Tags for Trajectories
Having read Hulme’s work about unfollowable things and the gaps in an object’s trajectory, I was immediately reminded of recent cases of “cries for help” found in clothing items purchased at high-street retailers. Whilst Primark came out and declared the textile tags embroidered with messages like “Forced to work exhausting hours” to be “hoaxes”, one can’t help but wonder – at which point during the journey from field, to factory, to fitting room, did the message appear, and by whose hand?
In the case of Turkish workers producing garments for Zara, customers in Istanbul came across handwritten notes urging shoppers to pressure the retailer into paying owed wages. These cases are examples of the often invisible or untraceable (at least to consumers) aspects of origin being made consciously explicit for effect. As Susanna Rustin points out in the article below, we’re used to seeing (romanticised) origin stories for things like food in advertising, helping to negate the potentially troubling production: happy cows promoting dairy, Tropicana-oranges growing plump under sunny skies. A similarly comfortable alternate narrative to sweatshop-conditions doesn’t really exist for very affordable textiles.
Contributed by EveliinaKuitunen on 03/02/2018
