issues.Pedestrian objects that fill our daily lives can carry a heavy historical and ecological heritage acquired during their production.But the lifespan of these items rarely ends immediately after purchase.Since everything we weave, stitch, and weave will be part of our world for quite some time, we might as well find a purpose for it—hidden in the obvious in dystopian HBOMax drama Station Eleven ‘s lesson.
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Based on Emily St. John Mandel’s novel of the same name, Station Eleven tells the story of a society rebuilding itself after a devastating epidemic killed most of the world’s population in a matter of months.Survivors must learn how to feed, dress, and warm themselves in a world where supply chains have completely collapsed, making it impossible to simply buy what they need at the store.While clothing isn’t the center of the storyline, it’s a vital part of the world series costume designer Helen Huang must help invent.So she found herself asking: If we can’t make new clothes in the future, what will people wear?
Huang said she wants the world in 20 years — 20 years after the pandemic ends — to feel “like a time capsule.”In her research for the project, she looked at how clothing changed after years in landfills and was shocked to discover that most materials today considered cheap or low-quality — rayon, polyester, and spandex among others Synthetic materials – behave like plastics because they are more or less immune to the elements.The apparel team responsible for making garments look properly aged found that even a grindstone won’t damage these types of fabrics.
“Right now we have a lot of things in the world that people can wear — a lot of things that don’t age,” Huang said.”They don’t disintegrate, they don’t come back to Earth. So we’re also trying to use that to describe something about this world [20 years]. Because in a lot of movies about the future, the past doesn’t exist anymore, which is simply not true. Yes, because we create a lot of things that never go away.”
As it turns out, when the show was filming in Ontario in the summer of 2020, the COVID-19-induced lockdown — aptly enough — greatly limited clothing-sourcing opportunities.The only place Huang and her team have access to is a huge warehouse full of antiques and used clothes, which houses millions of donated and unsold clothing.”We would pick them, and it did a lot of the visuals I wanted for the show,” she said, “because it gave us items with real memories that you can’t fake with clothes.”
Huang’s findings echo an anecdote in Worn’s foreword.On Martha’s Vineyard, where Tannhauser grew up, a small town dump is known for finding treasures thrown away by wealthy summer residents.Locals, including Thanhauser, dig up these vintage designer relics and precious antiques to fill their closets and homes.This is the author’s appreciation for vintage clothing, as she notes that the fabrics and construction have stood the test of time compared to more modern mall products.
Both Station Eleven and Worn reinforce the fact that the whimsy and waste in the fashion industry has left its mark on the world longer than one might think.As Whitney Bauck writes in a short essay for Grist, we can learn from the supply chain disruptions of recent years: “What if we were buying clothes as new tattoos?” To expand on this, I suggest Think of each existing garment as a monument: semi-permanent in nature, embodying both a great deal of work and perhaps some level of human suffering, as well as a memorial to a particular era and the place where it was created.
In this framework, there are no disposable or worthless clothes; the world we create is nothing but relics, and no matter how flawed the world may be, it should be treated with care.
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Post time: Mar-23-2022