Target scored a PR coup in 2003, when it celebrated the arrival of its first Isaac Mizrahi for Target collection with a pioneering pop-up shop in Rockefeller Center. Big-name designers collaborating with big-box stores was a new idea at the time, and so was the pop-up shop. It was open for only six weeks — but those six happened to include New York Fashion Week, during which, as I recall, the place was jammed. It was irresistible: The shop had every style in every color and every size.
(I bought several brightly colored button-down-the-front polo shirts — and never wore most of them after I found the buttonholes on the first one were so lax and lackadaisical that they wouldn’t stay buttoned.)
Ten years later, the pop-up shop is a familiar ploy for unloading clothes, accessories, eyewear, and you-name-it on jaded consumers. Everybody from Helmut Lang to Warby Parker is doing it.
But last month, designers Rebecca Layton and Monica Jakubiak put a wicked new spin on the idea when they opened the nation’s first pop-up sweatshop in Austin, Texas.
Called “Sewn on the Street,” it comprised a tent, stacks of cut-out garment pieces, and several sewing machines, each one standing in for the garment manufacturing industry of a different country — China, India, Bangladesh, etc.
The operation was part of a popular local arts festival called Fusebox. Festival attendees were conscripted to sit down at one of the machines and sew up a T-shirt, or part of one — a sleeve, a neckline binding, a hem, whatever. Their work was timed and, when they finished, they were paid the U.S. equivalent of what a garment worker in the country the sewing machine represented would have earned for the same work.
Sewn on the Street’s cash box was all pennies and, tellingly, pennies were all Layton and Jakubiak needed to meet their payroll.
They designed the graphics promoting Sewn on the Street to resemble the brash, upbeat come-ons of fast fashion with its emphasis on rock-bottom prices. At first glance, their signs and banners seemed to be advertising a big sale. Only, Layton says, instead of saying “85 percent off,” a sign would say: “Girls 15 to 25 make up 85 percent of the sweatshop work force.”
Instead of “marked down 34 percent,” a banner would read: “34 percent of people in Bangladesh live on less than $1 a day.”
Though they didn’t make a big point of it, they opened their pop-up sweatshop a year to the day after the collapse of Rana Plaza, a jerry-built eight-story concrete building that had housed dozens of clothing factories in Dhaka, the capital of Bangladesh.
Though the structure was visibly unsafe and clearly growing more unstable by the day, Layton says, the factories had orders to fill, and the people who worked there were told they’d be fired if they didn’t show up for work.
So they did, and the building came down on top of them. More than 1,100 were killed, and 2,500 injured.
If something like that happened where you live — a shoddily built factory collapsed, killing thousands of underpaid workers who made the clothes you wear — there’d be a huge outcry: How could something like this happen in America? But Bangladesh is far away.
How do you make people seem real when they’re half a world away, even if they make the clothes on your back? You don’t know them; you don’t see them.
Instead of preaching, Layton and Jakubiak, who design a line of block-printed fair-trade clothing produced by artisans using centuries-old technology in India, hit on the idea of inviting festival goers to have an experience: Let them do some of the same work that offshore garment workers do, and maybe in the process notice how much skill and focus their work takes, and then collect their meager pay.
The idea was to “have people start to think about it,” Layton says. “What’s the true cost of what you’re wearing?” Not just in money, but in overwork, hunger, missed school, sometimes death.
“It comes home to people,” she says, when they actually participate in the transaction: “They take the time to sit down and sew, and you pay them.”
In fact, Layton thinks “the spectacle of seeing people out sewing in public” may be educational on its own.
Today, all that most Americans know about the clothing business is its retail side: They shop. We don’t see them manufactured, because only 2 percent of the clothes we buy are made in America. As a result, Layton says, we’ve lost sight of how clothes are made and where they come from. “We’ve lost touch with what a well-made garment is,” she says. “A lot of people don’t even know.”
As a textile designer who loves her craft, Layton thinks this loss shortchanges us even as it takes cruel advantage of offshore garment workers.
Our clothes are disposable. We wear them a few times and throw them away. We don’t treasure them, the way some of our grandmothers did, because they knew the point of every kind of seam, every bit of interlining, every gusset and godet, and understood the skills that each required.
Layton’s hoping to take her pop-up sweatshop on the road, to start a conversation about where our clothes come from and what we owe the people who make them.
(Fast fact: She says offshore garment workers are so badly paid — typically they make about 30 percent of what’s considered a living wage in their communities — that doubling their wages would add only 45 cents to the retail price of a $25 T-shirt.)
She also wants us to think about what we stand to gain by replacing “fast fashion” with “slow clothes,” much as Americans and chefs and home cooks and hard-core locavores are finding that “slow food” can be more rewarding — and better for you — than fast food you grab from a drive-through window.
Write to Patricia McLaughlin c/o Universal Uclick, 1130 Walnut St., Kansas City, MO 64106 or patsy.mcl@verizon.net.
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