Our clothes have gone on a long journey before reaching the shop floor or our computer screens. Our clothes will pass through the hands of farmers, spinners, weavers, dyers, sewers and so many others that work almost invisibly in the supply chains of the fashion industry.
Take a simple T-shirt as an example, of which estimates suggest 2 billion are made and sold every year. If the T-shirt is made of cotton, its journey will have started as a seed, planted in the soil by farmers somewhere around the world such as India, Brazil or the southern United States. The raw cotton is sent to a gin where its seeds are separated from the chaff, which is like a husk or case. Then the cotton goes to a spinning facility where it is carded (separated into loose strands), combed and blended before being knitted on a loom into fabric. The fabric is then sent through a series of ‘wet processes’, which require washing, heating and treatments of various chemicals such as bleaching, printing, dyeing and fire-retardants or others that help achieve a desired softness or performance. The finished fabric then will be sent to a manufacturing facility, which will cut the fabric, sew the T-shirt, trim the threads, check for quality and pack for shipment.
What makes it so complex is that throughout and between these various stages of production, there are distributors, sourcing agents and middlemen who facilitate the buying and selling of inputs. Plus, each process will likely happen in different cities and countries, meaning a simple T-shirt would have been sent across the world several times before even reaching shoppers. Furthermore, garment manufacturing is rife with subcontracting. A fashion brand might place an order with one supplier, who in turn subcontracts the work to another facility if they need to meet a short deadline or require a special process to be done.
Major fashion brands may work with hundreds or even thousands of suppliers and garment factories at any given time. The vast majority of today’s fashion brands do not own their manufacturing and textile supplier facilities, making it challenging to monitor or control working conditions and environmental impacts across the supply chain. The fashion industry is regarded as one of today’s most globalised industries , involving complex, multinational and fragmented networks of producers, buyers, sellers and consumers all over the world.
There are other people involved in the making of a T-shirt who are not directly involved in manufacturing. The T-shirt would have needed designers who decide what it looks like, the fabric, fit, colour, print and trims. There will be people working in fashion brands that are responsible for sourcing the fabrics and finding the factories where the products are made. The T-shirt will require merchandisers, marketers and retailer workers who ensure the T-shirt is sold. There are people working in warehouses where the T-shirt will be stored and transport workers who deliver the T-shirt wherever it needs to go. There are business planners, financial managers, lawyers, investors and so many others who make the business of selling that T-shirt possible.
Today, fashion — comprising garments, textiles and footwear — is one of the world’s most labour intensive industries, directly employing at least 60 million people and likely more than double that are indirectly dependent on the sector — an estimated 80 million people in China alone . Women represent the overwhelming majority of today’s garment workers and artisans. Meanwhile, Fairtrade Foundation estimates that as many as 100 million households are directly engaged in cotton production and that as many as 300 million people work across the cotton sector in total.
In fact, as a result of fashion’s growing importance to the global economy, the apparel and footwear market was worth over $1.7 trillion in 2019 according to Euromonitor. Clothing manufacturing and textile production has a very long industrial history, credited with kickstarting modern industrialisation in developing economies since the 18th and 19th centuries and built from systems of exploitation and oppression from very early on, where black slaves were used to harvest cotton in the American South and poor, working-class and often migrant women and children fuelled the growth of newly mechanised mills and factories across Britain.
What’s markedly different today about the fashion industry is the scale and speed at which it operates. Factories around the world are continuously being pushed to deliver ever-larger quantities of clothing faster and cheaper. As a result, factories routinely make employees work extra hours, often without overtime pay or other benefits in return. The pressure on factories to deliver is so intense that workers are often subjected to intimidation, harassment, coercion and violence, and may even be restricted from taking short breaks to the toilet. The people who make our clothes are very unlikely to be paid fairly through this process. The same systems of oppression and exploitation we saw fuel the industrialisation of clothing still exist in today’s fashion industry. This is the often-grim reality that it takes to deliver our desire for ‘choice’ when we’re out shopping.
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