Week 4: Slow Fashion, Sweatshops, and Social Networks

Grace Petersen
ASA 141
Week 4: Slow Fashion, Sweatshops, and Social Networks

This week we have read about and learned the differences between the current dominant model of fashion production and the forms of production known as slow or eco-fashion. Slow fashion in many ways can be seen as a reaction to the brutal horrors of fast-fashions overlooked production cycle, but it is worth noting that before fast-fashion emerged, ways of producing textile, accessories, and other bodily adornments had already existed: in this way it can be said that slow fashion precedes fast fashion. While the horrors of production in fast fashion are rightly shocking, such as the exploitation of workers at the bottom line to squeeze every penny out of your five dollar T-shirt, there is little discussion of some of the less shocking yet nevertheless negative consequences of a fast fashion model. One of the things which is sacrificed in a fast fashion model which relies upon exploitative and predatory working conditions for those who produce the product is a sense of human relationships between designer and producers.

It is no shock that low-paying, hazardous work conditions are dangerous and even deadly to workers, yet we must also pay attention to how relationships and social connections are neglected under a system which sees human lives only as valuable as their labor. This is how the alienation of laborer from their labor as an abstract totally succeeds: when we detach from all processes of social relation. From Thuy Linh Nguyen Tu, "Social differences can be less of a barrier to collectivity than social distance. " (All in the Family? kin, gifts, and the networks of fashion), so how can slow fashion models not only restore an essence of human and environmental responsibility, but also a social connection between those who design and those who produce?

Before we can begin to answer this, we must be willing to disengage with fast fashion, and engage in the alternative.