The Intricate Ethics Of Clothing: A Q&A With The Author Of ‘Worn: A People’s History of Clothes’
“Decoding the global system that makes our clothes, might also change the way we view the world.”
I ’m a thrift-shop, flea market, tag-sale giddy kind of girl. Every dear friend and lover alike knows to just pull over if we spot one. I’ll snap my head back to double-check the address and date on a yard-sale-announcing neon poster-board warped with rain. Rats, it was last weekend, I’ll sigh.
95% of everything I own — other than underpants and socks and toothbrushes — has been used and worn by someone else. And I like that. What began as a necessity — I wasn’t raised with much money and then chose a writerly path — proved to be a way of life. A kind of romantic, strange posterity for clothes that bound me through space and time to other people.
What I hadn’t realized for much of my life was that clothing is deeply political. Like many others, the dawn of fast fashion horrified me — the collapse of a garment factory in Rana Plaza in Bangladesh in 2013 was something out of a nightmare, and it was just a pinprick of darkness in what is, essentially, a blackhole. Hands were wrung, reports were written, international ire was summoned, but proved performative, and the global fashion beast roared on. Still ravenous, still devouring.
“The making of good fabric cannot happen in isolation: it cannot happen without good communities and good agriculture. It cannot happen in the context of brutal, extractive trade regimes.”
— Sofi Thanhauser
The US fashion business is approximately a $2.4 trillion industry that employs about 40 million of the world’s poorest workers sans a living wage or meaningful rights. In Los Angeles alone, of the 46,000 individuals comprising the “cut-and-sew” labor force that underpins American apparel, 71% are undocumented immigrants possessing little recourse against rampant labor violations.
This was the backdrop in which I encountered the extraordinary and harrowing book by Sofi Thanhauser — Worn: A People’s History of Clothing — a meticulously researched and gripping tome that traverses history, sociology, the nature of consumerism, the role of gender, race and class in the making of textiles, and an incisive examination of the sweeping effects of globalization and deregulation on humans and our planet.
It’s not a light read, but an imperative one. After all, we all wear clothes.
And if we can understand the staggering role that garments play in our economy and our humanity — their creation, consumption, and casting off — we can all be better citizens.
I got the chance to ask Thanhauser about her relationship with clothes, with fabric and fabrication — where we’ve come from and where we’re going. Because Worn is not just a take-down, but a call to arms. It’s a reminder that while hope may not spring eternal — we need far more than good intentions — humans are brilliant, resourceful, and deeply talented makers.
“If it were possible to travel back in time 500 hundred years, we would be dazzled by the beauty and diversity of the clothing that people made and wore,” Thanhauser writes.
“We would see the flora and fauna of thousands of micro-environments transformed into cloth…The colors of the clothes were drawn from lichen, shells, bark, indigo, saffron, roots, beetles.
The fabric constructions and patterns themselves were astonishing, containing special regional weaves and knits, number magic, protective prayers, and clan symbols, collectively honed motifs, and individual flourishes.”
We cannot conjure our previous relationship to clothing and every one of us cannot take up the loom or even afford “hand made” clothes — eschewing the System takes privilege — but we can make small choices every day to participate differently. To be more intentional and court the craft instead of a mere object.
“When you watch a spider spin a web it appears for a time to be walking over air,” Thanhauser muses. “The thread itself is what provides safe passage between two impossible points, over an untraversable distance.”
Editor’s Note: This interview has been edited for brevity and clarity!
Worn in and of itself is a deeply political book — it takes no prisoners in terms of taking aim at the United States’ role in building a global garment trade that has systematically (and without any meaningful responses) destroyed swaths of ecosystems (human, natural, and economical alike) across the globe.
From Lubbock cotton-farming titans in Texas causing agricultural run-off in the Gulf of Mexico (a “dead zone” the size of New Jersey ) to making droves of workers go mad with carbon disulfide exposure (and of course studies proving this were buried or ignored!) much of the book reads like a horror film of greed and destruction…
Shot through with bright beautiful spots.
I’m always curious what artists believe their role is in exacting change… Is this book designed to anger and galvanize? Educate? Publicly shame corporations to spurn policy changes?
This is a question I wrestle with also. To me, the goal of this book was to tell a story, and to make histories that may have been treated in depth only in academic books legible to the lay reader. It was important to me to include points of light, both for the sake of reader morale and my own.
I wanted to write for a reader who hadn’t given clothing too much thought, but I also wanted to write for a reader who intuitively sensed that clothing production is deeply intertwined with some of the most pressing problems of our planet.
I wanted to give the gift that I personally feel that I receive from a good book or article: the sense that I am not crazy. To me, a writer is someone who becomes devoted to clarity, although perfect clarity is surely an illusion. I believe that clarity can fuel action.
In all honesty, I don’t remember when I realized clothes were not only personal, but political. And that the personal is always political! You talk a bit about wanting to recreate Jennifer Connelly’s Labyrinth blouse (so dreamy) and about your enduring love for thrift shops, but where did this particular writing itch stem from?
Can you remember a moment when you were like, damn, everything the light touches (animals, plants, water, and human labor!) dovetails with our relationship to cloth and I need to capture this story…?
Certainly discovering William Morris mattered a lot. Morris hated British middle class interior decorating. Eventually, his aesthetic disgust led him on the road to a political understanding of what was wrong with the system producing the prints and furniture that bugged him so much. A road that ultimately led him to socialism.
It was important for me to have it affirmed that aesthetic dislike is not necessarily shallow. We call appearances shallow, just like we call taking an interest in clothing shallow, for two reasons I think.
One is that both are associated with women. Another is that this is a good way to shut down a conversation. A conversation that, once it is begun, cannot help but lead to radical conclusions; to discussions of labor, the environment, and the system of global trade now prevalent.
Export processing zones — “a customs area where one is allowed to import plant, machinery, equipment and material for the manufacture of export goods under security, without payment of duty” — could be their own book, but one of your stats really seared into my brain.
In 1997 40% of all apparel purchased had been produced domestically and then by 2012 that figure dropped to 3%. Behind that figure lies a deep and abiding wound — globalization and the enduring fallout caused by NAFTA.
Codes of Conduct were introduced to offer some public semblance of ethical commitment, but even in the wake of the Dhaka tragedy, huge American retailers still went to great lengths not to protect Bangladeshi workers or hold any accountability should disaster strike again. You believe the global supply chain is both understandable and beatable — despite being what you call a “fearsome beast.”
You offer wool as a possible sustainable future…did you anticipate that discovery? Or the potential solace this fiber offers us and the community that has clamored to sustain and evolve it? What is it about wool?
Wool is a truly wonderful fiber, but what I was hoping to achieve in the section more broadly was to point to ways that small-scale production can be viable, and that communities can be reconstituted to make fiber and fabric in ways that enhance both environmental health and human wellbeing. Part of this is to posit that there are ways to use machines and technology equitably.
The industrial revolution was so entirely bound up in colonialism and slavery that it can be tempting to want to throw away machines entirely, but machines can be cool when they are used within systems that give adequate play to the individual human genius residing in each and every person, rather than denying it.
What was your favorite part of writing this book? What was the worst? I was buoyed by your parting thoughts that every day is another opportunity to simply do things better.
I think so much apathy is underpinned not by people’s absence of truly caring about other humans or the planet but by a paralysis engendered by the enormity of our problems. I suppose like any horrible snarl or tangle you must find one thread to begin untangling it….
My favorite part of writing this book was…speaking of snarls…unspooling a massive snarl out from my brain, and onto the page. I sat with, and lived with, the interconnected issues this book deals with for many many years, and a part of that was living with a lot of rage.
Writing the book transformed that rage into a different kind of energy, a drive towards precision and clarity and artistry, that for me was a much more livable kind of vital force to be dealing with on a daily basis.
What’s your favorite piece of clothing you’ve acquired (or had made? Or made!) recently?
A quilted wool dress made by a woman in Maine who has a company called Woodland Waders. I met her recently at a book talk and got a chance to tell her in person what a big difference this dress has made in my life and it was very satisfying.
The paperback version of “Worn” just dropped on Tuesday.
BUY IT HERE!
(Named one of the best books of 2022 by The New Yorker, you will not, full stop, regret reading this blistering, brilliant book.)
