Deluxe and Status Anxiety

[I'm going through my drafts folder and found this item from 2007 that I never posted.  I added a link to a recent book and it's time you read what I thought in 2007.]

Kathleen sent me a copy of Deluxe: How Luxury Lost Its Luster. Man, that is a depressing book. In brief, scaling up luxury goods meant moving production to large, new factories in China. The cost of production of the luxury goods plummeted to 10-11% of the retail price. Marketing/advertising overtook production in the total price of luxury goods. 

Mark says that the truly depressing movies are the bad ones. In that vein, I recommend that people also peruse Alain de Botton's Status Anxiety  I was especially moved by this quote from page 82 of the hardback edition:

Rather than a tale of greed, the history of luxury could more accurately be read as a record of emotional trauma. It is the legacy of those who have felt pressured by the disdain of others to add an extraordinary amount to their bare selves in order to signal that they too may lay a claim to love.

Maybe that's confirmation bias.

Anyway, Dana Thomas is a business of fashion reporter with good industry access.  Deluxe and Fashionopolis: The Price of Fast Fashion and the Future of Clothes are both good reads about the opposite ends of the apparel trade.  

Fashionopolis

I read an Advance Reader Copy (ARC) of Fashionopolis: The Price of Fast Fashion and the Future of Clothes by Dana Thomas. If I were a better advance reader, I would time this to come out the week of publication, around September 3, 2019.  But, I wrote it in July, when I read the book, and then set it aside due to anger.  In November, I decided to finish it up and post my thoughts.

This is not an expose about huge Fast Fashion chains that serve the mass market.  Lucy Siegle of the Guardian does an excellent job covering that beat.

Ms Thomas covers the business of fashion and she has fantastic industry access.  I read and blogged about her earlier book, Deluxe, which covers the luxury end of the market. This time, she writes about the Price of Furious Fashion.  Her publisher categorizes the book under: Business, Design, Technology.

It's a good survey of the history of fashion production and the current toll that it takes.  However, the book shines when Thomas takes deep dives with makers that show how to make clothing with smaller environmental footprints.

For instance, I have made my skepticism about organic cotton known.  But, I learned that naturally-colored Foxfibre is also naturally insect-resistant.  The Tannins that give the cotton color, are bitter; insects don't like to eat them.

I don't like the reductive way that Thomas segments the market into organic and "all the rest."  She covers the business of fashion, but she's not a scientist nor was there any evidence in the book that she spent time interviewing scientists.

For instance, Stella McCartney's Environmental Profit and Loss (EP&L) showed that virgin cashmere had roughly one hundred times the environmental impact of virgin wool (page 167).  Therefore, Stella McCartney does not use virgin cashmere in her collections.

How do you put a number on the destruction of an irreplaceable ecosystem I wrote about in The planetary cost of cashmere? Of the extinction of snow leopards in More bad news about cashmere.

McCartney hired a sustainability and ethical trade chief, Claire Bergkamp.  Bergkamp, in turn, hired the accounting firm, PriceWaterhouseCoopers, to audit her business (EP&L.) Accountants do what they do-- place numerical values on stuff.  At the end of the day, the numbers contain the biases of the makers of the model.

The numbers are maddeningly opaque and McCartney, Bergkamp and Thomas felt no need to look under the hood to find how those numbers are derived.  To a scientist, that's very disappointing.

On page 169, we learn that McCartney's EP&L determines that regenerated or 'reclaimed' cashmere is 92% less damaging to the environment than virgin cashmere.  She calls it postmanufacturing waste.  (I call it preconsumer waste and use it for more than half my sewing.)

This allows Bergkamp to throw around numbers like "though cashmere only made up 0.13% of [Stella McCartney's] overall raw material usage in 2015, it accounted for 25% of the company's total environmental impact; after adopting the use of regenerated cashmere in 2016, the impact dropped to 2 percent."

"Luxury fashion should use organic cotton--I don't think there is any excuse not to," said Bergkamp.

You get the idea.  Thomas takes so many claims at face value, particularly regarding natural vs. synthetic dyes and vegan vs. animal materials.

The book is a good survey on what people are trying, particularly at the luxury end of the market. Don't believe any of the scientific claims.  There is no guarantee that nonfiction books were fact-checked.  How do you fact-check a closely-held proprietary EP&L system anyway?

• Fact or friction: the problem with factchecking in the book world
• Checking Facts In Nonfiction

Book storage goals

We are drowning in books, DVDs and fabric chez BMGM. Instead of unpacking boxes still in the garage 4 months after my move, I'm reading and streaming instead.

Does anyone else watch K-dramas for design ideas? I want to move into the sets for Chicago Typewriter (as long as someone else does the cleaning and dusting.)

This is the entrance to the hero's study where he writes his novels.

Bird's-eye view of the inner sanctum.

We meet the nemesis (a novelist/plagiarist) when they shoot a PSA in a library together.

The office of the nemesis.  He may be a villain, but his office has clerestory windows and wraparound bookshelves.  This would be great for our urban townhouse, where our views are of the apartment building next door.

Great sweaters, too.

Links:
Korean Wave (Hallyu) – The Rise of Korea’s Cultural Economy & Pop Culture

Which is more sustainable, GMO or organic cotton?

The answer is...GMO cotton!

I was so discouraged by the number of sewing bloggers in instagrammers who equated organic cotton with sustainable sewing.  I felt like screaming into the void and started collecting data.  I collected so much data and research articles to counter the popular narrative that it won't fit in one post.

This topic is complex and will be broken down into several posts, interspersed with stories about water, because cotton and water are intimately interlinked.  GMO (genetically modified) cotton now produces twice as much fibre as organic cotton for the same water input (and grows with lower quality water and soil.)  Given the severe water shortages around the world and the land poisoning and subsidence problems caused by irrigating cotton fields around the world, I think that using organic cotton when there are better alternatives is just irresponsible.

I'm reminded of this 2015 Pew study:

The views in 2017 were similarly discouraging with white people more likely to believe conspiracies theories over scientific expertise than people of color (POC.)  I have many reservations about Roundup-ready crops, but there is a whole universe of GMO crops that are better for the environment than legacy organic crops.

As Science Moms says,

GMOs are presented in the media as inserting genes of one species into another species. But that’s only one meaning. Genetic modification also means selective breeding, cross breeding, mutagenesis, genome editing, and other techniques.
...
Everything is made of chemicals. They show a long list of all the scary-sounding chemicals in an all-natural blueberry. Pears naturally make formaldehyde.

The “most brilliant marketing move of the last ten years” was to convince everyone that organic is pesticide free. Copper sulfate is really bad for the environment, and it’s allowed in organic farming.

Data doesn’t support claims that organic is pesticide free, better for environment, or healthier.

On a really sad note, did you read this story about the artist that worked with mussel shells for 15 years, slowly killing herself, without realizing that natural materials can be toxic?

She’d spend up to 12 hours a day molding the shells with a dentist’s drill. While she ventilated her studio, she didn’t make any special effort to avoid the shell byproducts, assuming they were benign.

But almost immediately after starting the work, Genser started feeling ill. After years living with various autoimmune disorders, she was used to her body betraying her. But she soon realized these symptoms were different. As her limbs alternately ached and became immobile, she suffered neurological ailments as well. At her worst moments, she could barely speak, lost her short-term memory and stopped recognizing close friends.

She saw a litany of specialists in neurological health and psychiatrists who prescribed antipsychotics and antidepressants, but nothing seemed to help.

“To be fair to my doctors, they did ask me, ‘Are you working with anything toxic?’ And I’d say, ‘No no, I’m working with all natural materials, and we’d all move on,’” she said. “I was so certain that these mussels, which the government said I could eat safely and buy in the market as food, could never be bad for me.”

She dry-sanded shells for 15 years without wearing any respiratory or skin protection!  You can safely eat some parts of toxic plants and animals.  For instance, I love peaches.  But I eat only the soft flesh and leave the hard pit (and the cyanide in them) alone.  Mussel muscles can be safe to eat (in moderation,) but the shells bioaccumulate metals in the water.  You definitely should handle them with care.

It breaks my heart to see sewing bloggers fall for disinformation campaigns like when Sue quoted a natural soap "expert".  I sent her a horrified email and she posted a follow-up.  I wrote:

Scientists now have to take classes to learn the rhetorical tricks used by people who would slander us. I recognize one device in her description of Titanium Dioxide. Link it with something that is not safe to put on your skin, like house paint. Yes, TiO2 is sometimes used in house paint, but it would be very expensive house paint. It’s the safer and brighter white alternative to lead. You can also accurately call TiO2 the active ingredient in chemical-free baby-safe sunscreen.

EDTA is a perfectly safe preservative. Your soap is safer with it than without it. In fact, we eat it all the time as a food preservative rather than eat rancid food.

Ironically, the EDTA that the "expert" listed as a skin irritant and bad chemical is the chelating agent used to treat patients suffering from heavy metal poisoning like Genser.

New Old Indigo

I want to blog about water, but work, family stuff and sleep is getting priority these days.

I just want to give a quick link to this lovely story about Thao Vu and the artisans she works with in Vietnam--the people behind Kilomet109.

Hand batik.  Living and dead indigo.  Embroidery.  Interesting Shapes.

Detail of reversible tank top. Photo courtesy of NYT

Batik and indigo reversible tank top. Photo courtesy of Kilomet109

This is my favorite dress from the online store.

Photo courtesy of Kilomet109

But I would be happy if Santa brought me this coat.  I've been very, very good.

Jacket photo courtesy of NYT

Monozukuri

Junya Watanabe’s on monozukuri, the “art, science and craft of making things.”

Pockets on my mind

I'm a big fan of pockets in my own clothing.  There was a time when I skipped them, or only inserted them in the side seams (totally unflattering and uncomfortable for my build), in the rush to be done with a sewing project.

Now, I sew to get exactly what I like.  If it takes longer to make it, then so be it.

Imagine my delight when I saw this slideshow of Marni's S/S 2017 collection:

Photo from NowFashion via NYT

An entire fashion collection devoted to exploring pockets!

BTW, I read the NPR fact-check transcript, but could not bear to watch the debate last night.

Did you read the Politics of Pockets?  There's all sorts of good historical stuff about suffragettes, rational dress, the "New Woman", and Hillary Clinton's pantsuits.

Read this story about Susanna, a custom clothier in Beverly Hills who makes some of HRC's pantsuits.  Fox and right-wing pundits tried to deflect criticism that Trump-branded clothing is all made abroad in low wage countries by suggesting that HRC's pantsuits are made in Bangladesh.  They lie.

Susanna Forest, of Susanna Beverly Hills, has been handcrafting women's suits in the United States since 1976. From design to manufacturing, every step of her process is carried out entirely from her atelier in Beverly Hills, California. Susanna Beverly Hills garments are the product of hundreds of hours of American labor, and women, including Hillary Clinton, can be proud to wear a garment that has been crafted with the absolute most care and skill here in the United States.

I have a small quibble.  The article says that this white suit she wore at the convention does not have pockets.  Click to embiggen the photo.  Do you see a faint outline of welt pockets on her jacket just below the waist?  Methinks her jacket has a pair of pockets, but they are so skillfully done, they are practically invisible.

Enlarge this to see the hip jacket welt pockets.

I'd like to make the jacket below for my S/S 2017 collection.

V8732 is sadly OOP.

But first, I need to make progress on F/W clothes from DD and myself.  I promised her 2-3 colorful tops.  I need to make a few for myself and clear a backlog of 3-4 sweaters patiently awaiting seaming and finishing touches.

Two links while I catch up at home

I'm back home after two weeks away.  I'll post more about the trip when I come up for air.

I found a couple of related links too good not to share.

In What is fashion good for? Part 1, Timo Rissanen explains that the current fashion system is terrible for the planet because it is terribly wasteful. It's also very harmful to the people involved in creating the cheap clothes that most people wear.

Home sewing is part of the solution.

The NYT profiled the McCall Pattern Company in Sewing for the Instagram Generation.

Cultural Tourism

My two talks last week came and went.   People came up to talk to me all week about some of the points I brought up, so I guess not everyone snoozed.

DD is at sleepaway camp.  DH is at a meeting in Boston this week.  We decided to spend some vacation time together on the east coast before heading back west.

I've been enviously reading other sewists' blogs about their visits to

• Creative Africa, particularly Vlisco: African Fashion
• Manus x Machina 

I really, really wanted to explore the permanent collection at the Philadelphia Museum of Art and to see the Barnes Foundation's collection again. Philly is bursting at the seams hosting DNC this week. But, this is the week I am on the east coast.

Here's my schedule for the rest of the week in case you want to join me for cultural bingeing, shopping or eating:
M: Boston
T: AM Amtrak to Philly. PM museums
W: Museums, strolling Philly
Th: AM Amtrak to NYC (Chelsea), PM strolling, shopping Manhattan
F: Museums, shopping, strolling
Sa: Brooklyn (any recommendations?)
Su: Museums, bookstores, strolling
M: AM strolling, PM fly home

I'm interested in seeing these other exhibits if time permits

• Uniformity at FIT
• Stuart Davis at the Whitney
• Isaac Mizrahi at the Jewish Museum

And I'm all about the food.

If this sounds interesting to you, leave a comment with your contact info and day(s) available. Thanks.

Bicycling + Fashion

My main sewing goal for this summer is to sew more clothes that facilitate bicycling to work and around town. Reasons/excuses that keep me from biking include darkness, rain and not wanting to hassle with changing clothes.

Bike Night recap: Why bike fashion matters gives some fashionable ideas for bicycling-compatible fashion.  Click the link to see many more ideas made by students at Otis.

The skirt on this dress ties up for bicycling, and unties for length once you get to your destination.

This bicycle jersey and tutu outfit doesn't transform, but check out her smile and that bike!

I'm not sure about bicycling in a tutu.  Even wide-legged shorts catch on my bicycle saddle.  Perhaps she wears the tutu off the bike and the leggings sans tutu on the bike?

Hmm, wrinkle-resistant wrap skirts to go over my bike shorts that I can stuff in my pannier?

A few details from Reigning Men

Does the Reigning Men exhibit at LACMA make you think of the song, It's Raining Men by The Weather Girls?  Methinks the curators at LACMA have a sense of humor.  After all, they placed the Reigning Men exhibit next to the Robert Mapplethorpe show.

I'm just going to show you a few pictures to whet your appetite.

This is one of the many, many gorgeous ensembles on view.

But check out the hand-embroidered buttons that tie all the colors and patterns of the ensemble together.

Check out the way the line continues from one shoe to the next.

The poster for the exhibit, with a close-up of this coat, may have come home with me.

If you are new to this blog, you might want to read 25 years, which I originally posted in June 2006.

France's healthy models law

Photo from NYT coverage of the FW 2016 Saint Laurent show in Paris.

I read about France's law that purports to protect the health of models. Rather than just mandate larger sample sizes (like those that prevailed until recently), the law requires that models have a doctor's note saying that they are a healthy weight.

I wondered how that would play out. Would models be less thin this season at the Paris shows? Or would models/agencies just shop for cooperative doctors?

We've done the experiment and the data is in.

Why RTW doesn't fit

A statistics blogger, John Cook, explains why ready-to-wear fits so few women.

In 1945, a Cleveland newspaper held a contest to find the woman whose measurements were closest to average. This average was based on a study of 15,000 women
[skip]
Out of 3,864 contestants, no one was average on all nine factors, and fewer than 40 were close to average on five factors. 

I want to point out that women were more homogeneous in 1945 Cleveland than they are today.  I would guess that the contestants were mainly young women of European descent.

Then Cook uses a normal distribution to simulate 3,864 women with 9 independent measurements to illustrate the point I made in Meeting Shams.

Body measurements are correlated; that's why RTW pants can be clustered as "curvy", "straight" or "favorite" fits.  But it's an interesting exercise and Cook provides his Python code so you can play around with your own simulations.

BTW, I'll be giving a talk, Data Thinking Before Data Crunching, at the CISL 2016 Software Engineering Assembly on April 5, 2016.  The following day, Mary Haley* and I will be co-teaching an all-day hands-on workshop for analyzing and visualizing spatial and atmospheric datasets with Python and NCL.

If you are in (or can get to) Boulder April 4th-8th, 2016, we'd love to host you at NCAR. This year's theme is Data Science.

See the program.
Apply for a student scholarship to attend.

* Mary is the lead software engineer for the visualization group and I am the education and outreach lead for the data support group.

Fashion Flackage

No, not flack jackets as fashion statement.  Flackage is Kevin Roderick's term for the practice of PR flack/flak.  Sometimes, all it takes for me to see something is to give a name to it.

Remember the infamous piece about first lady and partner in human rights atrocities Asma al-Assad in Vogue? (Link goes to a thorough article in the Atlantic about the back story.)  Click through to read about how the piece was 'placed' by PR operatives working for Assad.

This month, Harper's Bazaar has a splashy spread about Melania Trump, the immigrant wife of the nativist running for the US presidency.  Actually, I think that the Donald is quite a bit more than a nativist, but I need to step away from the keyboard now.

In other PR flackage news, Charlotte Rampling's PR flaks earned their pay trying to rescue their client from a disastrous interview and non-apology with a story in the NY Times about her style.  When you can't say anything nice about the person, talk about her clothes...

Let's talk about nice things. Did you see this Preen dress in the Guardian's London Fashion Week coverage?  I have nowhere to wear a silk chiffon dress, but I love it.

Thom Browne's Studio

I like color.  But, Thom Browne is making gray and monochrome exciting.

See more detail photos at Vogue.com.

Take a look at this video interview in his office.

Two of his responses stood out to me as a maker:

This collection is 90 percent hand-pieced intarsia. That’s a lot of work. It took around three weeks for one seamstress to make one jacket. Not everybody, when they see the finished garment, will understand all the work that goes into it. But the people that do will really understand how special each piece is.

In the video, you can see a woman on his staff cut and sew the embellishments. Another cut of the video shows the impeccable welt pocket on a suit jacket. I wish I could afford his clothes because they are so achingly beautiful.

Well, actually the last sentence stood out:

I think the tailoring aspect of what I do is very in tune with the way that I live, and my office, and my store, and even my house, because of the uniformity of it, and the rigidity. Especially for women, I love to keep pushing the idea of uniformity, and not so much choice. I think there’s something really refreshing when things don’t change too much.

I just finished knitting four subtly different bath mats.

I've also been thinking a great deal about design and how to present information. At work, I'm alternating between trying to fix some broken legacy software and writing, filming and editing tutorial videos about how to work with data.

That had me going back to the lessons of Edward Tufte.  To really highlight differences, you keep all but just one thing the same.  Then the change or newness will really pop.  That's why scientists do controlled experiments, changing just one thing at a time.  That's why Thom Browne's clothes really speak to me.

Anyway, I hope you check out the Edward Tufte books and the clothes of Thom Browne.

DD has asked for another ruffled skirt made from recycled shirts.  She wore hers to rags.  It was getting kind of short on her anyway.  I took in the elastic of my skirt and she's wearing it now.  She loves it so much, she's worried about having a replacement in the wings.  This one will be the sixth in the series.

I'm off the thrift stores for supplies.

Fashion Revolution?

Today is the 2-year anniversary of the collapse of Rana Plaza, a building in Bangladesh where thousands of garment makers worked and died. Has anything really changed in two years?

Will wearing our clothes inside out, as Fashion Revolution urges, make any difference?

I really don't know.

I know that my shopping habits have not changed in the last two years--but mainly because I had already changed it about 10 years ago.  Read my stuff diet and wardrobe refashion threads to review the evolution of my habits and thinking.

I'm going to spend a quiet evening at home, making myself a new shirt from a thrifted t-shirt and some scraps I purchased from an LA odd-jobber (waste from a garment factory).  I liked Iris' shirt so much, I decided to make one for myself.

I already cut it out. The pieces on the left will be used in the shirt.  The small scraps at the top will be used to test stitch tension and then tossed in the trash afterwards.

Shams posted a photo of how she uses those small scraps and a light bulb went off in my head.  The medium-small scraps to the right were cut into pieces about 2/3 the size of paper towels.  I keep a basket of them under both the kitchen and bathroom sinks and use them instead of paper towels for messy cleanups.  (I use reusable rags for most of my cleaning jobs.)

As you can see, I do not run a zero-waste home.  But things get used and reused and then tossed.

Cowl Finished

I finished a couple of projects last weekend. Neither took very long, but they attest to the psychological power of making lists instead of moving on to the next shiny thing.

The cowl shown here on the needles is complete, with ends woven in and wet-blocked.

It's about a foot longer than I had hoped.  That's what I get for not wet-blocking my swatch before calculating the number of stitches to cast on.  (12 st repeat * 22 repeats)

I messed up my first attempt with a 360 degree complete twist.  Frogging these yarns was not easy and I lost some fancy yarn yardage.  That mistake, and the additional length, meant the cowl lost some width.

But it looks quite substantial (yet light!) worn doubled.

I made this with the intention of blinging up my black shirts and knit tops. But, that wouldn't photograph well.

What do you think about mauve? Matronly? Timeless? The shirt still has the store tags on it, despite languishing in my closet for years.  Do I dare wear mauve in public?

Pattern (see copyright stuff at the footer of the page):

1. With plain yarn: cast on your desired number of 12 stitch repeats on a long circular needle, placing markers every 12 stitches and stitch counter or other marker at start of round.
2. Knit 8-10 rows (4-5 ridges) garter stitch back and forth.
3. Place stitches on 2 long circular needles to ensure that there are no twists.  Join into the round.
4. With fancy yarn, set up pattern (Row 1 of 4 row repeat): 
• *k4, centered double decrease, k4, k1 into bar between stitches, k1, slide marker, k1 into bar between stitches*, *repeat between*
• Centered double decrease:  slide two stitches together from L to R needles as if to k2tog, k1, slip two slipped stitches over the knitted stitch.  This doesn't sound like it will create a row of centered stitches, but it does.
• For larger holes, use a yo instead of the lifted bar increase.  For no holes, use a pair of m1R and m1L.
• Row 2: at start of round, k1 into bar between stitches, knit to end of round.
• Row 3: repeat Row 1
• Row 4: repeat Row 2
5. With plain yarn, knit rows 1-2 three times for 6 rows total.
6. Repeat rows 1-10 till desired width or out of yarn, ending with the fancy yarn.
7. Knit 8-10 rows (4-5 ridges) garter stitch back and forth.
8. Seam garter selvedge edges together, weave in ends.
9. Wet block, soaking in warm water and then stretching firmly to open the stitches.

These are not Hammer pants

Iris requested winter-weight knit pants in dark go-with-everything colors.  I dutifully bought some gorgeous black cotton/lycra stretch fleece.  Because I was tired of seeing her wear leggings everywhere, I tried to steer her to some looser-fitting pants.  She told me she likes pockets; the top one has them.

Vogue 1417 Donna Karan

Simplicity 2061 Learn to Sew

She called them Hammer pants. No, they aren't. If they were Hammer pants, they would have a dropped crotch.

Hammer and PSY in Hammer pants

Besides, it is too late. I already cut and sewed the pants using the slimmer Simplicity 2061. To make them slimmer still, I cut one size down from her measurement size.

I photographed them side by side with leggings made from her TNT Kwik Sew 3476.  The crotch depths are similar, but the leggings sit higher--nearly to the waist--while Simplicity 2061 sits 1.5" below the waist.

Kwik Sew 3476

I also repaired a torn section of her blue denim skirt.  I am not sure if I previously blogged about them, but it is also made from recycled shirts and a small length of lightweight denim.  I made it to replace this outgrown skirt.

In 2015, Iris got 3 things, to my 0. She'd better be appreciative.

Color Lab Workspace

Have you seen the workspace series in the NYT? Previously, I'd seen the series about fashion designers. I'm really interested in behind the scene work so today's story about Beverly Bell, manager of color and quality standards for textiles at Pantone fascinated me.  Go read Where the Spectrum is Sliced and Diced.

How cool is this table-top spectrophotometer? In my dream home, I'd have room for one. Hmm, I'd also like to have both a table-top DNA sequencer and a replicator while I am dreaming.

Bad Dad is a spectroscopist. We initially met across a laser table*. We would feel right at home if our kitchen looked like a lab where the most colorful things are the food.

* Although we used a low-power laser to study the ions, we used a 10,000 volt power supply to generate the plasma containing the ions of interest. There was literally electricity in the air when we met.

In other news, the condo search is not going well.  If you are selling a condo in S, W or E Boulder near public transit lines and/or the bike path, can you contact me?

Rana one year out

A year ago, the Rana Plaza building collapsed, trapping thousands of workers inside. I'm using a picture from the Guardian, but click through to their photoessay with heart-breaking close-ups.

There are many news articles about the event on the one year anniversary, but I am particularly shaken by Jason Burke's reporting.  He details how the factory owners used female supervisors, who are trusted more by the workers, to convince antsy workers to go inside a building that they feared was unsafe.  That's the same way armies used NCOs to convince infantry to charge enemy lines when they refused to follow commissioned officers.  Both resulted in large-scale slaughter.

• If you have a strong stomach, view The shirt on your back.
• The clean clothes campaign is urging people to use social media to shame businesses into paying up to the Rana Plaza victims fund.
• Carolyn showed pictures of herself wearing her clothes inside out for Fashion Revolution Day.  We started a Q&A conversation about the ethics of clothes a few months ago, before life got into the way.  But, we will be posting a series soon.
• I'd like to make a plug for Home Ec.  Just as taking auto shop for a semester doesn't make you qualified to fix your own car, it does educate you as a consumer about how difficult a task is and how much it should cost to pay a skilled person to do it.  If more people learned rudimentary sewing in Home Ec, they would be more wary of $10 blouses with lots of detailing or $10 jeans.

I'm going to wear my favorite t-shirt inside out today.  Luckily, I put a pocket on the inside.  However, I can't wear my shorts inside out because I need the pockets, particularly because I'm hobbling badly.  If they were inside out, you'd see the label that says they were made in Mexico, a medium wage country.  The factories in northern MX are closer to my LA home than SF so I consider them locally-made.

What are you wearing today?  Who made it?  Under what kind of working conditions?  How much were they paid?  How do they feel about their lives?  Are you making their lives better or worse?