yeah yeah yeah, so we know that slaves and the impoverished tilled and harvested the cotton fields in America providing abundant cotton bales to be shipped to Manchester for spinning weaving and finishing in the 1700’s and that technological innovations in speeding this process fuelled the Industrial revolution. And today there is known to be child labour in Uzbekistan, India, Brazil to name a few.
The question is this; Will the fact of us knowing this make any difference to our insatiable hunger for cheap clothes?
Surely the question is this; What is the point of having such an abundance of garments to CHOOSE from when we only need to cover our bodies for the sake of warmth and decency and connecting to our tribes? Can we ask ourselves what value do textiles hold in our consciousness? Is this a complicated question to answer. I don’t think so, I think there are just contradictions in our relationships to cloth and garments;
If you look at textile production and garment manufacturing and sales of garments, it seems that we can never have enough of the stuff.
If you look at the quantities of used and abandoned garments that criss-cross the oceans every day seeking new markets and affordable recycling you would say that we have more garments circulating the planet than there are people to wear them. So did we make bad choices, or did we say yes to the dress and then no?
The desire for new clothes is insatiable and the rejection of old clothes is inevitable.
Is it the intimate relationship between cloth and the body that pollutes the cloth?
Leave a Reply