The Real Story of Women in Fashion

Whose hands made what you’re wearing right now? It was probably a woman’s. Making clothes is deeply connected to women’s work, spanning history right through to the present. From women bent over a garment by candlelight to the huge textile engine rooms of the Industrial Revolution, to modern-day garment workers in factories. Clothes have been and still are overwhelmingly created by women. I’m not talking about the famous designers, either, who get a lot of airtime like the Gabrielle Chanels of the world. I’m talking about the everyday women we don’t see in movies or books. The ones who actually make our clothes.

Ever wonder where the word “spinster” comes from? In medieval England, one of the only ways an unmarried woman could make money was to spin fibres like wool or flax into yarns. In the 1600s, spinster became a formal legal term to describe an unmarried woman, without the negative implication attached. The “unwanted old maid” idea snuck in during the 18th and 19th centuries. As the Industrial Revolution kicked off and brought spinning into factories, it only left behind a cultural anxiousness about women who remained unmarried, which persists to this day. A wonderful illustration of how history, society, and the fashion industry have treated women. Turns out, not much has changed.

We all wear clothes. Why is it that hardly anyone knows or talks about the women who are making them? It seems that we’ve all bought into some gauzy narrative about fashion and textiles as a purely glamorous pursuit, blissfully unblemished, and an industry with equally glamourised stories about women’s involvement in it. Aside from the people paying very close attention, why isn’t there a larger conversation about how what we wear has likely passed through the hands of multiple women the world over? Personally, I think this has something to do with women’s labour not attracting the same level of respect and recognition that men’s work does. Women’s invisible labour (yet again) goes unseen. That’s a deeper investigation for another time.

I cried over a T-shirt the first time I realised that women were probably the ones who made it. It was after I watched the documentary The True Cost (2015). A main storyline in that documentary follows a few women living in Bangladesh, who work at the factories that make clothes for global brands. These aren’t little unknown brands, either. If you shop at fast fashion retailers, you more than likely have one of these brands hiding out in your wardrobe. I distinctly remember watching the women speak about when the Rana Plaza disaster happened in 2013. Rana Plaza was a building in Bangladesh that housed several garment factories on its upper floors. It collapsed and killed 1,134 people, injuring another 2,500. It was the single biggest disaster to turn the eyes of the world to the working conditions of fashion’s garment workers and it called into question the entire chain that connects the fashion industry.

The women in the documentary spoke about the friends who died, crushed under the weight of the building. People who worked there had raised concerns about its structural integrity in the days before, but they were forced to return. They had no other choice. They woke up that morning to earn money for themselves and their families - some having relocated from small villages, far away - and didn’t come home that night. This left their children, friends, and family behind, many of whom would have depended on them. It was all for some cheaply produced clothing that might be worn a couple of times by someone else in another country, who would never know about the women who made them. After the documentary, I went to my wardrobe. I picked up the first T-shirt I found, bought from a fast fashion brand, and flipped the tag to see where it had been made. Bangladesh.

The story of women in today’s global fashion and textiles pipeline is well-known. The International Labour Organisation (ILO) puts the global garment workforce at an enormous 60-80% women. Around 42 million of those women are in Asia alone. Fashion is an industry closely tied with women’s work. Always has been. But even now many don’t get paid a wage that is considered ‘liveable’, or enough to cover expenses like food, housing, and a decent standard of living. Less than 2% of the fashion industry’s factory workers earn a living wage.** **The factories that employ women, at the very worst, indenture them into modern slavery through poverty wages, debt coercion, physical abuse, and deceptive recruitment. Many of these women have no other employment prospects or knowledge about their labour rights.

Since learning all this, I’ve found it increasingly interesting that an industry so closely tied with women’s work hardly ever mentions them, unless it’s some retrospective, tribute, or homage to the big names. We’re wearing what has passed through the hands of other women. Their work is literally at our fingertips and on our bodies throughout our entire lives. They are with us even though we can’t see it. We wear what other women have made, linking us across place and time, yet we couldn’t be more disconnected from each other. The real story of women in fashion is that we have always been here, either in the making or in the wearing. Ordinary, everyday women were the ones fashion was built on. It still is.