BOOK OF THE DAY: Where Am I Wearing?: A Global Tour to the Countries, Factories, and People that Make our Clothesby Kelsey Timmerman John Wiley 248pp, €19.20
WHERE DO your clothes come from? What’s the fashion house’s policy on child labour and sweatshops? Do they outsource? Are their subcontractors in compliance? Were your jeans bootlegged? Was the cotton sustainably grown? You can’t be sure.
Periodically, scandals hit all the major fashion companies. Their reaction is invariable: we didn’t know; we have strong codes in place; our middle men must be in breach; we’re investigating. . . Are they telling the truth? Possibly. The fashion industry is a vast labyrinth beyond any one company’s control. Think about the steps that go into putting jeans on your legs – cotton has to be grown, picked, combed, woven, bleached, pre-shrunk, dyed, stitched, embroidered, packaged, and transported to the store. At each link of the chain there’s a chance to exploit a worker, and degrade the environment.
So what do you do? Buy only impeccable eco-labels, like Ali Hewson’s Edun, which are expensive and probably won’t suit you? (Why are all eco-clothes “floaty” and in muted shades of biscuit? Why don’t eco-labels do trash disco?) Boycott sweatshop goods? This risks destroying the economy of poor countries – after NBC aired footage of a sweatshop in Bangladesh, Americans stopped buying Bangladeshi clothes, with the result that jobless children flooded Dhaka and NGOs protested.
It’s hell out there for the ethical clothes shopper. We’re badly in need of an informed guide. Unfortunately this isn’t it.
Kelsey Timmerman is an American blogger and freelance journalist, who came up with a good idea: to go to the factories where his clothes were made and check on conditions. His T-shirt said “Made in Honduras”; his boxers in Bangladesh; his jeans in Cambodia; his flip-flops in China.
Anyone who goes to the coalface brings back stories, and Timmerman is no exception. He recounts sad tales of Arifa in Bangladesh, on sick leave without pay from her $6 a week job; of Dewan and Zhu Chun in China who have a TV/DVD but haven’t seen their son for three years – he’s with grandparents in the country. Timmerman puts faces on the garment industry. This needs doing and he has the warmth, compassion and interest in other cultures to do it.
However, more is required to unravel our garments than an open disposition. Timmerman isn’t a bad investigator – he cold-calls one company for days and then turns up uninvited at their factory to be harangued by the vice-president – but he’s no newshound either. He only visits the main factories, not the subcontractors. In Cambodia, factory conditions seem ideal; it would be great to have the confidence that Timmerman had tested the whole supply chain, but he obviously hasn’t. And he’s so friendly, you suspect he’s gullible. “I don’t lie,” he writes happily, “because I’m lazy.” This is not very reassuring.
An interest in people is nice but can’t replace interest in textiles. At one factory three men examine his underwear. “They pull them, stretch them, rub the fabric between their fingers, examine seams, hold them up to the light, pretty much everything but smell them.” That’s the kind of obsession Timmerman needs. He should spool exhaustively through yarn, thread count, seams, zips, stone-washing and hemming so that we never look at our T-shirts in the same way again.
Instead, he bulks out his book with accounts of the Phnom Penh city dump, going bowling, and vignettes from his past. The blogger in him wants to recount his adventures, but they have nothing to do with the purpose of the book, and are merely distracting. Where Am I Wearing? would have made an excellent 5,000-word article; as a book it starts balling and unpicking even before the first wash.
Bridget Hourican is a historian and a freelance journalist