…So Don’t Discount Us in Technology

In the technology industry, when startups are looking to target the “low-hanging fruit” — those early adopters who are willing to put up with high prices and poor performance in order to have the product “first,” — women are often overlooked. If you don’t believe me, take a look at the first generation of wearables: huge ugly smart watches, rubber and plastic fitness detecting bracelets, and Fitbits that get lost in the wash. Designed by and for men, despite the fact that family health decisions are made by women.

And yet if you even take a quick glance at the fashion industry, you’ll see what an amazing role women have always played as trend-setters, early adopters and leaders.

In the past fifty years, as fashion has gone from an industry dominated by a few Parisian couturiers and Milanese fashion houses that dictated trends six months in advance to a global, real-time industry that affects everyone from the affluent to the people of the street, women have continued to be the early adopters, a signal for how they behave in every industry — even technology.

Every mother knows how early her daughter develops a sense of fashion — first by copying mommy (did you ever try on your mother’s lipstick or high heels as a toddler?) and later by imitating peers. By the time they are in middle school, girls won’t wear anything their friends don’t like, and the names of trendy brands are ingrained in their brains.

People in the fashion industry have always known this, that’s why they’ve gone from dictating the trends in the 1950s to borrowing their inspirations from the crowds today. The growth and spread of brands like Forever 21, H&M and ZARA shows how even women without big budgets want to buy the runway lookbook styles in their local stores immediately.

Because fashion is such a big industry, it constantly studies itself. Here are some stats I bet you didn’t know:

By 2015, the global market for bridal wear (dresses you wear once, and the stuff that goes with them), is expected to be $57 billion.

The children’s wear market (clothes your kid outgrows in six months) will reach $186 billion this year.

In New York City, people spend $362 a month on clothes, the most in the country. The least, $131 a month, is spent by people in Tucson, Arizona (where people don’t need coats and boots).

In all, Americans spend $250,000,000,000 on fashion, including footwear, on which we spend $48 billion.

No wonder there are 19,300 people who have the job description “fashion designer.”

And there are 29,360 shoe stores in the US.

Globally, the fashion industry is a $1.2 trillion industry, the top brands of which are LVMH (a conglomerate luxury brand including Louis Vuitton, Moet, and Hennessy); H&M (the fastest of the fast fashion brands);Kering (a conglomerate of Pinault, Printemps and Redoute); the Gap, and Christian Dior.

In the fashion industry, women are the early adopters, the trend setters, and the big spenders, so don’t sell them short when you design wearables and other “high tech” products. After all, look what we did for Tumblr. I bet David Karp loves women these days.

Fashion Reveals Women as Early Adopters was originally published in Fashion Industry on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

An industry grapples with globalized exploitation

The sidewalk outside of the Parsons School of Design is typically home to an array of stylishly-attired young designers, artists, and the occasional homeless wise man — but April 24 was a day out of the ordinary: the discerning fashion-conscious nonpareil caught each other wearing their clothes backwards, and not one called a faux pas.

Parsons’ Dress Practice Collective, a group that aims to challenge the ethical practices of fashion production, planned an event called “Fashion Revolution Day,” inviting people to turn their clothes inside out to spark a conversation about where their apparel is sourced, produced, by whom and in what conditions.

The event was held on April 24 to commemorate the one-year anniversary of the Rana Plaza factory in Dhaka, Bangladesh collapse, which killed 1,129 people and injured over 2,500 more. The incident was one of the worst industrial disasters in modern history — reminding much of the world that the days of coal mine cave-ins and massive factory fires were not so far out of sight, and sparked indignation from Bangladeshi workers demanding economic justice.

Fashion Revolution Day at Parsons was part of an international campaign which was started by Cary Somers, creator of the fair trade clothing brand Pachacuti, with the goal of mobilizing western consumers to pressure the industry to improve working conditions in the textile industry, starting with awareness. “We want people talking about the provenance of clothes, raising awareness of the fact that we aren’t just purchasing a garment, but a whole chain of value and relationships,” Somers said in an interview in Vogue.

Organizers installed a photo booth at the corner of Fifth Avenue & 13th Street to take pictures of people wearing their clothes inside out. Those equipped with smartphones snapped photos using the hashtag #insideout on Twitter & Instagram to show off their backward-dressing statement — over 20,000 hashtags popped up around the world.

Parsons’ Dress Practice Collective is hopeful that events such as these will foster more economics-minded activism at the fashion-savvy school. “Fashion consumers are predominantly detached from the provenance of their garments, and the individuals behind the labels,” explained the group’s president Cayla O’Connell. “My hope is that through the heightened visibility of garment workers, factory conditions, and the production processes that enable the fashion system, consumers may understand their agency within its hierarchy and exercise better fashion practices.”

Similar consciousness-raising events were organized in over 250 cities. FashionRevolution.org provided the basic formula for those who wanted to get involved, as well as a toolkit for participants eager to arm themselves with facts, further reading, and ideas for action. Organizers encouraged groups to plan events in their area and spur people to reach out and pressure the brands they purchase to show commitment to a transparent supply chain by making public their materials sources and suppliers, and to connect consumers with producers and factory workers, encouraging them to “tell their story or have them tell their story,” as the website’s ‘Get Involved’ section reads.

“We felt that providing a base and platform for students to participate in the event through a photo booth on campus would not only signify our university’s support of the movement,” said Cayla O’Connell, president of the Dress Practice Collective. “But more importantly, we want to bring awareness to the ethical implications of the industry with which we all engage.”

For some skeptics, taking Instagram photos of inside out clothes is not enough to effectively address exploitation in the globalized manufacturing industry. “While awareness is wonderful, it needs to be followed by action,” said Jens Astrup, a Parsons senior studying strategic design and management. “I’ve always believed more in attacking via regulatory or legal routes.” Other activists have decided to take on a more combative strategy.

While some activists buzzed on social media, others marked April 24 by forming a human chain of 1,129 people and blockaded a Gap retail store on Oxford Street in the heart of London’s shopping district. They called on Gap, and other multinational corporations to compensate families of the collapse victims in Dhaka, and agree to support labor rights reforms in the countries where their garments are produced, according to Al Jazeera.

“There is simply no way that we can deal with the problems of the fashion industry by just shopping differently — they go way beyond that,” said fashion journalist Tansy Hoskins at an industry event in London. “We need to tackle them in a way that will actually terrify the capitalists in the fashion industry into changing things.”

Fashion Revolution Day partakes in a trend of elite fashion brands capitalizing on socially-conscious consumers. “The idea of challenging the system is surrendering interesting results — and also fashionable ones. Even the grandest of maisons are getting in on the action,” writes Alexander Fury, fashion editor at The Independent in London.

Lucy Collins, who teaches a course in Ethical Fashion at Parsons, poses the question more seriously: “How can we approach an industry that perpetuates overconsumption and has a severe impact on human rights issues in the disregard for the labor conditions in countries where these clothes are produced?”

Data from the International Monetary Fund rank Bangladesh as the world’s second largest textile producer, exporting $21.5 billion worth of garments in 2013 — before retail markup, which grossed $1.2 trillion in sales in the U.S. alone. A New York Times editorial in November 2013 cited Bangladesh’s surging 50 percent growth in industrial textile production, and a 28 percent rise in recent years’ prices, contrasted with practically unchanged wages. Trade unions fought bitterly against factory owners for better conditions and higher wages, which workers finally won when the country’s Labor Ministry raised the minimum wage 77 percent to ৳5,300 per month (about $68 in U.S. dollars).

A report by Bangladesh University of Engineering and Technology found 60 percent of 600 inspected garment factories to be structurally unsound and in need of repairs. The Spectrum Sweater factory in Dhaka killed 64 workers when it collapsed in April 2005. A fire in a textile factory claimed 289 lives in Karachi, Pakistan in September 2005. According to a report conducted by Human Rights Watch, workers claimed they had been subject to mistreatment, threats, and unreasonable punishment and termination.

Some workers engaged in work stoppages, sabotage and transport blockades to leverage negations in their favor. Frustrations were somewhat temporarily allayed when over 150 companies signed an Accord on Fire and Building Safety in Bangladesh in May 2013. It promised safer working conditions by mandating repairs, inspections, public reporting and oversight, but progress has been slow to manifest, and protests have continued. The BBC reported that at least 15 people were killed by police during strike protests before 2013 was over. As of March 2014, only ten factories had released inspection reports, and none had completed the necessary corrective action plans, as stated on the Accord’s website.

Safety conditions are wrapped up with worker conditions, which can be particularly bad for women. Mahinur Akhter, a 16-year-old textile worker in Rana Plaza told reporters from The Wall Street Journal that even before she was trapped under rubble for eight hours after the building walls collapsed on top of her as she sat at her sewing machine, male managers abused them verbally, physically and sexually. “We need Mahinur to work,” her mother said. “The whole family is dependent on her. I fear for her safety. But she needs to go.”

Workers in one factory charged that supervisors said that women who tried joining the union would be stripped of her clothes and thrown into the street. “The government has belatedly begun to register unions, which is an important first step, but it now needs to ensure that factory owners stop persecuting their leaders and actually allow them to function,” Human Rights Watch Asia Regional Director Brad Adams said in a news release in February.

Fashion Revolution Day intends to bring awareness of these issues to a consumer audience. Other schools around the world also came up with events that sought to help understand the severity of the working conditions in the sweatshops that produce their clothes. Regent’s University School of Fashion in London held an open screening of a documentary about the tragedy and an online charity auction that raised money for affected families. DePaul University in Chicago hosted a sustainability-themed fashion show to mark the anniversary of the collapse at Rana Plaza.

“I think that events such as Fashion Revolution Day and recent journalistic coverage of the problems with production are representative of the increasing need for transparency in the fashion industry” said Elizabeth Pulos, president of the Fashion Institute of Technology’s Corporate Social Responsibility Club, which also hosted a flea market of ethically sourced and fair trade clothing, and engaged with students and professors about who made their clothes.

Professor Collins proposes that the next question remains unanswered:

“You need to sell clothes — but how do you do it in a way that isn’t weighed down by consumerism and excessive glamour, and has a care and concern for both the people who manufacture the clothes and the people who wear the clothes?”

This article originally appeared in The New School Free Press.

Made + Story Panel = Nanette Lepore, Alex Bogusky and Sheryl Connelly

Today (Aug. 20, 2013) I was glad to stumble upon a discussion on “American Made” held at Story in the downtown meatpacking district. This open panel discussion brought up many good points and evolved into some very constructive conversation. Discussions covered everything from factory safety to product sustainability, and bridged topics such as the inklings of an American manufacturing rebirth to the archaic mindsets that have portrayed labor as a commodity. While all of these topics can hold their own, I am going to delve into the discussion I introduced: the stigma of learning a trade skill and the lack of a younger workforce to bolster a rebirth in US manufacturing/craftsmanship.

Graduating from high school, the majority of students are encouraged to enroll in a college or university with the promise of a higher salary job. Furthermore, they are convinced that specific concentrations, such as business or finance, will guarantee a “high salary” job. On the rare occasion that this happens, I congratulate all those who “made it” through some hard work and a bit of luck. In reality, the majority of these college graduates enter the world with no job, let alone one in their field of study — and they are eyeballs deep in debt. Options previously available to the youth of America’s manufacturing boom are all but extinct, and the workforce that has maintained it is quickly retiring with no replacement. Family-owned businesses and trades schools that have supported this lifestream of labor are now treated as a dumping ground for glamour-less work or to temper problem children through hard labor. The idea of “honing a skill” and becoming a “craftsman” has been reduced to small micro-businesses, niche products, and urban economies.

It is nearly impossible in the American fashion manufacturing industry to find quality sewers, pattern makers, pattern cutters, leather workers, etc., let alone anyone interested in learning the craft. Many of these positions pay $40-100k a year, yet there is no workforce to rotate in for retirees, nor the amount of craftsman needed to expand business. This industry will not survive until we revitalize the idea that apprenticing is an education, and working with one’s hands is not a second class or last resort of the underprivileged, simple minded, or placement for cheap immigrant labor. We should welcome back the idea of “honing one’s skills” or “being a master at one’s trade” as both honorable and valuable. We should support companies who invest in their employees and acknowledge that when a company stands behind its employees, it is in direct correlation to that company’s belief in the quality and standards of its products.

American Made but no one to Make it? was originally published in Fashion Industry on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.