Fast fashion is polluting the world's air and water, filling landfills and overworking and underpaying workers. How does the shirt on your back contribute?
Across Women’s Lives’ “Wear and Tear” series traces the roots of women in the garment industry from textile mills in North Carolina to sweatshops in Los Angeles to crowded factories in Bangladesh, where the memory of the deadly Rana Plaza disaster lingers but real change has been slow.
Acree Bell Lassiter was just 17 when she started working in a textile mill in Roanoke Rapids, North Carolina. Now that mill, like all the mills in her town, is gone.
"My dad was a doctor, and when I was 6 my family moved from the center of the garment industry, New York City, to North Carolina, America's garment manufacturing state," recalls Marco Werman, host of PRI's The World.
To grow, blossom or bloom — this is what the Filipino word, lumago, means in the Philippines’ national language. But for the women of Lumago Designs, the word has symbolic meaning, as well.
The world's biggest fashion retailer wants you to help them “close the loop” by donating your unwanted clothes. But only a small percentage of those cast-offs become new clothes.
Rongmala Begum, like many of Bangladesh’s garment workers, doesn’t know how old she is. She doesn’t have a birth certificate, which is common for the rural poor here. She thinks she’s in her 40s. She has an identification card, but she can’t read it. Begum is illiterate.
The Rana Plaza collapse made companies and consumers more aware of working conditions in the clothing factories. In some places, reforms have made workers safer, but the changes are far from universal.
In the early hours of Aug. 2, 1995, authorities raided an apartment complex in El Monte and found 72 Thai workers, including Rotchana Sussman, living in virtual slavery while making clothing.
