Joanne Entwistle’s The Fashioned Body (I’m reading other books, I swear) focuses largely on the machinations of the British fashion system, and one of those machinations is the lack of machination: “Compared with other industries, clothing manufacture is much less mechanized and technological developments have not eliminated the basic unit of production, the woman at the sewing machine.”
All clothing is made by hand because machines are not good at manipulating fabric in the ways needed even to make a simple t-shirt.
Hands are the most important part of the garment-making process.
You can develop processes to make constructing a machine cheaper, and you can invent techniques to make weaving fabric cheaper, but you can “make” a human and their hands cheaper except by paying them less money.
A Bloomberg Businessweek story earlier this year noted that LVMH sells $9,000 Loro Piana sweaters with vicuña fibers gathered by Peruvian subsistence farmers working for practically nothing.
I was thinking about the woman at the sewing machine while I was watching Bitter Cane, a 1983 documentary about the economic exploitation of Haiti.
Bitter Cane zooms out from the supply chain of exported coffee and traces the industrial history of the country from French colony to American satellite:
The labor was wrenched from the enslaved by the French, until the enslaved threw down their tools, picked up some weapons, and said no thanks.
Then, a home-grown owner class took the place of the French with an agriculture-based semi-serfdom.
Then, the United States invaded while it was sowing its post-World War I, hegemon-aspirant oats and instituted waged factory work during its occupation.
Entwistle points out that the English textile company Courtaulds located its 19th-century production facilities in Halstead because the wool industry had decamped and left “a ready-made pool of exploitable labour” in its wake.
Haiti is among the poorest countries on Earth because its economy never recovered from France extracting post-independence reparations at gunpoint.
The liberty cap atop the Haitian flag’s palm tree might be the most expensive accessory in world history.
American businessmen likewise show up in Bitter Cane extolling Haiti’s workforce as one of its best natural resources because they only had to be paid a few dollars daily instead of hourly, capital flows freely into and out of the country, and taxes are practically non-existent.
In his memoir Shoe Dog, Nike founder Phil Knight says he advertised his first sneakers in the 1960s with a flyer that said: “Low Japanese labor costs make it possible for an exciting new firm to offer these shoes at the low low price of $6.95.”
A 2008 Congressional Research Service report says that tariff exclusions are laid out precisely enough to guide the process like this:
The cotton is not grown in Haiti and the fabric is not milled in Haiti because garment components are cheapest when imported to Haiti.
When the construction of a garment is complete, it is packed up and shipped across the border to the Dominican Republic for washing and finishing because it is cheaper to do that than build similar infrastructure in Haiti.
A washed and finished garment is shipped back to Haiti for final export because moving clothes across at least three borders at least four times is cheaper than paying a prevailing wage to workers in the same country as the company that sells the garment.
In Bitter Cane, the deadly political repression of the François “Papa Doc” and Jean-Claude “Baby Doc” Duvalier regimes is the price of an economic stability that failed to develop Haitian industrial infrastructure beyond a repository of human hands.
Phil Knight says in Shoe Dog that after Japanese workers started wanting too much money for his company’s operations to be profitable, he moved to Taiwan and Korea; then, in the 1970s, “the same conditions that brought down Japan—fluctuating currency, rising labor costs, government instability—were beginning to coalesce” and force a move to China.
A 2015 USAID report says that the apparel industry made up 90% of Haiti’s exports at the time, with the vast majority of those exports heading to the United States.
In 2022 Haitian garment workers went on strike to secure a $15-per-day minimum wage and won a $7.50 rate that was itself a 37% improvement; when a garment factory contracted by Calvin Klein and Tommy Hilfiger owner PVH closed that year, a $1 million severance settlement split between 1,100 workers ($909 per capita) was in some cases the equivalent of a year’s pay.
The 2024 PVH proxy statement says that the company requested shareholders grant CEO Stefan Larsson a $1.3 million base salary as part of a total compensation package worth up to $15 million.
How many countries are listed on the “made in” tags in your wardrobe?