VOGUE VIEWPOINT
In The Ascent of Woman, Foreman describes how the first known example of a culture trying to silence women is found in the carved law stones of the ancient Sumerians of Mesopotamia, which date from around 2,350 BC. They decree that a woman who spoke out of turn may be punished by having her teeth smashed in with a brick.
When you cannot speak, or no-one is listening, your clothing might tell your story. Take, for example, Argentina under military rule in the 1970s, when thousands of dissenters were ‘disappeared’, and the Mothers of the Plaza de Mayo embroidered white headscarves with the names of their missing sons and daughters and wore them to march. Or in December last year, when an Iranian woman at anti-government protest in Tehran was caught on camera waving her white hijab like a protest flag on the end a stick, her uncovered hair blowing free.
The fashion industry is home to many female forces of nature with much to say about justice. Vivienne Westwood shouts loudly about climate change. Stella McCartney uses her brand not just to sell supercool clothes, but as a platform to start conversations about sustainability. Maria Grazia Chiuri stamped her debut collection as Dior’s first ever female design boss with feminist slogans, printing the Nigerian writer Chimamanda Adichie’s rallying words on T-shirts: “We should all be feminists.” I could go on. There are many examples of women using their fashion powers for good.
But the women who design and wear our clothes tell only half the story. The other half belongs to the women who produce them. Sewing has provided millions of women with a pathway for economic empowerment, but it doesn’t always work that way. In 1911, a fire at the Triangle factory in Manhattan killed 146 garment workers, mostly teenaged girls who’d been making ‘shirtwaist’ blouses. More than a century later, in April 2013, it was more of the same when the Rana Plaza garment factory complex in Dhaka, Bangladesh, collapsed, killing more than 1,130 people.
Today about 80 per cent of garment workers globally are women, most aged between 18 and 35. Most have children and aren’t paid nearly enough. While China remains the largest fashion manufacturing nation, the second is Bangladesh, where cheap apparel manufacture is concentrated. There, according to Oxfam, women like Bangladeshi mother of two Anju get paid just 37 cents an hour to make clothes that are sold on the Australian high street. Time’s up on that too, I’d say.
There is no easy answer, and of course to talk of ‘fashion’ as a defined whole makes no sense. Some clothes are impeccably and ethically made, others unethically and unsustainably. Fashion’s story is as varied, complex and multi-layered as women’s lives are. But we must start the conversation, we must begin the work. And, of course, we should all be feminists – but to do that we must acknowledge our privilege and address the inequalities that marginalise millions of women.