Garment Industry Quotes

Take care of your costume and your confidence will take care of itself.

With right fashion, every female would be a flame.

Michael Pollan likens consumer choices to pulling single threads out of a garment. We pull a thread from the garment when we refuse to purchase eggs or meat from birds who were raised in confinement, whose beaks were clipped so they could never once taste their natural diet of worms and insects. We pull out a thread when we refuse to bring home a hormone-fattened turkey for Thanksgiving dinner. We pull a thread when we refuse to buy meat or dairy products from cows who were never allowed to chew grass, or breathe fresh air, or feel the warm sun on their backs. The more threads we pull, the more difficult it is for the industry to stay intact. You demand eggs and meat without hormones, and the industry will have to figure out how it can raise farm animals without them. Let the animals graze outside and it slows production. Eventually the whole thing will have to unravel. If the factory farm does indeed unravel - and it must - then there is hope that we can, gradually, reverse the environmental damage it has caused. Once the animal feed operations have gone and livestock are once again able to graze, there will be a massive reduction in the agricultural chemicals currently used to grow grain for animals. And eventually, the horrendous contamination caused by animal waste can be cleaned up. None of this will be easy. The hardest part of returning to a truly healthy environment may be changing the current totally unsustainable heavy-meat-eating culture of increasing numbers of people around the world. But we must try. We must make a start, one by one.

Fashion doesn't make you perfect, but it makes you pretty.

It's time to shop high heels if your fiance kisses you on the forehead.

Zippers are primal and modern at the very same time. On the one hand, your zipper is primitive and reptilian, on the other mechanical and slick. A zipper is where the Industrial Revolution meets the Cobra Cult, don't you think? Ahh. Little alligators of ecstasy, that's what zippers are. Sexy, too. Now your button, a button is prim and persnickety. There's somethin' Victorian about a row o' buttons. But a zipper, why a zipper is the very snake at the gate of Eden, waitin' to escort a true believer into the Garden. Faith, I should be sewin' more zippers into me garments, for I have many erogenous zones that require speedy access. Mmm, old zipper creeper, hanging head down like the carcass of a lizard; the phantom viper that we shun in daytime and communicate with at night.

Any girl with a grin never looks grim.

They were poor and living in the farthest corners of the Bronx. How did they afford tickets? "Mary got a quarter," Friedman says. "There was a Mary who was a ticket taker, and if you gave Mary a quarter, she would let you stand in the second balcony, without a ticket." ... and what you learn in that world is that through your own powers of persuasion and initiative, you can take your kids to Carnegie Hall. There is no better lesson for a budding lawyer than that. The garment industry was boot camp for the professionals.

Dresses don't look beautiful on hangers.

You cannot choose your face but you can choose your dress.

The new fashions sold in department stores had thrown skilled American seamstresses out of work, you see. They’d been displaced by immigrant girls doing piecework for a pittance in terrible sweatshops. I refused to patronize a garment industry that exploited its desperately poor workers so heartlessly. And if that wasn’t enough to keep me out of stores, there was this as well: I was determined to resist that shameless sister of war propaganda— the advertising industry.

Dresses won't worn out in the wardrobe, but that is not what dresses are designed for.

Department stores have come out with a new size for their clothing line that fits me perfectly. The label reads, XXL-LOL!

An old fashioned outfit is not a costume, it's a comedy.

An analysis in Bangladesh confirmed that the women who worked in the garment industry (as my grandparents did in 1930s Canada) enjoyed rising wages, later marriage, and fewer and better-educated children.46 Over the course of a generation, slums, barrios, and favelas can morph into suburbs, and the working class can become middle class.47 To appreciate the long-term benefits of industrialization one does not have to accept its cruelties.

There is no doubt that those Jewish immigrants arrived at the perfect time, with the perfect skills," says the sociologist Stephen Steinberg. "To exploit that opportunity, you had to have certain virtues, and those immigrants worked hard. They sacrificed. They scrimped and saved and invested wisely. But still, you have to remember that the garment industry in those years was growing by leaps and bounds. The economy was desperate for the skills that they possessed.

The Irish and Italian immigrants who came to New York in the same period didn’t have that advantage. They didn’t have a skill specific to the urban economy. They went to work as day laborers and domestics and construction workers—jobs where you could show up for work every day for thirty years and never learn market research and manufacturing and how to navigate the popular culture and how to negotiate with the Yankees, who ran the world. Or consider the fate of the Mexicans who immigrated to California between 1900 and the end of the 1920s to work in the fields of the big fruit and vegetable growers. They simply exchanged the life of a feudal peasant in Mexico for the life of a feudal peasant in California. “The conditions in the garment industry were every bit as bad,” Soyer goes on. “But as a garment worker, you were closer to the center of the industry. If you are working in a field in California, you have no clue what’s happening to the produce when it gets on the truck. If you are working in a small garment shop, your wages are low, and your conditions are terrible, and your hours are long, but you can see exactly what the successful people are doing, and you can see how you can set up your own job.”*

A drone is often preferred for missions that are too "dull, dirty, or dangerous" for manned aircraft.” PROLOGUE The graffiti was in Spanish, neon colors highlighting the varicose cracks in the wall. It smelled of urine and pot. The front door was metal with four bolt locks and the windows were frosted glass, embedded with chicken wire. They swung out and up like big fake eye-lashes held up with a notched adjustment bar. This was a factory building on the near west side of Cleveland in an industrial area on the Cuyahoga River known in Ohio as The Flats. First a sweatshop garment factory, then a warehouse for imported cheeses then a crack den for teenage potheads. It was now headquarters for Magic Slim, the only pimp in Cleveland with his own film studio and training facility. Her name was Cosita, she was eighteen looking like fourteen. One of nine children from El Chorillo. a dangerous poverty stricken barrio on the outskirts of Panama City. Her brother, Javier, had been snatched from the streets six months ago, he was thirteen and beautiful. Cosita had a high school education but earned here degree on the streets of Panama. Interpol, the world's largest international police organization, had recruited Cosita at seventeen. She was smart, street savvy, motivated and very pretty. Just what Interpol was looking for. Cosita would become a Drone!

I also gained a deeper appreciation of what it must have been like for my mother to be in a foreign country unable to speak the language (in her case, unable to read or write any language). As I walked around by myself, however, it was obvious that based on my body language people perceived me as American but at the same time different enough from other Americans that they felt free to come up and ask me all kinds of personal questions about where I came from, what kind of work I did, whether I was married, how many people there were in my family. Back in the 1930s when I asked personal questions like these of a Chinese student at Bryn Mawr, she reprimanded me for being too personal. I’m not sure whether that was because she came from a higher social class or because the revolution has opened things up. I answered their questions as best as I could in my limited Chinese. The ingenuity and energy of the Chinese reminded me of my father, for example, the way that they used bicycles, often transformed into tricycles, for transporting all kinds of things: little children (sometimes in a sidecar), bricks and concrete, beds and furniture. I was amazed at the number of entrepreneurs lining the sidewalks with little sewing machines ready to alter or make a garment, barbers with stools and scissors, knife sharpeners, shoe repairmen, vendors selling food and other kinds of merchandise from carts. Everywhere I went I saw women knitting, as they waited for a bus or walked along the street, as if they couldn’t waste a minute. I had never seen such an industrious people. It was unlike anything that I had witnessed in England, France, the West Indies, Africa, or the United States.

It’s hard to believe, but before manufacturing went to Asia, New York City was an industrial powerhouse. In the thirties and forties, seventy-five percent of women’s clothes in the country were made right here between Sixth and Ninth Avenues, from Forty-Second down to Thirtieth. They were stitched up and put on racks and then rolled over to Macy’s on Thirty-Fourth for sale. Everything was centered around Penn Station, so people from out of town could come in and shop. The garment district here is why New York’s fashion industry still leads the world and Seventh Avenue means fashion.

In 1991, 56.2% of all clothes purchased in the United States were American-made. By 2012, it was down to 2.5%. According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, between 1990 and 2012, the U.S. textile and garment industry lost 1.2 million jobs. That was more than 3/4s the sectors labor force, said it to Latin America and Asia. Once-vibrant industrial centers down the Eastern Seaboard and across the South faded into ghost towns, as factories sat empty and those who were laid off went on unemployment. In the United Kingdom in the 1980s, one million worked in the UK textile industry; now, only 100,000 do. The same went down across most of Western Europe. All of heroin textile jobs globally nearly doubled, from 34.2 million to 57.8 million.

Over the last decade, entire neighbourhoods have lost their identity to the ever-growing clothing retail market. Since my first visit to the Marais quarter of Paris in 2003, I have seen the area shift from a charming, off-beat district featuring a mix of up-and-coming designers, traditional ateliers, bookstores and boulangeries to what amounts to an open-air shopping mall dominated by international brands. In the last five years, an antique shop has been replaced by a chic clothing store and the last neighbourhood supermarket transformed into a threestorey flagship of one of the clothing giants. The old quarter is now only faintly visible, like writing on a medieval palimpsest: overhanging the gleaming sign of a sleek clothes shop, on a faded ceramic fascia board, is written ‘BOULANGERIE’. In economically developed countries, people’s motivations for spending money have long since shifted from needs to desires. There’s no denying we need places to live in, food to nourish us and clothes to dress ourselves in, and, while we’re at it, we might as well do these things with a certain degree of refinement to help make life as pleasurable as possible. But when did the clothing industry turn into little more than a cash machine whose main purpose seems to be its own never-ending growth? Just as clothing retail shops are sucking the identity out of entire neighbourhoods, so that the architecture becomes little more than a backdrop for their products, the production of the garments they sell is eating away at the Earth’s resources and the life of the workers who are producing them. Fashion has become the second most polluting industry in the world. And with what result? Our wardrobes are cluttered with so many clothes that the mere sight of them becomes overwhelming, yet at the same time we feel a constant craving for the next purchase that will transform our look.

Time was when a peasant family could consider the corn it sowed and reaped, or the woollen garments woven in the cottage, as the products of its own soil. But even then this way of looking at things was not quite correct. There were the roads and the bridges made in common, the swamps drained by common toil, the communal pastures enclosed by hedges which were kept in repair by each and all. If the looms for weaving or the dyes for colouring fabrics were improved by somebody, all profited; and even in those days a peasant family could not live alone, but was dependent in a thousand ways on the village or the commune. But nowadays, in the present state of industry, when everything is interdependent, when each branch of production is knit up with all the rest, the attempt to claim an individualist origin for the products of industry is absolutely untenable.

Marks … I’m afraid I’m not going to be able to find your spectacles in this wreckage.” “I have another pair at home,” she ventured. “Thank God.” Leo sat up with a quiet grunt of discomfort. “Now, if we stand on the highest pile of debris, it’s only a short distance to the surface. I’m going to hoist you up, get you out of here, and then you’re going to ride back to Ramsay House. Cam trained the horse, so you won’t need to guide him. He’ll find his way back home with no trouble.” “What are you going to do?” she asked, bewildered. He sounded rather sheepish. “I’m afraid I’m going to have to wait here until you send someone for me.” “Why?” “I have a—” He paused, searching for a word. “Splinter.” She felt indignant. “You’re going to make me ride back alone and unescorted and virtually blind, to send someone to rescue you? All because you have a splinter?” “A large one,” he volunteered. “Where is it? Your finger? Your hand? Maybe I can help to … Oh, God. ” This last as he took her hand and brought it to his shoulder. His shirt was wet with blood, and a thick shard of timber protruded from his shoulder. “That’s not a splinter,” she said in horror. “You’ve been impaled. What can I do? Shall I pull it out?” “No, it might be lodged against an artery. And I wouldn’t care to bleed out down here.” She crawled closer to him, bringing her face close to his to examine him anxiously... “Don’t worry,” he murmured. “It looks worse than it is.” But Catherine didn’t agree. If anything, it was worse than it looked... Stripping off her riding coat, she tried to lay it over his chest. “What are you doing?” he asked. “Trying to keep you warm.” Leo plucked the garment off his chest and made a scoffing sound. “Don’t be ridiculous. First, the injury isn’t that bad. Second, this tiny thing is not capable of keeping any part of me warm. Now, about my plan—” “It is obviously a significant injury,” she said, “and I do not agree to your plan. I have a better one.” “Of course you do,” he replied sardonically. “Marks, for once would you do as I ask?” “No, I’m not going to leave you here. I’m going to pile up enough debris for both of us to climb out.” “You can’t even see, damn it. And you can’t move these timbers and stones. You’re too small.” “There is no need to make derogatory remarks about my stature,” she said, lurching upward and squinting at her surroundings. Identifying the highest pile of debris, she made her way to it and hunted for nearby rocks. “I’m not being derogatory.” He sounded exasperated. “Your stature is absolutely perfect for my favorite activity. But you’re not built for hauling rocks. Blast it, Marks, you’re going to hurt yourself—” “Stay there,” Catherine said sharply, hearing him push some heavy object aside. “You’ll worsen your injury, and then it will be even more difficult to get you out. Let me do the work.” Finding a heap of ashlar blocks, she picked one up and lugged it up the pile, trying not to trip over her own skirts. “You’re not strong enough,” Leo said, sounding aggravated and out of breath. “What I lack in physical strength,” she replied, going for another block, “I make up for in determination.” “How inspiring. Could we set aside the heroic fortitude for one bloody moment and dredge up some common sense?” “I’m not going to argue with you, my lord. I need to save my breath for”—she paused to heft another block—“stacking rocks.” Somewhere amid the ordeal, Leo decided hazily that he would never underestimate Catherine Marks again. Ounce for ounce, she was the most insanely obstinate person he had ever known, dragging rocks and debris while half blind and hampered by long skirts, diligently crossing back and forth across his vision like an industrious mole. She had decided to build a mound upon which they could climb out, and nothing would stop her.

The lack of entrenched craft unions, however, allowed the garment industry to pioneer some of the earliest industrial unions in manufacturing, based on solidarity across skill levels, gender, and ethnicity rather than control of the training process.

Editorial photographs published in magazines and online give information not only about specific garments, but also the mood and style that are currently in vogue.

When we started Nalanda in 2007, there was a lot of buzz around a company called Eicher Motors led by a young, dynamic guy called Siddhartha Lal. Lal had inherited a hodgepodge of poor-quality businesses from his father in 2004. They manufactured motorcycles, footwear, garments, tractors, trucks, auto components, and a few other products, and none was an industry leader. In a remarkably bold strategic move, Lal decided to divest thirteen of the fifteen businesses to focus on just two products: trucks and motorcycles.30 Almost every analyst was gung ho about the future of Eicher; they were all taken in by its dynamic leader who was aggressively culling businesses, something that Indian firms rarely did. However, in 2007, this was a turnaround story with no empirical evidence of success. The company’s biggest hit, the Enfield Classic motorcycle, was launched only in 2010. We decided not to invest in the business. By the 2010s, the company’s motorcycles had taken on cult status in the Indian consumer’s mind. Sales exploded from just 52,000 units in 2009 to 822,000 units in 2019: a sixteen-fold growth. If you had listened to what we had to say about the business, you would not have invested. Your opportunity loss? Seventy times your money from 2007 until 2021. Tesla and Eicher Motors are the kinds of type II error we will inevitably commit because we reject highly indebted businesses, rapidly evolving industry landscapes, and turnarounds.

In America, the American Federation of Labor, which included most of organized labor, specialized in organizing only craft unions. That is, carpenters, plumbers, masons, painters, machinists, etc., were organized in unions representing these separate crafts. They constituted only a small part of the labor force. The vast majority of workers were unskilled and were employed in factories or single industries and were unorganized. There were three large industrial unions—the United Mine Workers of John L. Lewis, the International Ladies Garment Workers Union of David Dubinsky and the Amalgamated Clothing Workers of Sidney Hillman.

The popular impression of Korea as a free-trade economy was created by its export success. But export success does not require free trade, as Japan and China have also shown. Korean exports in the earlier period-things like simple garments and cheap electronics-were all means to earn the hard currencies needed to pay for the advanced technologies and expensive machines that were necessary for the new, more difficult industries, which were protected through tariffs and subsidies. At the same time, tariff protection and subsidies were not there to shield industries from international competition forever, but to give them the time to absorb new technologies and establish new organizational capabilities until they could compete in the world market.

[T]he dozen or so items I wished to return to XXI Forever could only be traded in, and the store had a strict BOGO policy: Buy One, Get One (Free). This means that the 12 items I had but did not need could only be returned by trading them in for 24 different, new items; I tried, of course, to eschew that "one free" I didn't need. Not allowed. (Everyone I knew got glittery spangles as holiday gifts that year.) The garment industry, it seems, is now inventing new ways to give this stuff away.

Publishing, I learn later, is a little like the garment industry: You have to be geographically well placed, in New York, for schmoozing convenience.

Being a teacher is meaningful. Being a physician is meaningful. So is being an entrepreneur, and the miracle of the garment industry—as

The city’s garment industry thrived on cheap immigrant labor and inexpensive transit services. But the combination of rapidly increasing ridership and insufficient funding for the subways created a problem that raised the ire of numerous civic groups in the mid-1920s. A leader of the Metropolitan Housewives’ League pointed out “the inhuman, indecent, and dangerous crowding and jamming of passengers, the unclean trains and platforms, and especially the conditions of the public waiting and toilet rooms which are filthy, unsanitary and disease breeding.” Likewise, the City Club of New York told city officials, “We do not get a civilized ride for a nickel today. We get instead a chance to hang on, like a chimpanzee, to a flying ring suspended from the roof of the car while we are crushed to the point of indecency by our fellow sufferers.

Among the working class, Asians are the invisible serfs of the garment and service industries, exposed to third-world work conditions and subminimum wages, but it’s assumed that the only group beleaguered by the shrinking welfare state is working-class whites. But when we complain, Americans suddenly know everything about us. Why are you pissed! You’re next in line to be white! As if we’re iPads queued up in an assembly line.

1.​Textile production produces an estimated 1.2 billion tonnes of CO2e per year, which is more than international flights and maritime shipping combined.47 2.​The average person buys 60 per cent more items of clothing than they did just fifteen years ago, and keeps them for about half as long.48 3.​By 2030, global clothing consumption is projected to rise by 63 per cent, from 62 million tonnes to 102 million tonnes. That’s equivalent to more than 500 billion extra T-shirts.49 4.​By 2050, the equivalent of almost three earths could be required to provide the natural resources it would take to sustain our current lifestyles.50 5.​A polyester shirt has more than double the carbon footprint of a cotton shirt.51 And yet the cotton needed to make a single T-shirt can take 2,700 litres of water to grow – that’s enough drinking water to last a person three years.52 6.​At its current rate, the fashion industry is projected to use 35 per cent more land to grow fibres by 2030. That’s an extra 115 million hectares of land that could otherwise be used to grow food, or left to protect biodiversity.53 7.​Approximately 80 per cent of workers in the global garment industry are women aged 18–35.54 But only 12.5 per cent of clothing companies have a female CEO.55 8.​Among seventy-one leading retailers in the UK, 77 per cent believe there is a likelihood of modern slavery (forced labour) occurring at some stage in their supply chains.56 9.​More than 90 per cent of workers in the global garment industry have no possibility of negotiating their wages and conditions.57 10.​Increasing the price of a garment in the shop by 1 per cent could be enough to pay the workers who made it a living wage.58

Yet Britain was still green in 1800, as America was still largely primeval. William Wordsworth, a poet with a private income, would have much to say in other poems about the stifling effect of industrial labor on the body and the soul, but in July 1802 he stood on London’s Westminster Bridge and found A sight . . . touching in its majesty: This City now doth, like a garment, wear The beauty of the morning; silent, bare, Ships, towers, domes, theatres, and temples lie Open unto the fields, and to the sky; All bright and glittering in the smokeless air.4

If you can land a job in the local garment industry you will be the first member of your family to bring home a salary. (Roughly 3 billion people live like this today.)

In 1992, Senator Harkin had first introduced the Child Labor Deterrence Act, which proposed a U.S. ban on importing products made with child labour. The legislation ultimately failed to pass congress but even the threat of such a boycott sent a chill through industry worldwide and had devastating consequences, particularly in Bangladesh, where the country's garment manufacturers abruptly dismissed about fifty thousand child workers. Most of the children had been supporting their families and were subsequently forced to turn to other more dangerous and less lucrative employment - some in rock crushing and many others in prostitution. It was perhaps a well-motivated gesture on the part of the senator, but it demonstrated some of the unintended consequences of benevolence.