Worn: A People's History of Clothing

As the garment industries left the United States, it undid the work of industrial feminists like Clara Lemlich and Rose Schneiderman, who had the audacity to demand that intellectual satisfaction was the birthright of every sewing machine operator. This new [21st century] brand of feminism didn't care to protect sewing work as good work; rather it scoured the earth to find the cheapest new sources of exploitable, female labour.

Working class immigrants like Clara Lemlich had only managed to gain the public's sympathy in their strike of 1909-10 when they were joined by their bourgeois women sympathisers, the 'Mink Brigades'. But wealthy 'feminists' like Massenet [founder of Net-a-Porter] don't seem interested in standing shoulder-to-shoulder with working class women. Rather, they looked out over them, in their insignificant multiplicity, through glass. And if these Vietnamese workers wanted to demand the same rights that Clara Lemlich had demanded, they would have to face off against employers who were literally a world away. The IGLWU had fought hard to organise the whole East Coast; the workers here would have to organise whole continents. And even that wouldn't be enough.

Nor is the answer as simple as a return to the handmade. [...] Good fabric requires us to rebuild entire systems of water use and conservation, distribution of wealth and resources, trade regimes, and agriculture.

Efforts to save handicrafts are important, but we must be careful that those efforts treat the disease, and not merely the symptom. 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.