Every outfit carries the fingerprints of someone else’s labour
Alexandra is a writer exploring the role of faith in the arts, fashion, and design
What story do your clothes tell?
My great-grandfather Santo Mione was a garment presser in New York City. Using hot, heavy cast-iron machinery, he used all his upper-body strength to pull down a lever hundreds of times a day to smooth out fabrics between the many steps of sewing. Hours were long. The work was gruelling and repetitive. Pensions were non-existent.
It’s him I think of when reading BMS World Mission’s recently released UK Ethical Fashion Guide. It includes practical advice on shopping well and links to a new online clothing brand checker. Researchers assessed 336 brands. They gathered 13,000 data points: checking governance, exploring supply chain tracing, supplier relationships, and assessing policies on human rights, worker empowerment, and environmental sustainability. Each brand was then scored out of 100.
Perhaps unsurprisingly, many of the brands performed poorly. At the bottom of the list were clothing from brands like Temu and Shein, but also British household staples like Tu (Sainsbury’s), Aldi, F&F (Tesco) and Sports Direct. Nearly nine in ten brands do not pay the people who make their clothes a living wage.
You don’t have to spend much time online to hear complaints about the state of the fashion industry. I hear a lot of “things aren’t made like they used to be,” and “things these days are made with such bad quality.”
These complaints about material and quality are real. But they also have stories hidden beneath their surface. The uneven lines sewn by a young girl because her mum couldn’t finish the quota of garments needed to pay for groceries that week. The puckering seams speak of a man yelled at to work faster than he can adjust thread tension. The woman who takes care when sewing her daughter’s dresses leaves raw edges because the factory finds trimming an unnecessary step at their price point. Clothing quality cannot be separated from treatment of garment workers. The poor final result we see is often the result of a consistent series of labour practices that belittle and disrespect the worker.
Beyond work hours and wages (as important as these things are!), we do a disservice to workers’ dignity and the goodness of work by creating an industry where quantity, speed and margins are prioritised over the quality of the product. Dorothy Sayers’s famous essay “Why Work?”, written during World War Two, reflected on what the world of work might look like after the war. She said this:
“We should fight tooth and nail, not for mere employment, but for the quality of the work that we had to do…There would be protests and strikes – not only about pay and conditions, but about the quality of the work demanded and the honesty, beauty, and usefulness of the goods produced. The greatest insult which a commercial age has offered to the worker has been to rob him of all interest in the end product of the work and to force him to dedicate his life to making badly things which were not worth making.”
I’m not sure about the quality of those garments that came out of the factories where my great-grandfather laboured for decades. But I do know a bit about the garments he produced with his hands and mind for his daughters and wife. He constructed my grandmother’s prom dress and my great aunt’s wedding dress. My great aunt tells me if she saw an outfit in the store that she liked, he would make it “even better than the original.”
Today, our clothes falling apart and being sent to landfill is material proof that we have failed as a society to equip others towards good and fulfilling work. Truly dignified work is work that brings dignity to the worker and their family and contributes positively to human good.
My great-grandfather worked from his teenage years to his death at 67. His work gave him no pension – just a $250 death benefit (about £2000 today). As unions demanded more for American garment workers, the industry began a process of offshoring and outsourcing labour to places where it was cheaper, and regulations were looser. As a result, we have to rely on organisations like BMS World Mission to tell the stories of the labour that hasn’t been improved, but merely relocated.
But we should also look to ourselves. When we purchase clothes without a thought to the stories behind them, we also do a disservice to ourselves.
In her book Liturgy of the Ordinary, Anglican priest Tish Harrison Warren says, “The often seen and seemingly mundane we spend our time are what form us.” For Warren, that includes losing your keys, getting stuck in traffic, and cooking lunch. In my view, they also include buying a new top, putting an outfit together, doing laundry, mending wear and tear.
When we shop quickly, frequently, and without a care, we make horcruxes of our souls. We split our spiritual lives from the bodies we live amongst. Shopping becomes a practical tick-box exercise. We serve only our most rudimentary desires to not be naked, or to make our bodies look good. We leave our spiritual selves up to the more obviously sacred stuff, and in so doing, forget what it means to be sacred beings.
To think twice before adding that shirt to the cart is to sew together the parts of our rending souls. Looking at a clothing brand’s ethics is part of a process by which we stop, reflect, and think about what it means to be human in a complicated world.
An extra search to see if we already have something suitable to wear in our closet, spending a few more minutes getting out a tough stain or mending a hole. Each of these small frictions forms a rhythm in our life that proclaims that we know how our lives affect others. With each moment of extra time between us and that click to buy, we form ourselves in the direction of our neighbours.
BMS World Mission’s guide has three actions for us. Buy less, buy better, and expect more. You can use their brand checker to learn more about your options, and read their full report to reveal more stories beneath those numbers.
Visit the Fashion Brand Checker
