Some thoughts on the fashion industry
Hello hello everyone, it’s been a while! I haven’t sent out a newsletter in ages, partially because I’ve been trying to focus on other writing projects, but also because I’ve been feeling a little burnt out. I did however give a talk at FCC last week about the fashion industry, and wanted to send out an edited version in case anyone is interested in reading some thoughts I’ve been having about the fashion industry lately. Enjoy!
Today I’m going to be talking about the fashion industry in Pakistan, not just from the standpoint of someone who reports on and writes about the fashion industry but also as someone who loves clothes and believes in the transformative potential of what we put on our bodies. Hopefully I will be able to make a case for why and how the ways in which we think about fashion need to radically change in order for us to build a fairer and more just world. After all, many people dismiss fashion as frivolous, but actually we can understand much of the world through fashion and the fashion industry.
Firstly, a very brief history of cotton production in Pakistan. It’s important to know that we are a cotton producing country and cotton is our most important cash crop. Many of us learn this at school in Pakistan Studies, where we also learn a little about the history of textile production in South Asia. The subcontinent has always produced high quality cotton and the only way the British cotton industry could compete in the eighteenth century was to industrialise and make cotton at a far cheaper price. Suddenly, Indian markets became flooded with British cotton and under British imperialism, the Indian cotton industry suffered greatly. The Swadeshi movement, which began in 1906, urged Indians to wear local cloth and boycott what was referred to as ‘Manchester cloth,’ this highlights for us what foreign and local cloth had come to represent at that time. After independence, a newly formed Pakistan established several cotton mills and factories in order to assert its self-sufficiency. This ability to manufacture cloth and textiles very cheaply and efficiently became a great source of national pride.
Fast forward to today, what is the landscape of the fashion industry in contemporary Pakistan? Never ending supply chains, relentless lawn campaigns every summer, huge retail stores that sell fast fashion such as Khaadi, Sapphire, Gul Ahmed and Nishat, the construction of the ideal Pakistani woman via advertising, contract labour that works below minimum wage, factories that operate with no accountability, models who complain of sexual harassment at the workplace, brands that do not allow their workers to unionise, Instagram influencers never questioning how the clothes they get in PR are made for fear of rocking the boat, garment workers who are constantly reminded of their expendability, designers taking most of the credit that rightfully belongs to artisans, the declining state of the environment in cities like Faisalabad due to overproduction, the choking of rivers and other water bodies, clothes that are only designed with certain bodies in mind, the well documented prevention of factory inspections as inspections are deemed profit averse, the violence and arrests protesting textile and garments workers must contend with, and all of this while power and money is increasingly concentrated in the hands of a few.
And let’s not forget, a new kind of imperialism is also at play within countries such as Pakistan. Many of the garments produced here are made on order and then exported to other countries. International brands such as H&M, Zara, Forever 21 and Urban Outfitters all buy garments from Pakistan yet choose not to account for their supply chains. Developing countries like Pakistan are dependent on these exports, making it a priority to fulfil international orders as quickly and cheaply as possible. Many people will remember that in 2012, the Ali Enterprises garments factory located in Baldia Town, Karachi was set on fire and 264 garment workers burned to death. Surviving workers have reported that management officials tried to save the merchandise before helping workers out of the burning building. The factory produced garments for a German textile brand, Kik Textillien. It was only after four years of campaigning that Kik Textillien agreed to pay compensation to the victim’s families. In 2020, due to the pandemic many international brands cancelled their orders and refused to pay their supply chains. The result was that many garment workers in Pakistan weren’t paid their salaries for months on end or lost their jobs. When workers protested outside factory gates they were beaten, shot at, some were arrested. A year later, many of them remain unemployed.
I’m aware that all I’ve done so far is map out the far-ranging problems that the fashion industry has either created or exacerbated in Pakistan and have offered no solutions. The reason for this is there are no easy fixes to a problem as multifaceted and all-encompassing as the fashion industry. However, in an attempt to save itself, the fashion industry in Pakistan has tried to offer us some easy solutions. Take for example, the reusable canvas bags that Sapphire launched in 2019, an effort to ‘tackle’ waste without having to take real stock of the waste caused by the brand itself. Consider the recent attempts by some major brands to include models that are not fair skinned or slim in their advertising campaigns, always announced with great fanfare on social media, while the majority of their clothes are still designed to fit a narrow percentage of the population.
Other examples are smaller brands and boutiques that have cropped up recently claiming they believe in slow fashion as well as in producing ethically and sustainably. The clothes many of these smaller businesses make cost more than what an average customer can afford, which raises the question of who this slow, ethical and sustainable fashion is really for. Thus, the fashion industry also makes the purchase of fashion a moral choice, by which I mean it puts the onus of buying ethically on you and profits off you either way, whether you choose to buy slow or fast fashion. In the next couple of years, I predict that big brands will also put out ethically made lines, priced higher than their regular lines and with little to no information about what exactly makes them so ethical.
If I sound sceptical about these solutions it is because we need to sit with the uncomfortable truths of the fashion industry, truths that we are also complicit in, if we are ever going to be able to affect real change. The Pakistani fashion industry wants to race towards solutions because if we are constantly looking towards the future then there is less inclination to think about how we got here in the first place.
I want to pause here and think a little about fashion as separate from the industry that I have described. I want to talk about what fashion has meant to me in my own life. Growing up in a respectable middle-class family in Pakistan, you can imagine fashion was often the subject of heated discussion. The question of what to wear and when and where to wear it was a significant one that dictated much of my youth. The clothes I put on my body were meant to signal that I was from a respectable family, that I was receiving a decent education and would go on to work towards the progress of the nation. Looking too ‘western’ was disapproved of, but it was also suspect to look out of touch with the modern world. Clothes were not supposed to express your creativity or imagination, they were only meant to validate your decency and femininity. When I wore something that expressed another possibility of being, skinny jeans, a brightly coloured sari or a boxy suit, I felt the transformative power of fashion. This is why fashion was and continues to be a channel of resistance for me, as I know it must be for many people listening today.
When I say the fashion industry needs to undergo a radical shift, in fact when I say that fashion needs to divorce itself from the industry, I say this not just because of the state of the industry today but also because the industry has curtailed our attitudes towards fashion as well. Even though the fashion industry positions itself as one that is inherently creative, the industry actually constrains what we regard as fashion. In Pakistan, women’s fashion is meant to express that mythical balance between modernity and tradition and celebrate how Pakistani women are both modern and traditional, without being too much or too little of either. This is the conceptual limit of the fashion industry in Pakistan.
Hence, it is the responsibility of those who love fashion to be critical of the industry as well as to look beyond it. As part of my own work, and as a result of the love for fashion that I discovered growing up, I now write and think about Pakistani brands and advertising because I want to dissect their constructions of womanhood and the nation state. We cannot begin to build a new narrative without first understanding the insidiousness of the one we are fed on a daily basis. In the same spirit, I decided to make an Instagram account, thisisthemodsquad, because Instagram is where so much fashion campaigning in Pakistan takes place now. It made sense to situate a critical approach to Pakistani fashion within a space where the fashion industry is rarely questioned. I also wanted the fashion industry to know that we are watching them, what they are doing is not going unnoticed.
And what about looking beyond? Looking beyond the industry requires more than just quick and easy short-term solutions. It requires more than a couple of experts. It requires the power of our collective imagination. Together, it becomes possible for us to imagine a world where fashion is no longer a commodity and the bodies that produce fashion are not sites of ownership and violence. A world where clothes do not define how respectable we are, where trends are not dictated by luxury brands, where the designer is not a benevolent authority and artisans are truly respected for their craft. A world where factories are eliminated, where garment workers are paid a living wage and where we return to skills that only a generation ago many people possessed such as sewing, mending, even designing our own clothes.
Fashion can be so much more than purchasing endless garments in order to purchase various identities at the cost of both the environment and the undervalued labour of others. Fashion can show us other ways of relating to the world and each other, ways that we already know in fact. If we can share and borrow clothes then we can build community. If we can reuse, restore and upcycle clothes then we can cultivate relationships with material things beyond merely purchasing them. If we can resist the pressure to buy clothes that will placate everyone, then we are defying respectability politics. If we allow for inconsistencies in our personal aesthetic, then we remember not to take fashion, and ourselves, too seriously. If we can come together to hold brands accountable, then we prove we are not just merely consumers but that we too have a stake in this world and a stake in the clothes we put on our bodies. If we agitate and organise for textile and garment workers to receive a living wage, we are saying we value the lives of many over the profits of a few. If we do all of these things together, then we can begin to create a new world, one that is free from the fashion industry in which every single one of us may clothe ourselves as we please.
Some of my other writing on fashion/the fashion industry
On garment workers and the 2020 pandemic
On the sharif girls who live in the Zara Shahjahan ad campaigns