I love clothes and fashion but with all the caveats previously discussed here. I have always appreciated the expression of self, not so much the ladder climbing status stuff.
The following are some of the things I think about when I take part in Me Made May and my sewing practice in general.
Clothes at their start point, if not made from oil (synthetic fibres) are crops, hemp, cotton, wool from sheep, it is land based. Everyone had a local fibre shed. Somehow we have divorced the land from ourselves.
Fashion is deemed as frivolous, being at all interested in what you are wearing is seen as superficial for women; and yet we are still held to an unobtainable standard set by someone else. It is not lost on me that the majority of all marketing is aimed at women but the people who own the top three largest fast fashion conglomerates are men.
I do think that given this consumer society we live in it is very easy to get caught up in what I am going to term hand made fast fashion . Where you are constantly making things at speed beyond what you, might really need or use which is not really any more sustainable than fast fashion itself. I have slowed over the years only making a few things a year for myself or others; every 3-5 years depending on wear and body shifts I might need to make a few more things but I really try to think very carefully about what I actually wear and use in my real life and not a fantasy life where its lovely to sew but I will never wear it.
As someone who knows how to sew garments, the time and skill it takes to make something is not insignificant although I am not trained, I am pretty competent . If you buy from fairly compensated , sustainably sourced companies the cost immediately goes up as it should. We have been lured into a false sense of what things cost and what fair and living wages should look like. The unfairly compensated and bad working conditions, mostly female off shore workforce becomes denigrated further, when we decide what is produced as disposable due to what we paid for it not what it actually cost to make, in environmental terms or labor .
If we deem fashion and clothes superficial and meaningless and not worthy of our timer or money; when in-fact clothing conveys all kinds of messages, and everyone needs to wear clothes, what does that mean for the people who sew the clothes?
Hereβs where I find it gets complicated. Women through the ages (and now) have been subject (in best case scenarios) to objectification and rules of how they are allowed to be in the world . If we as women ( and I mean predominantly western women here) are using an intersectional lens (as I think we should be) then that includes the women who sew our clothes, or weave and dye the fabric all the way through the chain. It is all connected.
The fabric, the land, the labor.
A few links
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